Some quiet in J&K, few red faces in Pak: shouldn’t we get more out of Sept 11?
If you lived in Delhi in November 1984 you’d remember the smell. Particularly if you were a reporter then, driving around a devastated city, counting the dead. Or sometimes the burning dead. Large parts of Delhi were then on fire, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. This wasn’t the smell of an ordinary fire. There was a bit of the cremation ground in that smell. But just a bit. There they burn you on clean, dry wood. Not with your entire house, furniture, papers, all your worldly belongings.
That’s the smoke and the smell that assails your nostrils and then cuts straight into your heart and soul as you walk around the block where stood the twin towers of the World Trade Centre until September 11. Two months after the event, the debris is still smouldering. You also don’t have to get that close to feel it. I drive home late one evening with Marianne Weaver, who lived in India for many years as the Christian Science Monitor correspondent and the wife of the then Time magazine bureau chief (at the peak of the Bhindranwale days), and she looks up at the skyline as we do the bend on the Harlem River Drive. ”Each time you look at that skyline, your heart sinks. This city has come to be defined so much by its physical symbols,” she says. But it is tougher, she says, sometimes in the mornings, when you open your window and get that smell. ”And then you realise it isn’t just any fire. That human flesh is still burning there.” Marianne, now at The New Yorker, has taken time off to do a book on (who else?) Osama bin Laden.
On the flight from Washington to New York, I have to unscrew my Mont Blanc, write with it, squeeze out two drops of ink to prove it doesn’t hide something more lethal. I have to explain the Isabgol. I get by, offering to swallow the spores
America will now see many books written on Osama, on Islam, on why the Muslims hate them so much, on hegemonism of the successful and the frustration of those they leave behind. But the trauma won’t go so easily in a society where even dogs and cats are subjected to psychiatric counselling and aromatherapy. The police barricades to block entry into ground zero in front of J&R world, New York’s most popular discount computer store at Park Place, have become a makeshift memorial. Thousands of cards, paintings by children, wreaths, posters, even ”we shall overcome” banners line the fence. And dozens of Americans stand silently in front, heads bowed in pain and prayer, sometimes crying bitterly.
NEARLY 3,000 people were killed in the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in November 1984. Only around 500 bodies were not found — they were probably burnt by the mobs and never identified or traced. At the World Trade Centre, more than 4,000 died. Not even 400 bodies have been found, now two months after the event. This is already causing situations modern America is not as accustomed to as you and I. The New York firemen have almost come to blows with the police department on the issue of how fast the debris should be cleared. The police would rather do it faster, with bulldozers. The firemen want to proceed slowly. They believe they might find the bodies of more of their colleagues.
The Americans are learning to live with fear in many of the ways we have got used to over the years. But it is tougher when you are used to a feeling of total security and so much comfort. On the Delta shuttle flight from Wa-shington to New York, I am among the eight passengers taken aside for a special security check. Not because of the colour of my skin, the officer tells me, but because I bought my ticket over the counter at the last moment. The frisking is like a free massage and it even gets somewhat uncomfortably intimate sometimes. You unscrew your Mont Blanc, write with it and then squeeze out two drops of ink to prove that it doesn’t hide something more lethal inside.
The handbags are turned upside down. I have some explaining to do for the small box of Isabgol in my medicine kit. A kind of Indian dietary fibre, try telling that to a US security agent. White, powdery, unmarked and in the baggage of a brown-skin flaunting an overused Indian passport. Simply doesn’t work in times of anthrax. I get by finally by offering to swallow the ”spores” and do so in an extravagant gesture to finally extract a smile from a very unhappy officer. But even on the flight nobody takes any chances. This is just an hour’s flight, announces the stewardess, ”so we request you not to get up from your seats until doors open after landing.” She says those who want to use the toilets should do so now, ”we have two lavatories in front and two behind.” Then you are told not to even get up to pick a book or something out of your handbags. ”If you need something from your bags stowed in overhead containers, please do so now. We would appreciate it if you don’t get up at all once the doors are closed…”
When an entire society gets so jumpy it tends to forget the rules, drills, instincts. Who knows exactly what happened on American Airlines flight 587, which crashed minutes after take-off? Could it be that some passenger with prostrate trouble absent-mindedly got up and walked towards the front toilets setting off panic, over-reaction, confusion at the crucial take-off time?
Even if the Taliban’s gone, Osama entombed, the Americans know there will be no retun to the old days. So they would rather stick around the Islamic hotspots, including our region. That’s why it’s time we began figuring out our own end game
DISMISS this by all means as uninformed speculation. But no event has changed America as much, made it as fearful of what lies ahead, than September 11. This will not change too much after the Taliban are gone and Osama is entombed. The Americans understand there will be no return to old days as long as radical Islam continues to treat them as enemies and until there are conditions that persuade Muslims around the world to join its ranks. They are therefore unlikely to stop after the completion of their own version of Operation Bluestar. They would wish to stick around this region as well as the other Islamic hot-spots and work to stabilise them for the future so they do not end up fighting another Osama, even if he is known by another name. They are now here to stay. At least on that one Musharraf is not wrong.
That is why it is time for us to start figuring out what is our own end game in the post-September 11 world. Certainly it cannot be merely a few weeks of respite in Kashmir, some embarrassment for the Pakistanis and greater international awareness of how India is a victim of cross-border terror. Nations that are directly affected by such defining moments would blunder in not seizing them to redefine their own power equations and to rewrite the future of their coming generations. Israelis kept quiet — in spite of the rain of scuds — during the Gulf War but gained finally because it kickstarted the Middle East peace process with a Western commitment that would have been unthinkable if Saddam had not invaded Kuwait. There is no complete peace in the Middle East yet.
But if you see Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon on television every third day reaffirming Palestinian statehood and Arafat and Hannan Ashrawi promising Israel the right to exist, it is because they were all able to seize upon the post Gulf War opportunity and take this giant step forward.
Closer home, we have sniffed a final settlement on Kashmir twice in the past. The first time was when India was in trouble (1962-3, Swaran Singh-Zulfikar Bhutto talks when in return for military help against China the US told us to settle with Pakistan) but Pakistani military arrogance lost that opportunity. The second time was when Pakistan was in trouble, having lost the 1971 war and Mrs Gandhi failed to seal the deal at Shimla. Now is the third time, when the US is in trouble. As it works its way out of that, it would see the Islamic crescent west of us, in South and Central Asia as the mother of all hot-spots. It is a very fearful, desperate and yet determined America. For any permanent peace in its own backyard it must first stabilise this region. It will test India’s strategic intellect but it also brings a real opportunity to secure the future of our own coming generations.