EDITORIAL
Mumbai and the violence of poverty
Published Dec 3, 2008 4:14 PM
The Bush administration has rushed the highest-ranking officer in the
Pentagon—Joint Chiefs of Staff head Adm. Michael Mullen—and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to South Asia. The cover story is that
they’re going to “defuse tensions” between India and
Pakistan.
What’s their real agenda? To use the crisis over the terrorist attacks in
Mumbai as a lever to bring Pakistan more fully into the U.S.-led war against
Afghanistan.
We have only the interpretation of Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies about
who organized the attacks. They are blaming a Muslim group supposedly based in
Pakistan for the three-day siege of two elite five-star hotels in Mumbai. Also
attacked was a fashionable cafe, a Zionist-affiliated Jewish community center,
two government buildings that house the legislative assembly, one of
India’s busiest train stations and a hospital. The official death toll as
of Dec. 2 has risen to 173, with hundreds more wounded. Twenty-two of the dead
are foreigners, including six from the U.S. and eight from Israel.
The Pakistani government denies any relationship to the attacks. It has been
under tremendous pressure from Washington to allow U.S. air and ground forces
to pursue Muslim militants inside Pakistan anywhere, at any time. In fact,
there have been gun battles in recent months between Pakistani soldiers and
U.S. Special Forces who violated Pakistani territory and sovereignty.
The U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are impacting all
of South Asia. Since the Indian ruling class and its major political parties
joined U.S. imperialism’s “war on terror,” they have stepped
up repression of the large Muslim population in India.
In fact, attacks against Muslims in India in recent years have led to greater
loss of life than just occurred in Mumbai, but they received little coverage
compared to this one, aimed at the foreign and domestic elite.
In 2002 in the state of Gujarat, just north of Mumbai, extreme right-wing Hindu
chauvinist organizations massacred up to 2,000 Muslims and drove 200,000 out of
their homes. This led to the radicalization of many Muslim youth because the
government was unable or unwilling to protect them.
Severe repression by the Indian government against the Muslim majority in the
disputed state of Kashmir has also aroused deep anger. The Indian state
brutally attacked demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Kashmir this
summer.
India has been seen as a rapidly modernizing country. But the wealth associated
with capitalist globalization and glossy high-tech industries enriches only a
tiny fraction of the people. High-tech industries employ just 0.2 percent of
India’s 1 billion people. For the majority of the population, poverty has
grown enormously. Almost half of all Indians live below the international
poverty line of $1.25 a day. The World Bank reports that half of Indian
children—the highest rate in the world—are so malnourished that
their bodies fail to achieve normal size.
This is the real violence and the source of widening instability.
The Muslims in India number 150 million—13 percent of the
population—and are the poorest segment in a very poor country. They have
the lowest literacy, lowest income, highest infant mortality, highest
unemployment and the worst jobs. One third of villages in India with a majority
Muslim population have no schools at all.
Media reports describe the attackers as offering to negotiate for the release
of Islamic prisoners and as denouncing the state violence in Kashmir.
Mumbai is considered the commercial capital of India. It is the center of
finance and the film industry. The population has doubled in the past 25 years
to 18 million, but more than half the people live in vast slums.
The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, one of the two hotels attacked, is a
landmark building similar to the Empire State Building or the World Trade
Center in New York. It is owned by the Tata Group, a hated corporate giant.
The U.S. media is making many comparisons to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the
World Trade Center. More ominous are the calls for a 9/11 response—code
words for creating a huge security apparatus, authorizing mass arrests,
restricting civil liberties and possibly opening a war with Pakistan.
The right-wing BJP Party, which was in power during the pogroms against Muslims
in Gujarat, has called on the current government to follow the example of the
U.S. after 9/11. The talk of war is now on the agenda, with the far greater
violence that would bring.
There is no solution under the capitalist system to the growing gulf between
the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor in South Asia. The only
recourse of U.S. imperialism as well as the Indian and Pakistani ruling classes
is to try to divert the population with intensified communal, class and caste
antagonisms, while relying increasingly on greater repression and an
ever-larger military machine.
Marxists know that violence against wealthy individuals and their politicians
does not end the system of exploitation and oppression. They also understand
that, when there seem to be no alternatives, such actions are bound to arise
from the violence of the system and the misery and desperation that millions
experience.
Building unity and resistance among the oppressed workers and peasants now
divided into competing nationalities, religions and castes is the only
effective way to combat the far greater violence caused by capitalist and
imperialist exploitation and war.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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