The Hindu Business Line : This too shall pass

Mumbai may be laid low now but it will rise again simply because it is a monument to its own history as the crucible of the infinite aspirations of Indians.

Nothing could have summed up more the tragic irony of the most vicious terrorist attacks ever on Mumbai than the television images of the Anti-Terrorist Squad’s chief Hemant Karkare’s encounter with a terrorist’s bullet: getting out of his car at a spot near CST and Metro cinema in south Mumbai in casual clothes, trying on protective gear — an ill-fitting helmet and equally clumsy anti-bullet proof vest— discarding both, and seconds later, the fatal shots that snuffed out his life. What added the most ironic twist were the images of the speeding hijacked police van from which the terrorists fired those fatal shots. As if to rub the point home, images also showed unarmed policemen below Nariman House, one of the buildings where other terrorists were holed up. For all the absence of any urgency in their movements or protective gear, they could have been waiting for one of those interminable street demonstrations — morchas — that have often marked Mumbai’s hot summer days. What do these TV grabs tell us?

The obvious answer is also the most painful one: they show the complete ineptitude of the State and city’s machinery to deal with terrorism that has become a frequent occurrence since the first serial blasts of 1993, soon after the Babri Masjid demolition. Fifteen years after the city was caught unawares by unknown terrorists, Mr Karkare’s almost casual death by an assassin’s bullet from a police van and the as yet unknown ways in which heavily armed terrorists took over so many institutions, form the most terrible indictment of shoddy governance. More than the incapacity of intelligence gathering to prevent is the absence of power to confront the random violence of these enemies of the people that has left the city even more vulnerable than it was in 1993. For, what we see even as the paper goes to print, is a city still in siege; a city universally recognised for the awesomeness of its enterprise, the expansiveness of its people’s generosity and its deep tolerance of a million voices speaking one Indian language. The city will of course pay for the shameless attacks on defenceless tourists and hospitals in a temporary loss of face, when the world will perhaps recoil in horror; markets may slip further, the rupee may fall, tourists may cancel bookings.

But Mumbai will rise; the iconic Taj Mahal hotel will be repaired as will be the Trident, patients will flock to the Cama Hospital as will budget tourists to the Leopold Café. Why? Because this city is a monument to its own history as the crucible of the infinite aspirations of Indians and humanity at large.