Samizdata

The following article was written for us by Taylor Dinerman, a journalist whom we occasionally borrow from the WSJ. – Ed.

Last night, a sold out crowd at the Asia Society on Park Ave and 70th Street on Manhattan’s East Side came to hear Salman Rushdie, Sukutu Mehta and Mira Kamdar speak about the Attacks on Bombay. The obvious echoes of 9/11, and the large Indian and Jewish communities in New York ensured a big turnout.  

While Kamdar, an unimaginative, left wing intellectual who had lost a cousin in the attack on the Oberoi hotel and Mehta, an Associate Professor of Journalism at NYU and the author of a book on Bombay, ‘Maximum City’ shared the stage, Salman Rushdie was obviously the main attraction. He did not let his audience down.  

He began by rejecting, with utter disdain, the word ‘Mumbai’. He said it was nothing but the product of a politician’s grab for power. Indeed one of the themes of the evening was the inadequacy of the Indian state as compared to the nimbleness and effectiveness of the Indian private sector. This is ironic since the almost entirely liberal crowd seems to have no problem with President-elect Obama’s plan to vastly increase US state power and to do unspeakable things to the ‘capitalists’, car owners and other evildoers, in order to save the planet.  

Rushdie and the others, sang (metaphorically) hymns of praise to the vibrant, diverse, inegalitarian, port city of Bombay, the place where India meets the world and which   they all agreed was the heart of India’s economic miracle. Why capitalism, greed, economic freedom and cultural commercialism should be a self evident good thing in Bombay and not in America or Europe is one of those mysteries that defy rational explanation.

The panel agreed that by striking at Bombay the terrorists were attacking the freedom and the open spirit not only of the city but of today’s global civilization. Again, its is ironic that when George W, Bush and the neocons said the same thing about the attacks in the New York, they were hooted down by a crowd that claimed that the Islamists were only responding to western ‘injustice’.   

It is to Rushdie’s credit that he rejected this explanation. He put down the Islamic terrorists and their ideology by misquoting M.L.Menken’s famous definition of puritanism . What Menken wrote was “At the bottom of Puritanism one always finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world.” He then added “At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing.”

Rushdie also unambiguously put the blame for the attack on Pakistan. The panel agreed India’s western neighbor was the source of the problem, a failing state, full of fury, and armed with nuclear weapons. Of course there were the inevitable claims that America’s relationship with Islamabad and especially the CIA’s support for the Afghan Mujahedin was somehow to blame.  

Of course this meme fails to acknowledge that for the first twenty years of Indian independence the US tried desperately to make friends with New Delhi. Nehru, a socialist aristocrat, rejected offers of support from capitalist peasants like Truman and Eisenhower. He and his successors preferred to embrace the pro-Soviet Non-Aligned Movement. Pakistan’s elites were quite happy to embrace America, not just as a source of weapons and economic aide, but more important as a scapegoat they could blame for just about anything that went wrong with their country.   

While Kamdar was ready to damn Bush at every occasion, she was also ready to threaten Pakistan with war if they did not repress the Islamic terrorists. She also mentioned that the US would have to somehow put the issue of its supply lines to Afghanistan onto the back burner while dealing with Islamabad. This problem has gotten a lot of attention lately, but when a US General pointed out that all of NATO’s fuel for its operations there comes from Central Asia the threat of a cut off seems to have lost its urgency.  

In the end, one has to feel sorry for Rushdie. He must keep his up his standing as a man of the left, but he is too smart to swallow the kool-aid. So he is a hypocrite; not   a big deal, hypocrisy is universal and anyone who is not at least to some degree is an obnoxious fool.   He supported the Sandanistas when they repressed Nicaraguan free speech, but now celebrates the free media of India, not to mention his own right to write offensive novels.   

The attack on Bombay was the sort of thing we have seen before, in the 1970’s and 1980’s Israel suffered from the same kind of terrorism and developed an efficient coastal protection system in response. India will too, eventually.  

Terrorism is a contemptible form of warfare and the panel did not bother to refer to the attackers as anything other than cowards who went after ‘soft targets’. Rushdie stressed that they were incredibly coked up, snorting and shooting and snorting and shooting, all in the name of God.