Bungle

A piece in Tehelka about the Mumbai attacks.

It is funny though, how the investigation has blurred the wider issue - India, although a democracy, does suffer from discrimination against various minorities, e.g. Dalits & Muslims. Think of Narendra Modi in Gujarat. Still in power, go figure.

There is enough going on in India to radicalise young Muslims, without importing Pakistan's own home-grown problems. This is being sweeped under the carpet.

One is also struck by the vocabulary of our times:

• 9/11 (Twin Towers, rather than Allende's overthrow in Chile)
• 26/11 (Mumbai)
• Extremists (taken as 'code' for Muslims, but an evangelical throwing a bomb at an abortion clinic, is to me at least, an extremist, regardless of their religion)
• Fundamentalists (a very misused and abused term)
• Freedom fighters (before Hamas, the PLO...there were groups like the Haganah fighting the British and the Palestinians) vs. terrorists

How can it be that a Palestinian, attacking an Israeli tank in Gaza, is a terrorist, yet a member of the Irgun, attacking a police station in British Palestine in the 1940s, is lauded as a hero? I guess it depends on your perspective - something lacking in the current debate.

Neither side will disappear, so they might as well reconcile. But it cannot happen while one side (an army with a state attached, rather than the other way round) expects the other side to hang its heads in shame and live like dogs.

After all, the Israelis refused to live like that, didn't they?