Dan Reed’s documentary on 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai has been aired on Britain’s Channel 4 just a few days ago. The documentary has original CCTV footage, survivors and police accounts, telephonic conversations between the terrorists and their masterminds, and Kasab’s testimony.

“This is just a trailer,” the controller in Pakistan warns. “Wait till you see the rest of the film…”

Here are the links:

Part I – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7hTRozowjY
Part II – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vButNJDHIUA
Part III - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFrpIk-h2Pc
Part IV – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQylElFV8iY
Part V – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjOAnQ4k0g

(Update: The YouTube links have been moved due to a copyright claim by Channel 4 and the video is now available at Desi Video Network.)

Thanks to Anupam for the links.

It looks like the Indian TV media has missed out another event of Talibanization which had occurred earlier this month – on January 16th in Mumbai. If the Mangalore incident was initiated by Hindutva brigade’s cultural-moral-religious guardians, the culprits of the Mumbai incident was self-styled Islamic religious police. This time the victim was a Pakistani woman and the attackers were a group of women. The crime? Sporting a tattoo that said ‘Shukr Alham Du Lillah’, meaning ‘Thank you, God’.

Mumbai Mirror reports:

Riyaz Ahmed Talukdar, a member of Jan Seva Sangh, a local NGO, had first spotted the tattoo on Saba’s back and informed his mother, Shabana Talukdar. Riyaz said, “When I saw the tattoo I was furious as holy words from the Quran were on her back.” Shabana, along with a few other women, then came to the mall in the next 15 minutes and confronted Saba in the washroom.

They slapped the girl several times before the mall management intervened.

Imagine what kind of image this incident, which forced the girl to leave the country, gives India before the world. I don’t know how our TV media has missed out this, but this doesn’t look good on them. They will only be taking bait from the Hindutva extremists by not giving prominence to the Mumbai incident and concentrating only on Mangalore incident.

The names change, from Bajrang Dal to Sri Rama Sena, but the radical Hindutva organizations continue to assault the countrymen in the name of ‘protecting Indian culture’. This time they attacked women. When I had written against such groups earlier in this blog, there were people protesting and saying that calling them Indian Taliban is too much. But just read the news quote given below and tell me how these Senas are any different from Taliban. Also tell me how come we are vocal against Taliban but so silent on such home-grown organizations.

The Sena activists accused the women of involving themselves in immoral activities, including consuming alcohol, dressing indecently, and mixing with youths of other faith”.

And don’t think that they would stop having fun now. The day when these organizations conduct their annual ritual of cultural protection is coming up. And yes, you guessed it right – the Valentines Day on February 14th. Last year, it was the turn of Bajrang Dal to clean up the culture. We got to either speak up against these groups or get ready to be Talibanized in the near future. Taliban too, started out with small scale operations.

Related posts: The Hindutva hypocrisy again

(Image courtesy: Times of India)

The Mumbai terror attack has reaffirmed the fact that there are two faces of India. The common man’s India and the VIPs’ India. The thriving creamy layer has space everywhere and it’s opinion matters while the other India is nothing but some mere objects to use for power. Oh and I ‘m not talking about the political class yet, but the media.

The media reports on the Mumbai terror attacks make us feel like that the CST/VT shootout never happened. It was mentioned in the initial news reports, and then slowly pushed to the back bench. Taj and Oberoi had come in by that time. I can understand if it was because the fight in the Taj was the longest one in the whole terror episode. But even after the whole mess was over, little has been mentioned about the CST/VT shootout where 55 people were killed by the terrorists. But media loved Taj more. The images of Taj with flames filled the background of the news desks and TV channels everywhere. When 26/11 became India’s 9/11, the Taj was called as the Twin Towers of India. An icon of India, they said. The TV cameras couldn’t hold off it’s eyes from Taj even after the whole mess ended up. The common man and his CST was of no interest to them. Then came the elite – TV and movie stars, high-profile writers – right infront of the camera and began recalling their nostalgic memories of the hotel. Shobha De was furious. So was Ratan Tata.

India’s elite and creamy layer have got the clear message – that they could be the next possible victims of a terror attack. It many not always be those people who travel in the packed trains carrying thousands of ordinary people. It may not always be those pan wallahs, or sabji vendors who get killed by a time bomb. And that fear has made the elite spoke like they never did. And I guess the government would listen to them now.

In an article titled “Hotel Taj : icon of whose India?“, Gnani Sankaran writes:

And the TV cameras did not go to the government run JJ hospital to find out who those 26 unidentified bodies were. Instead they were again invading the battered Taj to try in vain for a scoop shot of the dead bodies of the page 3 celebrities. In all probability, the unidentified bodies could be those of workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrating to Mumbai, arriving by train at CST without cell phones and pan cards to identify them. Even after 60 hours after the CST massacre, no channel has bothered to cover in detail what transpired there.

The so called justification for the hype the channels built around heritage site Taj falling down (CST is also a heritage site), is that Hotel Taj is where the rich and the powerful of India and the globe congregate. It is a symbol or icon of power of money and politics, not India. It is the icon of the financiers and swindlers of India. The Mumbai and India were built by the Aam Aadmis who passed through CST and Taj was the oasis of peace and privacy for those who wielded power over these mass of labouring classes. [ Hotel Taj : icon of whose India? ]

Meanwhile, V P Singh, a former prime minister of India, who was fighting cancer for a long time passed away and not many people have noticed it. The media did not cover the news with the due importance even after the terror attacks. They were after banking upon the emotions after the terror attacks.

Deepak Chopra talks sense in Larry King show. Excerpts given below:

Chopra: And right now, one of the questions, you know, after I heard Barbara Starr talking about how coordinated this is, that there are militant groups that cross international boundaries, is who is financing this? Where is the money coming from? We have to ask very serious, honest questions. What role do we have in this? Are our petrodollars funding both sides of this war on terrorism? Why are we not asking the Saudis where that money is going that we give them? Is it going through this supply chain to Pakistan?

It’s not enough for Pakistan to condemn it. Pakistan should cooperate with India in uprooting this. They should be part of the surgery that is going to happen. It’s not enough for Indians to blame Pakistanis. Indians should actually ask the Pakistanis to help them.

And it’s not enough for us to worry about Westerners being killed and Americans being killed. Every life is precious over there. We have got to get rid of this idea that this is an American problem or a Western problem. It’s a global problem, and we need a global solution, and we need the help of all the Muslims, 25 percent of the world’s population, to help us uproot this problem.

King: What does India immediately do?

Chopra: India at this moment has to contain any reactive violence, which is very likely and possible. So India has to condemn that by not blaming local Muslims. They have to identify the exact groups.

And the world has to be very careful that they don’t go after the wrong people. Because if you go after the wrong people, you convert moderates into extremists. It happens every time, and retribution against innocent people just because they have the same religion actually aggravates and perpetuates the problem. [Chopra: Attack prompts tough questions]

(via email from Jayswami. Image via CNN.com)

After watching all the gunfires, blood, gore and fire in Mumbai through live TV streaming, I went to sleep today by 4 in the morning. By the time I woke up, more than 100 people were killed and 200 injured (reportedly, 125 people killed as of now including 14 policemen and left 327 injured). The financial capital of India was taken under control by a group of terrorists. The fight was and is on. More than 24 hours passed and our police and army is still fighting with terrorists.

The attack seems to be planned and executed well, and it doesn’t look like it is done all alone by a home-grown terrorist outfit. Seeing the kind of massive ammunition and logistics they have (remember, they are still fighting us even after 24 hours), there must be some strong support from outside. Could it be global terrorist outfits like Al-Qaeda? Or is it the terrorist outfits rooted in our neighborhood Pakistan (and possibly supported by home-grown terrorists here)? Nobody has the answer yet, but the interesting thing is that the Pakistan’s foreign minister is on a 4-day visit to India from yesterday. So the attack could also be seen as an attempt to worsen the relationship between India and Pakistan.

Then I saw our Prime Minister’s face in the channels and by the time he opened up his mouth to “talk tough on terrorism“, I changed the channel as I was not in a mood to hear comedy. If these terrorists could take control of an entire city and kill more than 100 people and still fighting with the army, what kind of security do this country offer to it’s citizens? In India, only politicians and bureaucrats are sacred and valued, not the ordinary people who get killed in such terror acts. Oh, on that note, let me add, I really had wished (I know it’s a cruel wish) that a couple of our politicians were killed in one of these terror attacks, because it seems that only then the government would wake up.

It was a horrible scene to watch the Taj burn. And it took some time for the firefighters to reach to the spot. I’m just wondering, do we have any aerial firefighting method or was that option not feasible at the time? We spend money on so many feel-good projects, how about making our lives secure and feel-good? Is our government going to listen?

On the other hand, there are people who use this chance to spit venom on certain communities. The first thing that a colleague friend said in the morning was “I told you, all Muslims are terrorists“. Such blatant generalizations would only help to worsen the situation and cause unnecessary tension at the wrong time. I asked him if any Muslim was spared from the attacks or if only members of a particular religious community were killed. Well, it is better to ignore such people, but you can’t help just watching them spread hatred at this crucial hour.

My heart goes out to those who have been killed and their families. My salutes to the brave men who fought against the terrorists and those who have been killed in the process – Anti Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and additional commissioner Ashok Kamte. We can also not forget the service of the Firefighters, Police, Anti Terrorist Squad, National Security Guards, Army, the people who helped and still helping the helpers, those who are donating blood, those who are helping in every way they can. We should also appreciate the journalists, particularly the TV channels like NDTV and IBN covering all the events from several parts of the city, giving continued updates.

India is indeed incredible. And our government can perhaps change the tourism slogan to “Terrorist Devo Bhava“. You are welcome here fellow terrorists; please do come and bless us with your bullets.

(Image courtesy: nytimes.com)

Update 06:
Jacob Joseph, Founder and editor Mutiny.in, escaped the Taj hostage situation and recounts the horror. Vinu has several photographs from the affected locations

One of the terrorists’ picture from Mumbai CST (courtesy: Maharashtra Times):

Read the rest of this entry

Whenever the bomb blasts, terrorist attacks and religious riots have made their way to the news headlines, Malayalees believed that nothing as such would happen in their part of the world. We always thought that such things happen because of the lack of education and since we have 100% literacy in Keralam, nothing will happen here. But this comfort zone has been busted with the news of two terrorists from Keralam killed in Kashmir.

This news and the investigation followed have brought out some terrible truth. That the state has become a major recruitment center for terrorists of the border. The newly recruited terrorists were taken for training in Pakistan and then later get ‘appointed‘ in Kashmir to fight the Indian Army. What is more interesting is the reason that attracted the Malayali youth to terrorism. One of the dead terrorists was a goonda prior to joining the terrorist group. Varghese Joseph, a born Christian who later converted to Islam, was a member of the notorious gang of Thammanam Shaji, a notorious gang leader. The investigative agencies say that Shaji has helped recruiting many youngsters to the terrorist groups. These goondas do not have any religious motive other than the financial gains. So they join the terrorist groups and they get benefits – motor vehicles and a monthly allowance. This money comes from the terrorist groups like Lashkar-E-Toiba.

So goondas turn to terrorism, but what leads the youngsters to goondaism? It is their penchant for easy-money. I can quote an example here. I remember the time when my neighbor was building his house. There was this young boy, not more than 18 years old, who came to do the masonry. You could hear him use the swear words aloud and that little fellow used to scold the older women in the team. Everybody had noticed him back then. By the time I saw him next, he had turned out to be the infamous pick-pocketer and small-time ganja dealer of the area. After a couple of years, I saw his photo in the newspaper. By this time he had become one of the most notorious goondas in the town. He and his gang mates were arrested for killing someone from the opposite group and their photo was in the news paper.
Read the rest of this entry

Bruce Schneier writes in Wired magazine about the habits of terrorits. An interesting read.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group’s political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can’t describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren’t working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn’t have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don’t even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don’t have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist. [The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists - Wired]

(Link via email from Nikhil Nair)

I was happy to hear that the Kerala Catholic Bishops Conference (KCBC) conducted an inter-religious talk with various Hindu leaders today. It took place at Hotel Sarovaram in Kochi. The talk was intended to explain the activities of Catholic church and it’s missionary policy. When the communal hatred flares up, it is the duty of religious leaders to come together, have dialogue and make something positive out of it for the greater good of the society and nation. But my moment of joy faded away in a flash when I read that the leaders of Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and RSS where invited to the talks.

VHP and their pet organizations like Bajrang Dal are communal and religious extremist forces who are spreading hatred between Christian-Hindu and Muslim-Hindu communities. Their only political agenda is to gain supreme power in India and establish a Hindu Rashtra which is based on the One Nation, One Religion concept. And above it all, VHP and RSS do not represent the majority of Hindus (if it is so, we will have to say that the New Life Church or other such new-age evangelical churches represent Christianity or SIMI and Al-Qaeda represent Muslims). Their terrorist youth wing Bajrang Dal have been killing Christians and burning their properties in many parts of the country by cashing-in on the ordinary Hindu’s sentiments against some Missionary tactics. Such extremists need to be dealt with the law of the land. The Catholic Bishops should have urged and put pressure on the state and central Governments to jail the culprits like Bajrang Dal activists instead of choosing to have dialogue with their peers of VHP and RSS.

The extremist organizations like VHP, Bajrang Dal and their political wing BJP will not refrain themselves from their activities because they are only after power (by terror). By falling on their feet, the Bishops have done injustice to the innocent people (both Christians and Hindus) who have been killed in the Christian-Hindu riots which is a result of induced hatred by VHP and Bajrang Dal in Orissa, Karnataka and Kerala. When there are respected Hindu leaders from Chinmaya Mission, Kaladi Mutt etc and various Hindu organizations like SNDP and NSS who represent the majority of Hindus in Kerala (Chinmaya Mission, Sivarigi Mutt and Amrutanandamayi Ashram were invited to the event), why did the KCBC invite extremist people like Kummanam Rajasekharan and K P Sasikala? Were they stupid enough to think that this would make a change in the mindset of the extremists of VHP? And if the KCBC could invite the extremists of VHP and RSS, why didn’t they invite the Pentecostal groups who are aggressively into conversion business? Or is this showing the Kerala Catholic Church’s newly found love for VHP to fight their common enemy of Communism in Kerala?