Armed with automatic weapons and grenades, terrorists have attacked India’s commercial capital Mumbai. They targeted hotels and a famous cafe frequented by tourists, as well as hospitals, a Jewish community centre and the central rail station. Brought to an end with the capture of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel by Indian security forces, the death toll of the attacks is pushing towards 200 people with more than 300 injured. They are likely to have regional and global consequences that bode ill for progressive resistance forces everywhere.
A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen (indicating their origin in an area of southern India) have claimed responsibility for the attacks, although commentators say that a group called the Indian Mujahideen most likely carried them out. Indian police accuse these forces of other bomb attacks in India, including explosions on commuter trains that killed 187 people in Mumbai two years ago and 63 people in the tourist city of Jaipur this year.
The police have captured one of the attackers who allegedly confessed that he came from Faridkot in Pakistan – this increases the likelihood that the attacks will be used as a pretext for scapegoating and victimising Muslim communities in India, and a drive towards further confrontation with Pakistan.
Whipping up racism
Similarly, certain UK tabloids have made claims – it appears with little or no evidence – that up to seven of the attackers were British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin from Leeds and Bradford. That these claims have since been rejected as baseless by the BBC and the Indian government demonstrates just how eager some in the British media are to exploit each and every opportunity to witch hunt Muslims, allied to an agenda of justifying the increase of repressive state powers here in the name of security.
Indeed, it is difficult to see how much more they could have done to promote violence against British Muslims, or to act as recruiting sergeants for the British National Party, without being prosecuted for it.
It is clear that these attacks do nothing but strengthen the hand of reactionary forces in India and across the globe. All progressive, working class forces must condemn them without equivocation. In no way can such actions, which will be used to stir up hatred between India’s Muslim minority and its Hindu majority, serve any progressive end.
While the indiscriminate shooting of ordinary Indians (and foreigners) of all backgrounds at the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus has provided the most shocking scenes of slaughter, one should also note the targeting of an Orthodox Jewish religious centre, and the murder of the centre’s rabbi and his wife, as a sign of its reactionary and unjustifiable character.
Regardless of the supportive attitude of the Chabad-Lubavitcher movement, which owned and ran the centre, towards the Zionist state, this can in no way be seen as an act of resistance against Zionism or in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. Rather, it reinforces the message, common to most jihadi Islamist movements, that their war is one directed against Jews, anywhere in the world.
This is the “anti-Zionism” of reactionary fools and actually lends credibility to the message of the Israeli state that support for the Palestinians and opposition to the expansionist Israeli state is anti-semitic. Our condemnation, however, can have nothing in common with the hypocritical outrage of the Indian government, whose forces have gunned down at least 45 Kashmiri Muslim demonstrators since August, or with its threats from Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to “take up strongly” the use of neighbours’ territory to launch attacks on India, a threat to Pakistan or Bangladesh, depending on the terrorists’ origins. Nor can it have anything in common with the response of the imperialist powers, for whom civilian casualties matter only when they or their allies are not responsible for them.
Revolutionary response
The workers’ movement and the student and youth movements must rally to the defence of the Muslim community should Hindu chauvinists threaten to unleash communalist bloodshed in response. The workers movement which should know neither religious nor nationalist prejudices must take the initiative to prevent this.
The conditions which allow Islamist terrorists to recruit young fighters originate in the “war on terror” and its predecessors, like the 1991 war on Iraq, adding to the plunder of the Middle East’s oil wealth by western corporations and the total subservience to US imperialism of the Arab and Gulf states. Neither should we forget the desperation brought on by growing poverty and inequality for most of the population, such as neoliberal policies brought in the “boom years” in India and many other countries in South Asia. Now India is being hit by huge job losses and factory closures.
Working class unity, and the unity of the worker with the poor peasants, can cut across all religious, ethnic and national divisions. It is vital that the working class movement launches a powerful counteroffensive against this crisis. If it does so, then the attempts, whether from Hindu or Muslim communalists or from the government itself, to whip up ethnic and communal hatred will increasingly fall on deaf ears.