Mumbai and the violence of poverty

Dec 3, 2008

The Bush administration has rushed the highest-ranking officer in the Pentagon—Joint Chiefs of Staff head Adm. Michael Mullen—and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to South Asia. The cover story is that they’re going to “defuse tensions” between India and Pakistan.

What's their real agenda? To use the crisis over the terrorist attacks in Mumbai as a lever to bring Pakistan more fully into the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan.

We have only the interpretation of Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies about who organized the attacks. They are blaming a Muslim group supposedly based in Pakistan for the three-day siege of two elite five-star hotels in Mumbai. Also attacked was a fashionable cafe, a Zionist-affiliated Jewish community center, two government buildings that house the legislative assembly, one of India’s busiest train stations and a hospital. The official death toll as of Dec. 2 has risen to 173, with hundreds more wounded. Twenty-two of the dead are foreigners, including six from the U.S. and eight from Israel.

The Pakistani government denies any relationship to the attacks. It has been under tremendous pressure from Washington to allow U.S. air and ground forces to pursue Muslim militants inside Pakistan anywhere, at any time. In fact, there have been gun battles in recent months between Pakistani soldiers and U.S. Special Forces who violated Pakistani territory and sovereignty.

The U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are impacting all of South Asia. Since the Indian ruling class and its major political parties joined U.S. imperialism’s “war on terror,” they have stepped up repression of the large Muslim population in India.

In fact, attacks against Muslims in India in recent years have led to greater loss of life than just occurred in Mumbai, but they received little coverage compared to this one, aimed at the foreign and domestic elite.

In 2002 in the state of Gujarat, just north of Mumbai, extreme right-wing Hindu chauvinist organizations massacred up to 2,000 Muslims and drove 200,000 out of their homes. This led to the radicalization of many Muslim youth because the government was unable or unwilling to protect them.

Severe repression by the Indian government against the Muslim majority in the disputed state of Kashmir has also aroused deep anger. The Indian state brutally attacked demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Kashmir this summer.

India has been seen as a rapidly modernizing country. But the wealth associated with capitalist globalization and glossy high-tech industries enriches only a tiny fraction of the people. High-tech industries employ just 0.2 percent of India’s 1 billion people. For the majority of the population, poverty has grown enormously. Almost half of all Indians live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. The World Bank reports that half of Indian children—the highest rate in the world—are so malnourished that their bodies fail to achieve normal size.

This is the real violence and the source of widening instability.

The Muslims in India number 150 million—13 percent of the population—and are the poorest segment in a very poor country. They have the lowest literacy, lowest income, highest infant mortality, highest unemployment and the worst jobs. One third of villages in India with a majority Muslim population have no schools at all.

Media reports describe the attackers as offering to negotiate for the release of Islamic prisoners and as denouncing the state violence in Kashmir.

Mumbai is considered the commercial capital of India. It is the center of finance and the film industry. The population has doubled in the past 25 years to 18 million, but more than half the people live in vast slums.

The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, one of the two hotels attacked, is a landmark building similar to the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center in New York. It is owned by the Tata Group, a hated corporate giant.

The U.S. media is making many comparisons to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. More ominous are the calls for a 9/11 response—code words for creating a huge security apparatus, authorizing mass arrests, restricting civil liberties and possibly opening a war with Pakistan.

The right-wing BJP Party, which was in power during the pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, has called on the current government to follow the example of the U.S. after 9/11. The talk of war is now on the agenda, with the far greater violence that would bring.

There is no solution under the capitalist system to the growing gulf between the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor in South Asia. The only recourse of U.S. imperialism as well as the Indian and Pakistani ruling classes is to try to divert the population with intensified communal, class and caste antagonisms, while relying increasingly on greater repression and an ever-larger military machine.

Marxists know that violence against wealthy individuals and their politicians does not end the system of exploitation and oppression. They also understand that, when there seem to be no alternatives, such actions are bound to arise from the violence of the system and the misery and desperation that millions experience.

Building unity and resistance among the oppressed workers and peasants now divided into competing nationalities, religions and castes is the only effective way to combat the far greater violence caused by capitalist and imperialist exploitation and war.