India’s gateway becomes terrorism’s door

Wednesday’s horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India, a savage irony given the landmark’s history. Since it was built in 1911, the magnificent arch has stood as a symbol of the openness of the city.

The teeming throngs that gather around it daily reflect India’s diversity. One sees Parsi gentlemen out for their evening constitutionals, Muslim women in burkas taking the sea air, Goan Catholic waiters enjoying a break from their duties at the stately Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Hindus from every corner of the country chatting in a multitude of tongues.

Today, ringed by police barricades, the Gateway of India -- the gateway to India, and to India’s soul -- is barred, mute testimony to the latest assault on the country’s pluralist democracy.

The terrorists who reportedly heaved their weapon-laden bags up the steps of the wharf to begin their assault on the Taj, like their cohorts at a dozen other locations around the city, knew what they were doing. Theirs was an attack on India’s financial nerve center and commercial capital, a city emblematic of the country’s energetic thrust into the 21st century. By attacking Mumbai, the terrorists hit India’s economy, its tourism and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city’s openness to the world. A grand slam.

They struck at symbols of the prosperity that has made the Indian model so attractive to the globalizing world -- luxury hotels, a swish cafe, an apartment house favored by foreigners. The terrorists also sought to polarize Indians by claiming to be acting to redress the grievances, real and imagined, of India’s Muslims. And by singling out Britons, Americans and Israelis, they demonstrated that their brand of Islamist fanaticism is anchored less in faith than in the geopolitics of hate.

Today, the platitudes flow like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in condemnation of this atrocity. Commentators in the U.S. have pronounced the carnage India’s 9/11. But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a 2001 assault on its Parliament that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ presumed sponsors, Pakistan.

This year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several places on one searing day in the state of Assam.

Indians have had to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist violence ever since malign men in Pakistan concluded it was cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it in conventional war. Attack after attack has been proved to have been financed, equipped and guided from across the border. And while a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin has claimed credit for Wednesday’s attack, I believe it is unlikely that this horror was homegrown.

The Islamist extremism nurtured by a succession of military rulers of Pakistan has now come to haunt its well-intentioned but lamentably weak elected civilian government. The bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel proved that Frankenstein’s monster is now well and truly out of that government’s control. The militancy once sponsored by its predecessors now threatens to abort Pakistan’s sputtering democracy. There has never been a stronger case for united action by the governments of India and Pakistan to cauterize the cancer in their midst.

Inevitably, the questions have begun to be asked: “Is it all over for India? Can the country ever recover from this?”

Of course the answers are no and yes. Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on, as they have done throughout history.

But what could destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism and coexistence that is our greatest strength. The prime minister’s call for calm and restraint in the face of this murderous rampage is vital. If these tragic events lead to the demonization of the Muslims of India, the terrorists will have won. For India to be India, its gateway -- to the multiple Indias within, and the heaving seas without -- must always remain open.