Mumbai is India's 11-M, not India's 9/11

Amitav Ghosh has an op-ed in the NY Times that underscores something that I was thinking about the other day. He notes that violence and attacks such as that carried out in Mumbai have been in occurring with regularity in India for decades though western media watchers may not have been as aware of them as they might be. He goes onto argue that the 9/11 comparison is inaccurate because there was no history of attacks in the United States prior to 9/11 as there was in India. Then he makes the following point:

When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India takes a hard line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration, the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other, more productive analogies for the invasion of Mumbai: one is the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable number of casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief.

If 9/11 is a metaphor for one kind of reaction to terrorism, then 11-M (as it is known in Spanish) should serve as shorthand for a different kind of response: one that emphasizes vigilance, patience and careful police work in coordination with neighboring countries. This is exactly the kind of response India needs now, and fortunately this seems to be the course that the government, led by the Congress Party, has decided to follow.

This is exactly the kind of response the US needed to 9/11 and failed to take. Let's hope that the Indian government will avoid making the mistakes of the Bush administration.