Why the Mumbai Attacks shouldn’t have surprised anyone

The story of why this attack was allowed to happen.

The latest Mumbai tragedy is the fourteenth terrorist attack on the city since 1993, raising the total terrorism-related death toll in the city to 701. With history repeating itself yet again, one has to wonder how many more attacks the so-called “spirit of Mumbai,” if there ever was one, can bear before it breaks. Of course, the most tragic aspect of the attack remains that it came as no surprise, at least to those who were observing the situation closely.

While no one could have predicted where exactly the attack would be and on what date, given the developments of the last two years gave a clear indication that a major attack is coming somewhere in the middle of 2011. In fact, we provided this risk assessment regularly to public and the government, to be ignored regularly. Worse yet, if this attack receives the same apathetic response that was given to the previous indicators, we can expect more and bigger attacks on other major cities by the year’s end . 

The meaningless ritual of Terrorism

We as South Asian people have a thing for rituals. Be it religion or society or governance, we have an uncanny ability to distill a legitimate process into a rite devoid of any semblance of meaning or purpose that we continue to faithfully follow eternally without ever questioning its efficacy. Bollywood churns out movies based on the same formula, government follows the same archaic rules written a century ago and housewives, across the country, wake up every day at four in the morning to water their Tulsi plants, the sole symbol of vegetation in their household. 

Now, it seems, terrorism has also become a meaningless ritual, a theatrical performance where everyone faithfully acts out his or her role, disregarding any possibility that the whole exercise may be pointless. 

In this theatre, we all know our roles. The terrorists need to kill random people in a random city. The government needs to be unapologetically apathetic. Media needs to be outraged and jingoistic. Politicians need to resign, safe in the knowledge that they would be absorbed back into the government soon enough. Civil society needs to celebrate the artificial notion of the “Mumbai spirit”. Hotels and multiplexes need to start half-heartedly body searching their patrons again. As for the people, unfortunately, their role is simply to die.

As for the usefulness of this theatre, if there is any, it was lost long ago in the ashes of few first bombs that killed innocents in India. What does anyone gain out of all this?