The smell of rotting fish

Sometimes it doesn’t help to have a nasty suspicious mind like mine, because it so complicates things.

As most of us are probably aware, there were three bomb blasts in Bombay a couple of days ago, in which upwards of twenty people were killed and well over a hundred injured. And, almost by reflex, the Indian government insinuated that a Muslim terror group, the Indian Mujahideen, was responsible.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that I have no proof that the Indian Mujahideen was not responsible. Let me, in fact, fully admit the possibility that the Indian Mujahideen was indeed the guilty party.

And then, let’s play a completely harmless mind game, in which we imagine that the guilt of the Indian Mujahideen, or some other Muslim terrorist group, is not a proven fact. Since we’ve already admitted that the Indian Mujahideen is in fact, responsible, the game is completely harmless. Right?

Well, now, let’s see why the Indian Mujahideen or any other terror organisation should want to carry out these blasts.

As I believe I have said in the past, terrorism is a tactic, like any other, and a tactic is geared to a definite end. It’s all very easy and facile to say, like the politicians and media morons do, that terrorists are mindless evildoers, but of course that’s rubbish. Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides, “Well, today I’m going to do terrorist things and blow up a building or two”.  Terrorist acts are geared to some purpose, and terrorists have no use whatever for psychopathic loose cannons. So, why on earth would the Indian Mujahideen want to blow bombs up in Bombay at this particular time? What would they gain?

You know, come to think of it, the answer is nothing at all!

In fact, assuming that the official propaganda is true and the only purpose of these terrorists is to harm India, the last thing they should do is carry out a few low intensity bomb blasts. Said blasts will of course, achieve precisely nothing at any time, but at this of all times, would be distinctly counter-productive.

Why?

Well, the reason lies in the abysmal political situation in India at the moment, where the worst government in this country’s history goes into the last two utterly corrupt years of its current term. The so-called “prime minister”, a man who has never won an election in his miserable life, has packed his government full of hacks who are incompetent and/or corrupt to the core, and the whole government is completely in thrall to Big Business in every way one can imagine.

Meanwhile, as prices rise to the stratosphere, the people of the country are finally beginning to come to the conclusion that they are sick and tired of the whole damned mess, and are demanding some kind of accountability. Now, in Indian law, as it now stands, corrupt people can legitimately keep their ill gotten money – the law has no provision for recovering it from them, and the current government is determined to protect the corrupt in every way it can as long as they are politically useful. And, starting 16 August, the stage’s all set for a major showdown between the government and anti-corruption campaigners led by a man called Anna Hazare, who has the support of the average Indian.

Now, you tell me, why on earth would terrorists want to distract attention from the government-versus-civil-society showdown by letting off a few small bombs which would achieve nothing at all?

After all, it’s not as though these bombs – made of fertiliser and fuel oil – were even very high tech. It’s not as though these terrorists got hold of RDX from Pakistan and had to set the bombs off before the law laid its hands on the explosives. The blasts could have been carried out at any time over these last months, or postponed by a few. So why now?

Why, indeed, unless these Muslim terrorists were (gasp!) secretly supporting the government, or (even more gasp!) the bombs weren’t exploded by the Muslim terrorists at all?

 Now let me take a moment’s break to say something: there’s this remarkable tendency of the Indian government’s “intelligence” (a counter-intuitive term) agencies and police to ascribe any and all bomb blasts to Muslim terrorist outfits, such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Student’s Islamic Movement of India, and most often recently the Indian Mujahideen. So knee-jerk is this reaction that even when mosques are bombed, the police immediately blame Muslim outfits, without making any effort to explain why they should detonate their own places of worship. It’s just part of the unacknowledged but very real second-class citizen status of Muslims in India.

At the same time, everyone but the Hindu Right now admits the existence of Hindu terrorist outfits, which have now been shown to be responsible for many of the bombings earlier blamed on Muslim terrorists. Far be it from me to say, of course, that Hindu terrorists planted these bombs, though the crude fuel oil/fertiliser bomb is much more characteristic of Hindu terror than the usually sophisticated Muslim bomb. But just for fun, let’s imagine they were responsible.

Why would they do this? Well, remember how the popular attention needs to be diverted from the anti-corruption crusade I mentioned? The left-wing Anna Hazare isn’t the best anti-corruption crusader from the Hindunazi point of view; that role was supposed to belong to the right-wing yoga guru Ramdev, but he was rather easily neutralised by the government, and Hazare has far greater popular appeal. The Hindunazis wouldn’t be unhappy to see Hazare fail.

Then, what about the government’s own agencies? The Indian government is one of the most callous in the world where the lives and livelihoods of its own citizens is concerned; it has no qualms in throwing people off their farms at gunpoint to hand over the land to industrialists to build factories making cars or electronic goods, for example. The jails of this nation are packed with people still awaiting trial who would have been free long ago if they had served the maximum sentence for their alleged crimes. This is a government whose police forces exist, as in the British times, explicitly as a force to keep the population in line and subservient to the rulers. It’s not a nation which values its citizens’ lives, as long as said citizens aren’t influential.

So, just imagine a scenario where the government’s agencies either planted these bombs, or stood by nodding approvingly while Hindunazis did the job. Since Bombay is a cosmopolitan city with a huge Muslim minority, the actual bombers might even have imagined they were targeting Muslims. Does it make sense?

To a nasty suspicious mind like mine, it does.

Of course, I can’t stress enough that this is only a mind game. Repeat after me: the Indian Mujahideen, or some other Muslim terror outfit, planted these bombs. We know they did.

The government of India told us so.