Who benefits from Mumbai?

I can’t stop thinking about all those poor people in Mumbai, just like all those poor Spaniards and Londoners, New Yorkers and Kenyans, Iraqis, Israelis, Afghans and Palestinians. That brother/sisterhood of bomb victims winds up being the most innocent, cosmopolitan, ecumenical, interethnic and profoundly human on this sorry planet. Too bad the whole of humanity can’t rally around their peaceful memory, and not the bloody-minded priorities of their murderers.Rattling to work on morning trains; superheated, thick and sticky crowds attempting valiantly to remain civilized; everyone yearning that that first stuffy challenge of the morning be over and done with, that the day’s gray workload liberate them from it; the gray monsoon rattles every car roof under its ceaseless downpour. The roar, the sway and the damp, burnt tang of cheaply lain track… Then the stunning blow (I can feel its first kiss on my crawling scalp), literally decapitating, vaporizing the upper torso of those nearest, caving the skulls and collapsing the shoulders of those standing mid-ground and spattering the remainder with vaporized gore and a shrapnel of overhead grillwork and bone splinters, scything broken-legged everyone sprawling as mortally wounded trains screech to a grinding halt… Dead silence momentarily, then the screaming aftermath rinsed in blood and endless rain. The hospitals overrun with dead and dying filling the corridors and sending nurses and orderlies running pale for extra supplies, trying not to slide on all that bloody spoor. The agony, the shock, the grief. All those innocent children turned instantly into orphans through no fault of their own—they’ll never really believe that. Horrible beyond imagining. Yet quite common, these days. Pretty much a replay of Bali, of London, of Barcelona, of 9/11, of Iraq day-to-day—and of how many countless bombings before and since?

Did someone recruit twice as many willing suicide bombers in the Muslim community on the outskirts of Mumbai as from around London? Guarding their sacred bundles in the overhead racks until they were vaporized by them, too? Didn't their fellow passengers smell the stink of their fear, read it off their body language? Finally, was that recruiting slime ball paid by ISI crazies or by equally insane loose cannon peers in India? Mumbai, that most worldly of cities heading up a world-weary yet upsurging nation among the senior on Earth. Salman Rushdie’s stomping grounds, well known to us residual reading occidentals because he’s guided us into it, through it and beyond it, lovingly, more than once. The Paris, New York and LA of India; which only Indians could combine into one package. A center of cosmopolitanism and a shaky bastion of mutual tolerance, if deeply traumatized in the recent past. The one place the extremists on both sides would love to decapitate: both literally and figuratively—as someone has managed to achieve: may he rot in Hell forever. May his Hell be a perpetual train ride in a first-class charnel car containing seventy virgin decapitated corpses crowding around him and laughing shrilly out of blood-bubbling throats at his vicious stupidity. Who but Hindu extremists will benefit? Certainly not Mubarak with his three-to-one outlays on the military versus health and education combined, his country swarming with Yahoos disguised as good Muslims sandbagged behind every other mountain, his fistful of nukes that pretty much cancel everyone’s glorious military ambitions. Not the vast majority of Kashmiris who wished everyone would just go home and leave them alone. Not Muslim Indians who must feel like hunted animals on their own block right now.

How many thousands of insults, how many sly blows and cunning crimes do those two hundred dead and three times as many wounded atone for? How many times more pain and anguish will they incite, as innocently as those sorry bastards did deliberately who blew up that holy mosque in Iraq? I ask again: who benefits? Only the BJP – whom I’ve read had pretty much run out of political steam and relevancy in the upcoming Indian elections, short of this catastrophe – and its psychotic outriders, of course. They delude themselves they and their Hindu fundamentalism will benefit. May they choke on that steaming benefit… Wasn’t it, after all, fundamentalists who murdered Gandhi, just like Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir, just like Egyptian President Sadat, just like any leader with any compassion, common sense and charisma for the last few decades on this planet; while corrupt and incompetent hand-wringers swap places with corrupt and incompetent firebrands, while corrupt and fully competent swindlers run everything from the back rooms, and some damn fool can always be found to gun down anyone honest who holds out any promise of peace whatsoever—and so on, ad nauseum, with every-growing consistency and ‘efficiency’? I repeat, who benefits most? In short – whatever side they claim to be on and whatever God they claim to worship but actually disgrace – no one who merits the title human.