Minister: I couldn't live on benefits
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“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
The minister claims to have political guts, but the only principle her voting record shows is slavish obedience
An open letter to Hazel Blears MP, secretary of state for communities and local government.
8 Feb 2009, 0057 hrs IST , Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar |
High foreign exchange reserves have, in the current global recession, saved Asian countries (including India) from the travails they suffered in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-2000. So, they must aim for rising forex reserves in future too, right? Wrong. In truth, high Asian forex reserves are an important reason for the current recession. High reserves promise safety in a storm. But, beyond a point this safety becomes illusory, because rising forex reserves worsen the global imbalances that have precipitated the recession. The global recession has many roots. One is the erosion of traditional US household prudence. US households used to save 6% of their disposable income. But in recent years they went on a borrowing and spending spree, and household savings dropped to virtually zero. Corporations and financiers also ran up record debts, partly to buy assets such as houses, stocks and commodities. This created huge bubbles in all three markets. When the bubbles finally burst, US households, corporations and financiers found themselves in dire straits. Many financial giants were rescued by the government. Meanwhile households, sobered by the turn of events, started saving 4% of disposable income, up from zero. More saving meant less spending, and made the recession deep and sharp. Most Asians are smugly blaming US imprudence and loose financial regulation for the crisis, while portraying themselves as innocent victims. Yet, they must share the guilt too. US profligacy did not arise in a vacuum. It arose in part because Asian insistence on high forex reserves meant that they poured dollars into the US to buy US securities. This flood of dollars from Asia drove down US interest rates, making it very attractive to borrow. That spurred the borrowing spree, and the accompanying bubbles. Historically, rich countries had surplus savings, manifested in a trade surplus. Poor countries lacked savings, manifested in trade deficits, with the deficit being plugged by an inflow of dollars from rich to poor countries. For the world as a whole, current account surpluses and deficits of countries must necessarily balance. Historically, the surpluses of rich countries were offset by the deficits of poor ones. But after the Asian financial crisis, something strange happened. Asian countries, above all China, began generating huge savings surpluses, manifested in huge current account surpluses. Many used undervalued exchange rates to artificially create trade surpluses, which were then invested in US treasuries (that is what foreign exchange reserves are). However, poor Asians could not run huge surpluses unless others were willing to run huge deficits. Remarkably, the rich US began to do so. This arose partly from the sophistication of its financial system, which found many ways - too many, in fact - of converting the flood of money from Asia into a borrowing and spending spree. This sharp rise in US spending boosted the global economy, and created the record global GDP growth in 2003-08. US demand sucked in huge quantities of manufactures and services from Asia, above all from China. Asian manufacturing sucked in huge quantities of commodities from Africa and Latin America, raising incomes there too. Alas, this boom was based on huge global imbalances that had to be corrected at some point. No country, not even the rich US, could keep running gargantuan trade deficits forever, to offset the surpluses of Asia. US asset bubbles burst, the boom ended, and US spending and imports plummeted. Ending the consequent recession means reducing global imbalances to manageable proportions. Americans will have to save more, spend less and export more. Asian countries, especially China, will have to consume more, save less, and export less. This re-balancing will restore global balance, and enable global growth to rise sustainably again. However, such re-balancing means that Asian countries must stop piling up ever-rising forex reserves (and trade surpluses). Such reserves represent excessive saving, excessive exports and insufficient imports. Excess forex reserves have provided apparent safety to Asian countries in a recessionary crisis, yet are also a cause of that very crisis. What will happen if Asians insist on trying to keep savings and forex reserves high? Well, if Asians keep savings high and Americans and Europeans do so too, then world demand will collapse and the recession will become a Depression. Asians must recognise that high forex reserves serve as a safety cushion only up to a point, and beyond that exacerbate global imbalances that threaten disaster. Saving too much can be as harmful as saving too little. Unless Asian countries recognize this and go slow on future reserve accumulation, the recession may become worse than anyone dares imagine today. |
For the first time in my life I resent paying my taxes. Until now I have seen this annual amputation as a civic duty -- like giving blood -- necessary to sustain the life of a fair society. Suddenly I see it as an imposition. Its purpose has reverted to that of the middle ages: subsidising the excesses of a parasitic class. A high proportion of the taxes I pay will be used to bail out companies which, as the Guardian's current investigation shows, have used every imaginable ruse to avoid paying any themselves. I think that for many people this is the final blow: the insult which seals their alienation from the political process. The small Welsh town where I live, many of whose inhabitants are among the very poor, was once a haven of progressive politics, built from nonconformist religious sects and a long tradition of social solidarity. People from these valleys were transported to Van Diemen's Land for demanding the vote. Now almost everyone I speak to says the same thing -- "what's the point? They're all as bad as each other" -- and I can find no argument to refute it. Had their forebears been told that, 125 years after the first agricultural workers got the vote(1), the poor would be bailing out the rich and (thanks to the first-past-the-post system) the votes of only a few thousand citizens would count, I doubt they would have bothered. We are trapped in a spiral of political alienation. Politics isn't working for us, so we leave it to the politicians. The political vacuum is then filled with heartless, soulless, gutless technocrats: under what other circumstances could political ghosts like Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, Alistair Darling, Hazel Blears, Peter Mandelson or John Hutton remain in office? Unmolested by the public, corporate lobbyists collaborate with this empty political class to turn parliament into a conspiracy against the public. Revolted by these phantoms, seeing nowhere to turn, we withdraw altogether, granting them even richer opportunities to exploit us. The government talks of re-igniting public enthusiasm for politics, of bringing out the vote, but balks at any measure which might make this happen. The reform of the House of Lords has again been postponed until after the next election, if at all (2). The promise, in Labour's 1997 manifesto, of a referendum on electoral reform is long-forgotten. It now looks as if nothing will be done to stop MPs from moonlighting, as our representatives argue that they cannot possibly get by on £63,000 a year (plus lavish expenses) (3). I wonder whether they have any idea how that plays in a town like this. Consultations are rigged. Citizens' juries are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken. The Big Conversation turned into a lecture. LabourList, mercilessly satirised by Catherine Bennett in this week's Observer (4), seeks to create a grassroots movement where no grassroots exist. But I doubt that the government could revitalise politics, even if it had the best intentions. If the people of this country are to be mobilised, if new life is to be breathed into politics, we have to do it ourselves. As soon as you acknowledge this, you see the problem: we have lost our base. The affiliated trade unions have turned into the government's nodding dogs, continuing to fund the Labour Party even as it destroys everything they claim to stand for. The old social democratic and non-conformist movements have gone. All we have left are the NGOs and a series of informal direct action movements. They have proved to be good at raising public awareness, less good at building sustained, multi-faceted campaigns.We require a permanent mobilisation, and it might be just about to begin. For several years, activists have been proposing a MoveOn campaign for the United Kingdom. MoveOn.org is an web-based coalition in the United States that has mobilised around three million people to demand progressive change. It was launched in 1998 as a petition to Congress "to censure President Clinton and move on", rather than impeach him (5). Since then, it has been credited with revitalising the Democratic Party and changing the face of American politics. Some of the claims its promoters make are exaggerated, but no one disputes that it has inspired hundreds of thousands of alienated people to re-engage. At the beginning of every year, MoveOn polls its members on their political priorities and then mobilises them around those demands (6). It encourages them to bombard their representatives with emails and phone calls, to raise political funds and to propose new legislation. Every year it scores small victories, on issues as diverse as Medicare reform and Facebook privacy (7). It also appears to have contributed to some very large ones: some people claim that neither the candidacy nor the presidency of Barack Obama would have been possible without it. MoveOn has made mistakes -- its position on the Iraq war, for example, has been hopeless(8) -- but it's obvious that the model works. There have been campaigns a bit like this in the United Kingdom, but they have tended to concentrate on a single outcome and to disperse or relax when it has been achieved. The Big Ask, run by Friends of the Earth, mobilised 200,000 people to demand a climate change bill -- and got it(9). The Local Works coalition drove the Sustainable Communities Bill through parliament (10). The closest relative of MoveOn in the UK so far is Unlock Democracy, which, with far smaller resources than its American cousin, has already changed the way we are governed. Last month, for example, working with groups like enoughsenough.org and mySociety, it managed to stop MPs from hiding their expenses from the public(11). Today Nick O'Donovan, a British academic working in the US, launches a movement in the United Kingdom built overtly on the MoveOn model. Dosomethingaboutit.org.uk is a rolling petition which seeks to ensure that the people who sign up don't lose touch with each other. When there's an important vote in parliament or when the government is threatening to shut down a useful public service or to waste our money on subsidising the rich, it will set up a petition and mobilise its members. Like MoveOn, it will also poll them over the issues they want to champion. At elections it will help people to decide which candidate in their constituency to support, in order to avoid splitting the progressive vote. Its purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of our self-serving technocrats and, it says, to make "the moral high ground electorally viable"(12). I hope O'Donovan and his colleagues know how much they are taking on. They will be fighting party machines which have refined every dirty trick in politics; the hopelessness that arises from 12 years of broken promises; a labour movement that seems to have abandoned every political aim except driving foreigners out of the workplace; an electorate that has ceased to believe in itself. But none of this is a reason not to try. Dosomethingaboutit is a bold and wildly ambitious scheme. Can it work? That's up to you. www.monbiot.com References: 1. The Representation of the People Act 1884.This extended the vote to some rural men, but only if they owned land worth £10 or paid £10 a year in rent. 2. George Parker, 14th July 2008. Straw seeks to defer Lords reform. Financial Times. 3. Sam Coates, 2nd February 2009. Peers can carry on lobbying despite payments row. The Times. 4. Catherine Bennett, 1st February 2009. Does Labour really think John Prescott is the new Obama? The Observer. 5. moveon.org 6. pol.moveon.org 7. Success stories 8. Norman Solomon, 13th March 2007. The Pragmatism of Prolonged War. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. 9. foe.co.uk 10. localworks.org 11. Unlock Democracy, 21st January 2009. People power forces Government to back down on MPs' expenses. 12. dosomethingaboutit.org.uk |
By Raveena Hansa
05 February, 2009
Countercurrents.org
On 5 January 2009, the Indian government handed a 69-page dossier of material stemming from the ongoing investigation into the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 26-29 November 2008 to the Pakistani government. This was subsequently made accessible to the public [1], so it is possible for us to examine it.
The most striking point about the dossier is its vague and unprofessional character. Enormous reliance is placed on the interrogation of the captured terrorist, Mohammed Amir Kasab, despite the fact that there is an abundance of other evidence – eyewitness accounts, CCTV and TV footage, forensic evidence, etc. – which could have been called upon to establish when, where, and what exactly happened during the attacks. This gives rise to the suspicion that the interrogation is being used as a substitute for real investigation because it can be influenced by intimidation or torture, whereas other sources of evidence cannot be influenced in the same way.
The account gleaned from interrogation would be far more convincing if it were corroborated by evidence from other sources. Thus it seems to have been established that Kasab is from Faridkot in Pakistan, and we also know from eyewitness accounts that he was captured at Girgaum, thanks to the heroism of Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Ombale. But a real charge-sheet would require the rest of the account supplied by Kasab to be confirmed by other evidence. For those who know Bombay, who were glued to their TV screens while the ghastly events unfolded, and who also followed reports in the print media, including Marathi newspapers, the account in the dossier just won't do.
A Very Significant Omission
Let us follow one trail from the point where the terrorists landed. According to the dossier, all ten terrorists landed at Badhwar Park on Cuffe Parade in an inflatable dinghy, then split into five pairs, and took taxis to their destinations. Kasab and Ismail Khan were assigned to CST station (better known as VT), and allegedly entered the station and started firing indiscriminately at 'about 21.20 hrs' (p.5). But according to an eyewitness at VT, Bharat Patel, a chef at Re-Fresh Food Plaza which was riddled with bullet-holes, firing in the mainline station started at 9.55 p.m. [3]. According to CCTV footage, it was at 21.55 that passengers, who had earlier been walking around normally, began running for cover in the suburban part of the station while the railway police attempted to take on the terrorists, and at 22.13 p.m., the terrorists were still in VT station [4]. Motorman O.M.Palli said, 'I heard the last bullet sound at 10.32,' and when asked how he could be so sure of the time, replied, 'I am a motorman; I keep time by the seconds' [5]. So why does the dossier prepone the assault by 35 minutes, when there is evidence which enables us to establish its timing far more precisely?
VT station opens onto Dadabhai Naoroji (DN) Road, which runs northwards parallel to the railway tracks and becomes Mohammed Ali Road; Mahapalika Marg begins in front of VT, going off DN Road to the northwest. Travelling from VT along Mahapalika Marg, one passes, on the right, the Municipal Corporation buildings, the Esplanade Metropolitan Magistrate's Court, Cama Hospital, and St. Xavier's College; it then carries on to Metro Junction. The third side of the triangle is constituted by Lokmanya Tilak Marg, on which the Police Headquarters is located, which runs between Metro Junction and Mohammed Ali Road. However, a large part of the triangle is occupied by a police complex, including police residential quarters. Running between DN Road and Mahapalika Marg is a lane, at least part of which is named Badaruddin Tyabji Marg, which goes off DN Road opposite the middle of VT station, turns right, going past the back of the Esplanade court and Cama Hospital on the left, then some distance further passes the CID Special Branch Building which houses the Foreigners' Regional Registration Office (the southernmost part of the large and sprawling police complex) on the right, turns sharp left, passes the side of St Xavier's College on the left, and exits onto Mahapalika Marg (see [2]). It is important to keep this geography in mind when assessing the account in the dossier.
The dossier continues, 'They left the station, crossed an over-bridge and fled into a lane towards Cama hospital. Near Cama hospital they were challenged by a police team and there was an exchange of fire. As they exited the lane, they fired on a police vehicle carrying three senior police officers and four policemen' (p.6). The reader of this account is being asked to believe that Kasab and his colleague were involved in two encounters, presumably survived the first to be able to engage in the second, and that these encounters occurred in relatively quick succession. Prima facie, none of this sounds credible. In fact, what the dossier has done is to transpose an incident that occurred in Cama Hospital to the area just outside the hospital, in the lane at the back. What happened in Cama Hospital for Women and Children is that two Marathi-speaking terrorists armed with AK-47s and grenades killed two guards and spared a third who was in civilian dress and begged for his life [6], and then made a beeline for the terrace of the hospital, taking the liftman Tikhe with them [7]. After 15-30 minutes, a police party led by officer Sadanand Date arrived, was taken up to the 6th floor (which had no wards and was therefore empty at night) by another guard, Ghegadamal, after which a fierce battle ensued for 30-45 minutes, during which Date was seriously injured and two policemen died [8].
The fact that an incident took place in Cama Hospital involving two Marathi-speaking attackers, and that this was widely reported in the papers, would obviously be a source of embarrassment if the dossier is bent on showing that the terror attacks of late November involved only Pakistani nationals. Presumably that is why this whole sequence of events (in Cama Hospital) has been omitted from the dossier? In fact, this omission raises several other questions. First and foremost, who were these Marathi-speaking terrorists, why were they in Cama Hospital, and what happened to them afterwards?
Second, and no less important, is the question asked by Minority Affairs Minister A.R.Antulay: if there was no hostage situation in the hospital, why was an officer of the rank of ATS Chief Karkare sent there, and not to the Taj, Oberoi or Nariman House, where battles would have been raging by this time [9]? According to constable Arun Jadhav, who is the only eyewitness cited in the dossier (p.6), Hemant Karkare and others were called to Cama only after Date was wounded and had to retreat, which could not have been before 23.40, and was possibly somewhat later [10].
This timing is corroborated by the account given by a government driver, Maruti Phad, who lived off the lane in which the officers were reportedly killed. He stated on NDTV that at 23.30 he received a call from his boss, the Medical Education Secretary, summoning him to Mantralaya. As he drove down the lane to Mahapalika Marg, there was firing, and he was hit in the hand by bullets. He had the presence of mind to duck and reverse rapidly, and when the car stopped, pretended to be dead. The last thing Mr Phad added as he concluded his account of this episode was, 'Karkare mere pichhe thha' ('Karkare was behind me') [11]. Again, a proper investigation would have to reconstruct details from his eyewitness testimony. Here the suggestion seems to be that the killers of Karkare, whoever they were, were waiting at the corner outside St Xavier's College, and mistook Phad's vehicle for the one which Karkare was using.
In fact, the battle in which Karkare and his companions were reportedly killed was not at the exit of the lane but several yards before the exit, in front of the branch of Corporation Bank at the side of St Xavier's College, which bore the marks of several bullet-holes. If we accept that Kasab and Ismail conducted the massacre in VT, then they would have escaped from VT station, crossed the footbridge over DN Road and run along the lane going past the back of Cama Hospital around 22.40. If they were not involved in the attack inside Cama, what possible reason would they have for hanging around for at least an hour in a lane which is on the edge of a police complex and would have been full of cops by then due to the standoff at Cama, when they could have hijacked any number of cars from the main road (Mahapalika Marg) and escaped? Even in the event that they had been told Karkare was a target (extremely unlikely, since Karkare's revelations regarding the Samjhauta blasts (see below) had been welcomed in Pakistan), neither they nor their handlers in Pakistan could possibly have known that he would be coming down that lane an hour later. Give all this, it seems most unlikely that they could have been the killers of the police officers and constables killed in Badaruddin Tyabji Lane. Which leaves us with the crucial question: who killed Hemant Karkare?
A.R.Antulay was by no means alone in raising doubts about who exactly had killed Hemant Karkare, nor were such questions raised only by Muslims. Starting with an investigation into a terrorist attack in Malegaon in September 2008, Karkare had begun unearthing a terrorist network linked to Hindu extremist organisations with huge ramifications, some leading to military and bomb-making training camps and politicised elements in the army, others to religious figures like Sandhvi Pragyasingh Thakur and Dayanand Pandey, and yet others to organisations and political leaders affiliated to the BJP. These revelations confirmed an earlier enquiry by the ATS, which had linked Hindu extremist groups to several terrorist attacks in Maharashtra, but had never been followed up. One of the most potentially explosive discoveries was that a serving military intelligence officer, Lt.Col. Srikant Purohit, had procured 60 kg of RDX from government supplies, some of which was used in the terrorist attack on the Samjhauta Express (the India-Pakistan 'Understanding' train) in February 2007, in which 68 people were killed, the majority of them Pakistanis. Leading members of the BJP and Shiv Sena had vented open hostility against Karkare and the Malegoan investigation, demanded that he be removed from the case, organised support for the accused, and planned to hold a bandh against him on 1 December. Indeed, earlier on the 26th, an editorial in the Shiv Sena's Saamna attacked the investigation, and Karkare received a death threat [12].
When someone who has been vilified and threatened with death is killed under mysterious circumstances, it is only logical to suspect those who had been conducting a campaign against him of having a hand in his death. The way the dossier constructs its narrative points in the same direction.
Other Anomalies and Omissions
According to Jadhav's original testimony, Kasab and Ismail hijacked the the police vehicle in which Karkare had been travelling and drove it first to Metro Junction, where they fired three rounds at journalists and police vans (see [10]). There was indeed a shootout at Metro, captured on camera by a TV crew [13], but there is no mention at all of this incident in the dossier. Why not? Again, the implication is that the terrorists involved in the incident at Metro were not Kasab and Ismail but members of the other group, who drove there after killing Karkare and his companions.
Secondly, the dossier mentions that the return journey to Pakistan was charted on the GPS instrument (p.22-23), yet the terrorists, unlike those who hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814 to Kandahar, made no attempt to use their hostages to secure their own or anyone else's escape. If, for example, they had announced, via the e-mail connection they used to claim the attacks for the 'Deccan Mujahideen', the names of some high-profile and foreign hostages, there would have been enormous pressure on the Indian government from family, friends and governments of the hostages to get them released. The fact that there was no such attempt suggests that this was a suicide mission; in which case, why was a return journey to Pakistan charted on the GPS when no one would be returning?
Thirdly, the intercepted calls cited in the dossier are emphatic that no Muslims should be killed (p.53, 54), yet in the carnage at VT station, 22 of the victims – well over one-third of the total – were Muslims [14]. The Walliullah family lost six members, and many of these victims would easily have been identified as Muslims from their appearance. This almost suggests that Muslims were deliberately being targeted: the exact opposite of what the Pakistani handlers had ordered! One possible explanation of this, also suggested by the fact that there were simultaneous attacks on the mainline and suburban sections of VT, is that there were two pairs of terrorists attacking the station, one of which was not from Pakistan.
Fourthly, it is clear from the translations of selected intercepted calls in the dossier (Annexure VII, p.51-54), that the cellphones of the terrorists were the main means by which they stayed in touch with their handlers and received instructions from them. What is not mentioned is that on 6 December, two people were arrested by the Kolkata police for supplying three SIM cards for these very cellphones: Tausif Rehman and Mukhtar Ahmed. Rehman was reported to have obtained the SIM cards in the name of deceased persons and other fake IDs, while Ahmed passed them on to LeT operatives.
Initially seen as a breakthrough in the investigation, the arrests soon became an embarrassment when it was discovered that Ahmed was an Indian intelligence operative who had infiltrated LeT. This incident has been used to make the charge that the whole Mumbai terrorist attack was a 'false flag' operation masterminded by Indian, US and Israeli intelligence services [15]. This seems far-fetched, but it certainly appears that something more sinister than a mere 'intelligence failure' on the part of Indian intelligence services is involved. What the SIM card episode and other reports suggest is that some parts of the Indian intelligence establishment had prior intimation that an attack was being planned. This prior intelligence was specific enough to identify seaside targets, in particular hotels. Hotel managements were in fact issued a general security alert some weeks before the attacks. Despite this, no attempt was made to prevent the attacks.
A month after the attacks, the government of Maharashtra appointed a two-member enquiry committee consisting of former Union Home Secretary Ram Pradhan and retired Indian Police Service officer V.Balachandran to investigate the occurrence of the terrorist attack and management of the ensuing crisis by the state administration. One hopes that these professionals will look at the evidence in its totality, sifting the more reliable pieces of information from those which are either patently false or contrived in some way.
Conspiracy Theories versus Supernatural Explanations
Most people react negatively to conspiracy theories. It is as if, when you are a child, someone tells you that your mother or father is a criminal: the first response is denial, even if you know in your heart of hearts that there is something in the accusation. From this comes the stereotype of 'conspiracy theorists' as crackpots.
Yet there are occasions when the conspiracy theory makes sense, and it is those who deny it who have to resort to supernatural explanations. A famous case is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Warren Commission, set up to enquire into the assassination, came out with the theory that he was killed by a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was subsequently himself assassinated. But several books, as well as Oliver Stone's film JFK, showed that the official version rested on the assumption of three bullets fired from the same location, one of which changed direction more than once, went through President Kennedy and Governor Connally, and emerged in an almost pristine condition. Against this 'magic bullet' theory, the alternative explanation – that there was more than one assassin – sounds more plausible, especially given eyewitness accounts that there were more than three shots, and that they came from different directions. But the failure to pursue this line of investigation strongly suggests a conspiracy, and a large majority of Americans believe in it.
Closer to our time, the 9/11 Commission report gave rise to considerable criticism in the US; by November 2008, there were apparently some 150 million web pages devoted to 9/11 conspiracy theories, several books had been written, and a large number of Americans believed the attack had been an 'inside job' designed to provide a pretext for military attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq [16]. (For these people, incidentally, the claim that '26/11 was India's 9/11' would mean that the Indian state is implicated in the Mumbai attacks!) It would be hard to prove that all these people are crackpots: many are scholars, pilots, architects, engineers and other professionals with specialised knowledge, as well as eyewitnesses. One of the criticisms related to the claim that it was the fire generated by the planes crashing into the WTC towers that led to their collapsing on their own footprint. Never before or since has fire led to buildings collapsing in this way, they argue, whereas this is exactly what happens when a controlled demolition takes place. They clinch the argument by referring to WTC Tower 7, which collapsed on its footprint without even being hit by a plane. Controlled demolitions imply that explosives had been laid beforehand, and that evidence for them was covered up afterwards: i.e., a conspiracy. But, like the JFK assassination, this is a case where the conspiracy theory complies with the laws of nature whereas the official version does not.
It is not necessary to allege that the government or head of state is involved in a conspiracy: it would be absurd, for example, to suspect that President Kennedy was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate himself. All that is required is that some elements in the state are involved. So what would a conspiracy theory of the Bombay terrorist attacks look like? One hypothesis is that Hindu nationalist elements in the Indian state had fairly precise intelligence of the planned terrorist attacks in Bombay, but instead of acting to prevent them, decided to enhance them instead, by adding more terrorists to the operation at VT, putting bombs in the taxis which blew up at Dockyard Road and Vile Parle, and positioning gunmen throughout the area, including Cama and the vicinity of the Metro.
Why would they have conspired in this way? Two reasons. The first and most pressing reason was that Hemant Karkare was rapidly uncovering just how extensive their network was, and how deeply they were implicated in a large number of terrorist attacks which had previously been attributed to Muslim jihadi groups. He had to be stopped at all costs, but an obvious murder by Hindutva terrorists could lead to a backlash against them. A terrorist attack by Pakistanis provided the perfect cover for the assassination. The second reason was that several Assembly elections were pending, and the BJP would be able to take advantage of the attack to accuse the UPA of being 'soft on terrorism'. In fact, the disappointment and dismay of BJP leaders after the election results came out was very evident, when they discovered that they had not gained as much as they hoped from the Mumbai attacks. But this disappointment was offset by the elimination of Karkare. The Minister of External Affairs, Prime Minister, Defence Minister, etc. immediately blamed 'Pakistan' for the attack, and the whole discourse of the media, which had been following the Malegaon case, shifted decisively back to 'terrorists from Pakistan'.
This 'conspiracy theory' is able to explain several things which remain unexplained in the 'official version', for example: (a) why, despite prior intelligence of the attacks, nothing was done to prevent them; (b) the Cama Hospital incident involving Marathi-speaking terrorists, and the outbreak of firing and general mayhem at Metro Junction; (c) the carnage at VT, where far more people were killed than at any other location, and the high proportion of Muslims killed there (contrary to the instructions given to the main group of terrorists); and (d) last but not least, the murder of Hemant Karkare at a time when Pakistani terrorists could only have been present at that location if time had stood still during the hour or more when the battle at Cama Hospital was raging.
Providing Justice to the Victims and Security to the Public
The main requirement for providing justice to the victims of the attack is to identify and punish all those involved in perpetrating it. This should be done in a manner that satisfies the requirements of the law. The Lockerbie case, which involved a terrorist attack on a plane over Scotland, victims from the US, UK and France, and accused from Libya, was tried by a Scottish court sitting in The Hague. A similar model would be ideal in this case: trial by an Indian court, since the attack took place in India and most of the victims were Indian, but in The Hague, since there were also victims from fifteen other countries (see p.14 of the dossier) and the accused are from Pakistan. It is especially important to have transparent legal proceedings that conform to international standards in order to help ensure that the case is conducted to the satisfaction of all parties, and also help to defuse the tension between Pakistan and India.
The broader aim of providing security to the public requires that members of terrorist networks in both countries should be rounded up and put behind bars. It is good that the international community is putting pressure on the government of Pakistan to do this in their country, and it is essential that this pressure should be sustained till results are achieved. As long as the Pakistan-based terror networks remain intact, further strikes cannot be ruled out, and these could have catastrophic political consequences for the subcontinent. But focusing simply on those networks will not, by itself, provide safety to us in India. Our security in addition requires the government here to eliminate terrorist networks in this country, including Hindutva ones. It is heartening that the ATS is proceeding with the prosecution of the Malegaon blast accused, and has presented the 4250-page charge-sheet that Hemant Karkare risked his life to work on, although it remains to be seen whether convictions will follow or the accused will be acquitted on some pretext. But even if there are convictions, that is not enough; Karkare was only able to uncover the tip of the iceberg before he was struck down, and a great deal more remains to be done. If it is not, we can predict with a fair degree of certainty that the Hindutva terrorists would strike again before the Lok Sabha elections, and the parties that are linked to the terrorists would use the opportunity to accuse the UPA of being 'soft on terrorism' in order to come to power. If they succeed, we could be faced with the horrific prospect of a military conflict between India and Pakistan that escalates into nuclear war.
[1] See http://www.hindu.com/nic/dossier.htm for a scanned copy of the dossier.
[2] See http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=badaruddin%
20tyabji%20marg&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl (the link takes you to a map of the US, and asks, 'Did you mean: Badaruddin Tyabji Marg… etc.' If you click on this link you go to the correct map.)
[3] Rahi Gaikwad, 'Retracing the CST Attack,' The Hindu, 4 December 2008, http://www.hindu.com/2008/12/04/
stories/2008120461882000.htm
[5] Rahi Gaikwad, 'A hero at work,' Frontline, 20/12/2008,
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2526/stories/
20090102252602800.htm
[6] Maharashtra Times and Navakaal of 29/12/2008,; see also
http://www.twocircles.net/2008nov29/
mumbai_attack_terrorists_spoke_marathi.htm
[7] http://www.monstersandcritics.com
/news/southasia/news/article_
1445785.php/SIDEBAR_Hospital_
staffer_recounts_escape_from_terrorists_
[8] http://spoonfeedin.blogspot.com/2008/12
/india-mumbai-attackscama-staff-rose-to.html
[9] Manoj C.G. and Seema Chishti, Indian Express, 17/12/2008,
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news
/Antulay-selfgoal-sees-a-Malegaon-
mystery-in-Karkare-Mumbai-murder/399670/
[10] Indian Express, 29/12/2008
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/witness-account
-of-karkare-kamte-and-salaskars-death/392181/
[11] Prachi Jawdekar Wagh, 'Mumbai driver recounts battle for survival,' 6/12/2008
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/
ndtv/mumbaiterrorstrike/Story.aspx?ID=
NEWEN20080075496&type=News
[12] Y.P.Rajesh, Indian Express, 27/11/2008,
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/ATS-chief-
Hemant-Karkare-dies-a-heros-death/391325/
[13] 'ATS Chief Hemant Karkare Killed: His Last Pics: IBNLive.com,'
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/79133/ats-
chief-hemant-karkare-killed--his-last-pics.html
[14] Srinivasan Ramani, 'Attack on "Everyday India",' Pragoti, 9/12/2008, http://www.pragoti.org/node/2720
[15] Kurt Nimmo, PrisonPlanet, 7/12/2008,
http://www.prisonplanet.com/
arrest-provides-more-evidence-india
-israel-and-the-us-behind-mumbai-attacks.html
[16] See, for example, http://bushstole04.com/ , http://www.911truth.org/ , and millions of other websites that come up if you type '9/11 truth' into Google.
It's not just governing elites that the world is rising up against - it's the entire model of deregulated capitalism
Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."