When the terror hit the United States on 11 September, while watching the endless reruns of the passenger jets ramming into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, little did one realise that the shock waves would lap against South Asian shores the way they have. Along with the 6000 or so victims of the disaster, a bit of one's faith in the unity of all humanity got buried there in the debris of a landmark skyscrapers. But before the dust had settled on lower Manhattan, and before the grieving had even begun, the verbal campaign of revenge and eye-for-eye began, and all eyes were immediately on Afghanistan— and South Asia. While the Americans homed in on Osama bin Laden as the unlikely one-stop villain of the piece, South Asia's leaders rushed to take cover, or to take advantage as the case may be.
Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf, found himself the prisoner of history in his country's support for the Taliban regime which would give refuge to the Saudi rebel, incongruously forced to defend the very process which had been set in motion by the CIA itself during the campaign to oust the Russians from Afghanistan. He turned mullah to his flock, explaining the exigencies that had led him to side with the infidels, appealing via the hadith to the economic and nationalist common sense of the Pakistani-on-the-street.
If Pakistan's president-general was forced to do a tightrope act between the ulema and the Americans, he was making do as best as he could under the circumstances. It was the reaction of the Indian foreign policy establishment and supporting actors which was more troubling, and which will have longterm repercussions within India as well as in the neighbourhood. Non-violence and non-alignment have been jettisoned at one go, and it required terrorist attacks on the United States to tell us here in South Asia how much economic globalisation and the interests of its burgeoning middle class had distorted India's view of itself and the world. Gone were the moralistic harangues of the West that the Indians used to conduct from the United Nations pulpit for decades on end. Absent was any sensitivity to the specificities of terrorism, and how the genocidally audacious attacks on the citadels of America's economic and military might (the WTC and the Pentagon) were quite different from the militancies within—in Kashmir, in the Northeast and in class warfare in the central spine of the country.
And yet, only to spite Pakistan on Kashmir, the Indian leadership, which today speaks more and more for the middle and upper classes and less and less for the rest of the country, was willing to expose its confused and convoluted understanding of politics and geopolitics. It offered the American military its ports and air bases without being asked, it went on a gleeful anti-Pakistan spree as if the American disaster were a godsent opportunity to settle scores on Kashmir.