Tag Archive for 'Mumbai'

Mumbai terror attacks coverage from The Immanent Frame

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Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in International, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Terrorism
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There’s some fascinating stuff written on the Mumbai attacks by scholars of religion and global politics at The Immanent Frame – much better analysis from a blog with a specialist interest but also the ability to contextualise broadly than I’ve seen in most of the MSM coverage.

Arjun Appadurai writes about the twin globalisations of Islam and Hindutva, and Mumbai as a flashpoint for a range of global currents, and asks whether its resilience is infinitely renewable. Sumit Ganguly believes the death of secular India to be exaggerated, while Dipesh Chakrabarty reflects on the future of Indian democracy. Vijay Prashad examines the historical legacy of Mumbai’s diversity. Nicole Greenfield links to some noteable commentary, and Laura Duane looks at the targetting of Jews in India.

None of these pieces is easily reducible to talking points and all resist inscription into a grand narrative of “the West versus the rest” or “global terror”. All are worthy of a read by anyone seriously interested in what occurred in Mumbai and what it portends for the future.

Cities, states, globalisation and warfare (and global sociology)

Published
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Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Disasters, Government, History, International, Politics, Sociology, Terrorism and War
. 37 Comments

On a couple of reports on tonight’s tv news, I saw a citizen of Mumbai being interviewed who demanded the Indian government go to war with Pakistan. That set me to wondering what such a war – and God forbid one is launched – would solve. War, increasingly, has lost its (perhaps always somewhat illusory) ability to resolve conflict after intensifying it. There are a lot of factors operating here – but one aspect of the globalist discourse that doesn’t receive as much attention as it should (and it’s one aspect that clashes with the more ideological aspects of neo-liberal globalisation talk, and maybe there’s a connection there) – is the inability of states to monopolise the use of violence on their own territory. That capacity, was of course, the key aspect of Max Weber’s classical sociological definition of the state. And, as other sociologists such as Norbert Elias have demonstrated, it’s not either an abstract conceptual nicety or an ahistorical effect, but rather something that has developed over time. Indeed, it can, and no doubt has been argued that the United States is not a modern state at all because it’s never taken seriously one of the core things modern states do – that is, to disarm their own populace. (The better to govern them, among other reasons, and that’s why you get the strong cultural link between guns and liberty.)

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

Continue reading ‘Cities, states, globalisation and warfare (and global sociology)’

Mumbai terror attacks: an anti-Hindutva motivation?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Developing world, International, Media, Middle East, Nationalism, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Terrorism
. 125 Comments

The Mumbai terror attacks are horrendous and to be roundly and loudly condemned. But, as with all events of this nature (particularly those which involve attacks on Westerners), inevitably there’s been a rush to inscribe their significance within a political frame – the prime candidate being the war on terror. Andrew Bolt can stand as representative here:

THE slaughter in Mumbai was a barbaric attack not just on India, but on us. On the West.

Now, I don’t think that the reflex response to the desire to prematurely ascribe blame to Al-Qaeda before the facts are known should be to rush off in the opposite direction. But it did interest me that many of the television reports a few nights ago sought commentary from experts in terror studies, rather than sourcing those who have a deep knowledge of Indian and subcontinental politics and history per se. This in itself ties in with the desire to write one single narrative of international terrorism, as the terrorism experts in question are usually best informed about Middle Eastern and South East Asian affairs. This in turn both ascribes more unity to international terror networks than actually exists, and turns them into an immediate and default suspected cause, no matter what the specificities of the political and social environment in which attacks actually occur.

Anyone with anything more than a passing acquaintance with Indian politics, society and history, though, would know that it’s quite possible, even probable, that the attacks’ causes lie in factors such as the increasingly weak Indian central government’s inability to control its territory and monopolise the use of violence, and the inability of either the justice system or the state (even after the Congress-led coalition defeated the BJP) to prevent inter-communal violence and massacres such as those in Gujarat in 2002 or hold anyone to account for them. Political violence in India recently, it’s also worthy of note, has often been directed as much against Christians as Muslims, and what we may be seeing is the emergence of what are basically pogroms on a much bigger and more organised scale. The role of the Shiv Sena Party in the governance of Mumbai itself, a party which has called for the formation of Hindutva suicide squads and an ethno-religious sectarian neighbourhood cleansing program in the city, may additionally be a factor.

One shouldn’t rush to judgement. And one shouldn’t do that also for reasons of preserving an awareness of the horror of the deaths and injuries that have been inflicted in Mumbai and some more respect and dignity for the victims than instantly transforming them into political footballs. But if causes are to be sought, and they should be, both the Pakistani connections to violence and the emergence of terrorist movements pushing back against the nationalist pogroms may well be found in time – after the facts are in – to have been at work in these tragic events.

Elsewhere: Crooks & Liars, The Independent and Boing Boing.

Update: Shakira Hussein in Crikey.

Update: The Blair/Bolt Watch Project, Guy Beres and a roundup of citizen journalism at The Guardian.