Free Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor

United States and the United Kingdom had proposed it in 2006, supported it in 2008—a clear indication that in the wake of the Mumbai horrors it judged that such pro-Pakistani obstruction would no longer be compatible with its role as a responsible leader of the international system. What is essential is to sustain the pressure: the American decision in April 2012 to announce a bounty of $10 million on Hafiz Saeed’s head is a welcome indication that the world has not given up its quest for justice. I had hoped that if our tragedy gave the semi-secular moderates in Pakistan the opportunity to crack down upon the extremists and murderers in their midst
in their own interest
, the suffering of a few hundred families in India on 26/11 might not be replicated in the lives of other Indians at the hands of these evil men in the years to come. But if the Pakistanis don’t do so, the rest of us must.
    The Indian state is no stranger to political violence within its territory, and it has evolved a very effective technique of dealing with it—combining ruthless law and order tactics with completely open cooptation into the democratic space. The former gives those using violencea disincentive to continue doing so; the latter gives them a positive reason to give up the gun in order to seek their objectives by other means. This has worked in places as far apart as Punjab and Mizoram, so that yesterday’s terrorists become today’s political candidates, tomorrow’s chief ministers, and the day after tomorrow’s leaders of the opposition, those being the vagaries of democracy.
    But when you are talking about terror coming from across the border, those options are not available. The terrorists are not people who are seeking a ventilation of political grievances. These are not people who are coming to Mumbai because they want to have their space in making decisions about the country, the community, the future, whatever. These are people coming, unfortunately, with no objective other than destruction. Their objective is to sow terror and fear. And that is very different from the other kinds of terrorism India has dealt with domestically.
    When these twenty young men set sail from Pakistan to wreak the havoc they did in Mumbai, I do not know how many of them realistically thought they would ever get back. But clearly, they had no political objectives beyond the undermining of India. They were not asking for the release of imprisoned terrorists. They were not asking for a change of government. They were not seeking anything other than to cause as much damage and death and destruction as possible, perhaps in order to provoke a war between India and Pakistan that would take the heat off Al Qaeda in Pakistan. For them to pretend to be standing up for the cause of Islam, when they killed forty-nine innocent Muslim civilians in the city of Mumbai, would be a travesty of anything that Islam stands for.
    It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this kind of terrorism—terrorism as an end in itself, not as a means to something larger—can only be confronted implacably. There is no co-optation formula available. It just has to be nipped in the bud, ideally before it starts, and if that is not possible in its home base, deal with it firmly if and when it actually occurs.
    It is fair to ask why 26/11 is the singular event that overwhelms the debate. Why does it overshadow the four wars, and even the preceding twenty years of terrorist support? The answer lies partly in its proximity: just over three years have passed since 26/11 as these words are written, and it looms large still, whereas the formal wars seem to belong to thehistory books, and the earlier terrorist blasts have been relegated to the footnotes. There is, of course, the continuing danger that 26/11 implies: this mutant species of political violence now offers a copybook template to any future terrorist group. More vital, though, is its intimate immediacy in a psychological