India-Pakistan: Empathy, grief in Pakistan for Mumbai mayhem

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

muqaddam, I haven't followed ALL of borivill's posts but I think it may be possible for everyone to find some broad agreements, for the good of all, even with people's differing perceptions.

Despite this terrible tragedy, Indian people have not lurched as much to right, or anti-Muslim, as one might have feared, and Muslim Indians have acted as all other Indians. This should give us a great deal of hope.

It is exactly the mindset of people like the poster of #367 that is making life difficult for the Muslims in India. There have been several attacks by Pakistani(or Pakistan backed) Muslim terrorists in India in the recent past and there has not been even one retaliation against the minority community, because the majority community also understands it is the handiwork of Pakistan.
The majority of Muslims in India are poor and worried about there daily bread. Muslims would be in fact defenceless if the majority were really to go after them.
The demand of the time requires solidarity among all Indians and not Hindu Muslim bashing.
The enemy in this case is in Pakistan and will pay for his actions if not the hands of India, then by self destruction.

Re: # 307
DM...
I am not showing rage....I am just treating these moslas as human....

Majumdar writes "The other possibility is Pak Army to destablise the civilian Govt. But plausibly the former."

That is no possibility at the present. The Pakistan Army brought this current government to power to salvage itself. The previous possibility of "rogue elements" is BS given the facilitation hurdles and the sophistication of the attacks. Somehow these rogues managed to get to India undetected with massive firepower, outdid the Indian commandos with their backyard training and all died except one, yeah give me a goddamned break. That is some BS that you all have come to spew. The Americans did it with full knowledge and participation by the Indians.

Have a nice day and get an education and take that idiot Kulharee with you

Of course, Indians have to do something to stop the terrorism. But just what?

After so many decades of listening to war-mongerers and feminists like Indira Gandhi, we still cry 'war', but fail to do ANYthing in the end, to even do what is really needed - like beefing- up the MEN in the forces, fixing responsibility, negotiating Kashmir, etc.

This is the crux of the problem - the danger of crying 'war' is that in the end, we neither fight a war, NOR do what is really ESSENTIAL!

Re: # 378

you can add this to your thinking loud in idle time .For the dead and families its meaningless who did it how & why

Hindu Zionists behind Mumbai Attacks - Zaid Hamid


Written by Inam Abidi Amrohvi · December 03, 2008 · 798




I felt that a section of the Indian media acted a little immature by linking the terrorists to Pakistan even before the official word. Playing to the gallery gets you TRPs but doesn’t help the greater cause. Agreed the men came from Pakistan (as shared by the government later) but the country is itself fighting the same monster. It’s high time that we work together on countering this threat together rather than play the age old blame game. If Pakistan is serious we will get closer to the people who masterminded the Mumbai carnage. And for that it needs to do more than just mere assurances.

Replying to the Indian claims of the terrorists coming from Pakistan, a TV channel (News One) there has come up with its own weird conspiracy theory. I couldn’t watch the entire programme as it was too far fetched to digest and in a way mocked the sacrifices of some very brave men.

The video features Zaid Hamid. Hamid is an idependent Pakistani security expert and also the founder of BrassTacks - a Pakistani Think Tank devoted to the study of regional and global political events and their influence on Pakistan. He comes from a military background having signed up as a volunteer in the Afghan war. His jihadi roots speaks for his biased opinions and weird logic. On a lighter note he is a good entertainer with his kind of imagination.

Have a look-

http://www.brasstacks.pk/brasstacks/Default.aspx?TabId=159

What can I say other than we have to shed aside our differences if we are to fight a common enemy. The electronic media needs to be more restrained in their approach. Such telecasts only fuel the fire.

It saddens me to see India’s name amongst the 20 most dangerous places to visit by the UK’s Telegraph. Needless to mention the millions we will lose because of tourists shying away. And we share space with Pakistan on that list. I’m sure the Pakistanis too feel the same!

Let’s find solutions rather than faults!

borivli_express:

No doubt, the likes of Modi and Thackeray deserve punishment for their deeds - instigation, hate speeches, inaction, etc. I would be the first to applaud their conviction.

What I don't agree with you on is classifying them is the same category as Dawood.

I would agree if you were to classify them in the same category as some imams and maulvis who give hate speeches in their mosques, in different parts of India/Pakistan. I do not know of any cleric who got arrested/convicted for giving a hate speech.

The key is that the State is often afraid of punishing such people - be they Hindu or muslim or any other religion - for fear of a public backlash or communal unrest. That is where your points about making the police force more independent, well-equipped and impartial make sense.

Not sure how much this would count yaar GF, but coming as it does from Yogi Sikand, whom most Indian Muslims love (to the heaven) calling him one of the saner Hindu voices speaking for them, it does deserve some attention. I'm pasting an excerpt here. This man is no military expert, but he does know what an Indian Muslim's accent would sound like.

"It is plainly evident from the conversation that the terrorist was a Pakistani, most likely a Punjabi. This is obvious from his accent and the sort of Urdu he speaks. One can easily make out that he had been carefully tutored by his mentors who masterminded the deadly terror assault on Mumbai to intersperse his hate-driven harangue with some Hindi words (shanti, parivar etc) and to use Urdu words in the typical Hindi way (jabardasti instead of zabardasti etc.) so as to give the misleading impression that he and the other terrorists with him were Indian Muslims, not Pakistanis. The terrorists claimed to belong to the 'Deccan' in India, but it is obvious that this was not at all the case. There can be no doubt that these Pakistani terrorists were trained to lie that they were Indian Muslims who were allegedly resorting to terror in revenge for the atrocities committed on Muslims in India.

"Why the Pakistan-based terror outfit behind the attacks would do this needs no explanation. The aim of the attacks was probably to destabilise India, fuel Hindu-Muslim violence, instigate Muslims to take to terror in response to attacks by Hindus and then drown India in flames. This, indeed, is precisely what several Pakistan-based self-styled Islamist groups have been consistently plotting to do for decades, although, mercifully, by and large, the Indian Muslims have refused to fall into their trap."

You can read the rest here:

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/04mumterror-lies-of-the-lashkar.htm

#376 by Goldfinger

So what sort of naughty posts have you been posting to have gotten yourself banned?

I said something which if repeated here will get me banned again :-)

As to accents and other evidences...I wonder if there's a bollywood super star within every ordinary soul to be able to keep up fake/perfect accents even under life threatening situations...and how wonderful and easy it is for the great indi crime busting authorities to solve the mystery so easily because the perfectly trained criminals, most conveniently, left their satellite phones neatly placed next to the beheaded body of the ship captain that they had hijacked, after talking to their operator...??

1. If ordinary individuals could be trained to be as fit as the commandos they eventually took on, surely they could have been trained to speak in a different accent. And I'm sure it would be much easier than the former.

2. You should see some of the footage captured on CCTV. The terrorists were in fact braving the Railway Police (equipped with vintage WWII 303s) to take them on, not ducking and hiding like you'd expect them to.

3. As they were shooting people, they showed absolutely no emotion. Hundreds lay in front of them either dead or dying. If that didn't move them, no life-threatening situation would.

4. The most important thing: they came well prepared to die. Why would they fear anything, least of all the ill-equipped and undertrained Indian cops?

Having said the above, it all depends on how you look at it. If you're skeptical, you could find loopholes in even the most watertight case. But I'm sure more skeletons will tumble out; until then we can only speculate.

Re: # 374 So what sort of naughty posts have you been posting to have gotten yourself banned? you say:

"Yaar how easy is it to fake accents? I would think as easy of getting a confession out of a tortured terrorist. If you discount confessions made under duress, equally you should discount the terrorist's accent which can easily be faked."

As to accents and other evidences...I wonder if there's a bollywood super star within every ordinary soul to be able to keep up fake/perfect accents even under life threatening situations...and how wonderful and easy it is for the great indi crime busting authorities to solve the mystery so easily because the perfectly trained criminals, most conveniently, left their satellite phones neatly placed next to the beheaded body of the ship captain that they had hijacked, after talking to their operator...??

...I would think as easy as getting a confession out of a tortured terrorist....

#371 by Goldfinger

Yaar GF, I've been banned so am using this ID.

...by which I mean that there are no angels anywhere...no blacks and whites but lots of shades grey...of course two wrongs do not make a right, I reckon, and after all for how long can the two neighbors carry on such mayhem against each other? Everyone must remember that there can be no winners in a nuclear war...so all those who have any brains must try as much as possible to diffuse tensions...

I think for the first time we agree on something.

...so my gut feeling is that the Pakis didn't do it. Even the criminals (from what little one could make from the pictures) didn't look like any one from Pakistan...more nepalese/burmese/malay sort of looks...and they say even the language they spoke was Indic...so whats the overwhelming evidence?

Yaar how easy is it to fake accents? I would think as easy of getting a confession out of a tortured terrorist. If you discount confessions made under duress, equally you should discount the terrorist's accent which can easily be faked. Coming to the evidence (overwhelming actually) is that both American and Indian intelligence agencies had prior warnings that Mumbai could be attacked by sea (that the security apparatus did not act upon it does not in any way lessen its significance). Add to that, evidence gathered by the RAW includes a call made by the terrorists to an LeT operative in Lahore's Lashkar office using the satellite phone recovered from the trawler MV Kuber which was used by the terrorists to travel from Porbandar in Gujarat to somewhere off Mumbai and calls which were being made to the Lashkar operative even as the siege was going on. And please note that the calls were retrieved with the help of western intelligence agencies (which one, I don't know) because apparently the RAW didn't have that capability.

Re: # 372 MaheshG...now instead of being able to listen to someone else's pov you are coming up with ridiculous self made categories in trying to coerce people into coming up with views exactly identical to yours...just to perpatrate further this skewed indi bigotry and trying to put words into people's mouths...so what if an israeli writes in NY Times that he thinks the murderers were Pakistanis...does that make it conclusive evidence? Are lesser mortals not allowed as to how that conclusion was arrived at? I meanwhile read this:

www.antiwar.com
The Meaning of Mumbai
South Asia, the new arena
by Justin Raimondo

The Mumbai massacre comes at a time when the U.S. is about to switch battlefields in its avowedly "generational" war on terrorism, from the Middle East to South Asia. As we move our forces eastward into Afghanistan and, inevitably, Pakistan, the events in Mumbai light up the geopolitical landscape like lightning at midnight, prefiguring a new and even bigger quagmire than the one we're supposedly leaving behind in Iraq. Forget the differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites. That's so yesterday. What we're dealing with now, in the Pakistani-Indian rivalry, is a true war of civilizations, pitting Muslims against Hindus.

India's 9/11: that's what they're calling it, and the pattern fits in certain ways, particularly when it comes to forewarnings. In the aftermath of the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history, it came out that the U.S. government had received intelligence that might have led it to be more vigilant or take certain preventive measures. In the case of Mumbai, however, the warnings were quite specific: the Indians were apparently informed that an attack from water-based terrorists on Mumbai hotels – including the Taj Hotel, where much of the action took place – was imminent. The most telling detail is no doubt the fact that the Indian police simply ran for cover, although what this tells us is hard to believe. Can it really be true that so specific a warning could have been ignored?

The analogy to 9/11 hopefully does not include a reenactment of our own response to the biggest terrorist attack in our history – the launching of a war without end, one that has drawn us into the wilds of Waziristan and, now, the unfathomable depths of the Muslim-Hindu divide.

More parallels with 9/11 – if you'll remember the immediate reaction of the War Party was to link the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Today, the reflexive response of the same avowed "experts" is to point the finger at Pakistan. One would imagine the debunking of the Saddam-Osama connection would give them some pause, but no. A rationale for war is being constructed with stunning swiftness.

According to the Indian account, the terrorists left behind a satellite phone on the boat they hijacked. Five individuals have been identified as having placed calls, at least three of them associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Muslim fundamentalist group that seeks to "liberate" Kashmir from Indian rule. However, the Indians have a much longer list of suspects, 20 in all. The Wall Street Journal reports:

"India also has told Pakistan that the attacks were approved by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the head of Jamaat ud Dawa, the parent organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mr. Saeed denied the allegation that his group was involved. 'India has always accused me without any evidence,' Mr. Saeed said in an interview with GEO News, a private Pakistan television channel."

In assigning responsibility for the Mumbai horror, we enter a world of murky ambivalence. Lashkar-e-Taiba is said to be affiliated, in some vague way, with "rogue" elements of Pakistani intelligence, which is, in turn, connected to the Taliban, the protector and ally of al-Qaeda. The War Party has its terrorist genealogy down to an exact science, but its precision comes into serious doubt when we look a little closer at this alleged "parent organization" of Lashkar-e-Taiba – which apparently wasn't a terrorist organization when they were working alongside American soldiers and relief workers in aiding victims of the devastating 2005 Pakistan-India earthquake.

The neat little narratives pumped out by war propagandists to rationalize acts of mass murder are an important part of any campaign to spark a conflict, so they have to be minimally convincing, or at least credible. Yet the story coming out of the Indian government is frankly incredible. The terrorists left a satellite phone conveniently placed next to the body of their ship's captain, whose throat they had slit, with the numbers of their handlers stored in memory. Very convenient. Even less convincing, however, is the assertion that even after Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor of the terror squad, had been captured, he continued to get messages from his handlers. That little embellishment, I believe, gives the show away. Add to this the oddly unprepared – indeed, criminally negligent – role of the Indian security apparatus, and the whole thing reeks to high heaven. "Fishy" is putting it mildly.

The effect of the Mumbai massacre on Indian politics is another likely analogy to 9/11, which gave the neocons power and catapulted the worst warmongers to the very top of the national security bureaucracy. In the case of India, where voters will soon go to the polls, we are apt to see an electoral victory for the most militantly nationalistic and chauvinistic political movement in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP is the political expression of the Hindutva movement, a fundamentalist version of traditional Hinduism that traces the genealogy of the Indian "race" back to the old Aryan incursion from the north. According to the ideologues of Hindutva, their race originated at the North Pole and was originally – in its "pure" form – a tribe of blue-eyed, blonde Aryans. Accordingly, the leader of their central organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), must be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Saraswat Brahmin. The movement's goal, like the goals of all fascist movements everywhere, is to recapture the lost glory of a semi-mythical past, in this case the restoration of the ancient Hindu empire.

The Indian government's great problem has been the country's lack of cohesion. The failure of the Congress Party to unite the nation around a secularist-federalist model and the persistence of localist separatism paved the way for the BJP to unify the country on a different basis: extreme nationalism fueled by religious fanaticism, i.e., Hindu fundamentalism.

The BJP rose to prominence on the strength of street riots initiated by party-led gangs, which led to the destruction of a local mosque. The BJP municipal government tore down the ruined building and built a Hindu temple on the site, thought to have been the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. Those civil disturbances killed 1,200, mostly Muslims, a pattern of communal violence that is sure to reassert itself in the aftermath of Mumbai. The BJP will also reassert itself, I'm afraid: after being driven from office four years ago, the Hindutva crackpots will more than likely goose-step back into power, perhaps this time with a decisive majority. In the last government they participated in, the defense minister, George Fernandes, openly bragged India would "win" a nuclear exchange with Pakistan, declaring:

"We could take a strike, survive, and then hit back. Pakistan would be finished. I do not really fear that the nuclear issue would figure in a conflict."

The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is scrambling to explain its passivity in the face of what seems like an attack from outside forces. Singh is a mild and introspective technocrat, whose forte has been untangling the smothering web of his country's mammoth bureaucracy and revving up the country's economic engine. In the face of this crisis, however, he faces increasing pressure from India's growing right-wing nationalist movement. The smoke had barely cleared in Mumbai before BJP politicians were on the scene.

The pressure to cement an Indo-American alliance has been growing for quite some time and is slated to accelerate. India's special relationship with Israel, for one thing, is second only to our own. For another, President-elect Obama's promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan and even spread it into Pakistan is congruent with the plans of India's War Party, which is waiting in the wings to take the reins and confront Islamabad.

The argument that we must end the war in Iraq so that we can concentrate on the "real" enemy, the amorphous and exaggerated al-Qaeda, which is supposedly hiding in the wilds of Pakistan's tribal areas, is leading to an even wider, more open-ended conflict, one so combustible that it could spark a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.

As bad as George W. Bush was, he never messed up that badly. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief now that we are approaching the day when an easily-manipulated ignoramus is no longer in charge of American foreign policy. What may be even more dangerous, however, is a very smart president who thinks he and his advisers know more than they actually do.

The strategic shift in the balance of U.S. military forces in the region, away from Iraq and eastward to Afghanistan and Pakistan, seems almost to have been conceived in order to confirm the complaints of the anti-American forces in the region that the U.S. and its allies have launched a crusade to eliminate Islam from the map. From this perspective the pattern is clear enough: having exhausted their efforts in Iraq, now the West strikes from a different direction, in alliance with India. At the geographic center of it all, you'll note, sits Iran, which can look forward to being surrounded on both sides.
~ Justin Raimondo

What more is needed to convince Pakistanis? There are only three kinds of Pakistanis now.

1. Agree this is true and want to stop it unconditionally.
2. Agree this is true and are cheering it.
3. Don't believe that this is true but ironically will still keep providing "moral" support to "freedom fighters" who are incidentally absolved of all blame.

I would like to see how many of the Pakistani chowk interactors fall in category 1. I extend my hand of friendship to them and hope that their tribe grows in Pakistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/world/asia/04india.html?_r=1& hp



Excerpts:

"WASHINGTON — A former Defense Department official said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan’s Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped train the Mumbai attackers. "

"Both American and Indian authorities have concluded that there was little doubt that the Mumbai attacks were directed by militants inside Pakistan, and Indian officials have said they have identified three or four masterminds of the attack, including a leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Yusuf Muzzamil. "

Re: # 317 harish...that about the poor performance of the Indian commandos was in response to a jingoistic chest thumping individual from your neck of the woods, so to speak, and then you joined in too...and just now I was about to say something on your mention of the shoot down of the Indian aircraft in Kargil but decided not to since I came upon your response to my little snippet just when I thought everyone had ignored it as irrelevant...yes I agree some day some one has to do some write up on the shenanigans of RAW in trying to destabilise Pakistan, causing bomb blasts, murders and mayhem there...by which I mean that there are no angels anywhere...no blacks and whites but lots of shades grey...of course two wrongs do not make a right, I reckon, and after all for how long can the two neighbors carry on such mayhem against each other? Everyone must remember that there can be no winners in a nuclear war...so all those who have any brains must try as much as possible to diffuse tensions...

As to your sudden jumping to conclusions that the tragedy in Mumbai was perpetrated by Pakis...you say overwhelming evidence points to it (and though I haven't seen latest news)...may I ask you as to what is that over whelming evidence? They say that they nabbed one of the murderers and that he blurted out all the secrets to every one. Even if that were so, lacking professional interrogation techniques, I'm sure Indi (and Paki) torturers can make a man say anything, and that confessions under torture are not permissable in a proper court of law...so my gut feeling is that the Pakis didn't do it. Even the criminals (from what little one could make from the pictures) didn't look like any one from Pakistan...more nepalese/burmese/malay sort of looks...and they say even the language they spoke was Indic...so whats the overwhelming evidence?