12 steps to shock-and-awe Pakistan's economy

12 steps to shock-and-awe Pakistan's economy
R Vaidyanathan

December 11, 2008
I did not anticipate the huge response my inbox received for the article slamming Pakistan. Many of those who wrote in have sought concrete steps to tackle the Terror Central.

The terror attack on world citizens at Mumbai has created revulsion and outrage all over the world. It is imperative that India seize the opportunity provided to destabilise Pakistan.

A stable Pakistan is not in the interest of world peace, leave alone India. Army controls the country and owns its economy.

A significant portion of its GDP is due to army-controlled entities (See: Military Inc - Inside Pakistan's Military Economy, by Ayesha Siddiqa; OUP; 2007). One can easily say that Pakistan economy and its Army/ISI are synonymous.

Unless this elementary fact is internalised, we are not going anywhere. This implies we should stop talking of a stable Pakistan since a stable Pakistan means multiple attacks on many more cities of India by that rogue organisation ISI, which is the core of the Pakistan Army and the heart of Pakistan's economy.

Let us not even assume that Zardari is in control. Poor man -- he did not trust his own investigators to probe his wife's assassination -- he wanted Scotland Yard to do the job. Now he blabbers that if his investigators are satisfied, then he will initiate action against terrorists sitting inside Pakistan.

Periodically, the Pakistan Army likes to present some useful idiots (as Lenin would have called them) as elected representatives and we swoon over such events.

India should take the following steps to destabilise the economy of Pakistan:

1. Identify the major export items of Pakistan (like Basmati rice, carpets, etc) and provide zero export tax or even subsidise them for export from India. Hurt Pakistan on the export front.

2. Identify the major countries providing arms to Pakistan and arm twist them. Tell Brazil and Germany (currently planning to supply massive defense items to Pakistan) that it will impact their ability to invest in India. Tell Germany that retail license to Metro will be off and other existing projects will be in jeopardy.

3. Incidentally, after the arrival of Coke and Pepsi in China, the human rights violations of China are not talked about much by US government organs. Think it is a coincidence? Unless we use our markets to arm-twist arms exporters to Pakistan, we will not achieve our objectives.

4. Tell American companies that for every 5% increase in FDI limit for them, their government needs to reduce equipping Pakistan by $5 billion. That is real politics, not whining. Let us remember that funds are in desperate search of emerging markets and not the other way about. Let us also remember that international economics is politics by another name.

5. Create assets to print/distribute their currency widely inside their country. To some extent, Telgi types can be used to outsource this activity. Or just drop their notes in remote areas.

6. Pressurise IMF to add additional conditionality to the loans given to them or at least do not vote for their loans.

7. Create assets within Pakistan to destabilise Karachi stock market - it is already in a shambles.

8. Cricket and Bollywood are the opium of the Indian middle classes. Both have been adequately manipulated/ controlled by the D-company since the eighties. Chase the D-company money in cricket/ Bollywood and punish by burning D-assets in India instead of trying to have them auctioned by the IT department when nobody comes to bid for it.

9. Provide for capital punishment to those who fund terror and help in that. We have the division in the finance ministry to monitor money laundering, etc. It is important that terror financing is taken seriously and fully integrated into money laundering monitoring systems and this division is provided with much larger budget and human resources. And it should coordinate with RAW.

10. Encourage and allow scientists/ academicians/ elites of Pakistan to opt for Indian passport and widely publicise that fact since it will hurt their self-respect and dignity. There will be a long queue to get Indian passports -- many will jump to get our passport -- since they will not be stopped at international airports. It is rumoured that Adnan Sami wants one. Do not give passports to all -- make it a prized possession. Let it hurt the army- and ISI-controlled country. This one step will destroy their identity and self-confidence.

11. Discourage companies from India from investing in Pakistan, particularly IT companies, till Pakistan stops exporting its own IT (international terrorism).

12. In all these, it is important that we do not bring in the domestic religious issues. The target is the terror central, namely Pakistan, and if there are elements helping them here then they also should be punished -- irrespective of religious labels. If Pakistan is dismantled and the idea of Pakistan is gone, many of our domestic issues will also be sorted out.

Will the Indian elite go for the jugular or just light more candles and scream at the formless/ nameless political class before TV cameras?

It is going to be a long haul and may be in a decade or so, we can find a solution to our existential crisis of being attacked by barbarians from the West. We need to combine strategy and patience and completely throw to the dustbin the 'Gujral Doctrine' by that mumbling prime minister about treating younger brothers with equanimity. The doctrine essentially suggests that if we are slapped on both the cheeks we should feel bad that we do not have a third cheek to show.

He, according to security experts, seems to have dismantled our human intelligent assets inside Pakistan, which has resulted in the gory death of thousands of Indian citizens in the last few years.

Such is our strategic thinking in this complex world since our political class is not adequately briefed and the elite don't think through issues. Better to be simple in our talks and vicious in our actions rather than the other way.

Hopefully, this November attack will create a new vibrant India capable of taking care of its own interests.

The author is professor of finance and control, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, and can be contacted at vaidya@iimb.ernet.in. The views are personal and do not reflect those of his organisation.

8 things India Inc, govt must do against Pakistan

December 10, 2008

The three-day-long terror strike on the country's financial capital was devastating in terms of its reach and impact. It has left Corporate India badly shaken and the elites numb.

It is no more about bombs being thrown at bus stations or trains getting blasted. It is no longer about only Nagpada or Govindpuri residents losing limbs and lives. Terror has now climbed up the value chain.

As the new age entrepreneur Kiran Majumdar Shaw told a Bangalore newspaper, "So far, the terrorists targeted common people. Now the society's elite, the business sector, is the target. What happened in Mumbai is a loud wake-up call for all of us to do something to protect ourselves."

Corporate India did not bat an eyelid when Mumbai train blasts took place, or when Sarojini Nagar was burning on a Diwali day, or Hyderabad was weeping two years before.

But today, every corporate captain is angry, and so are the celebrities who people Page 3 of newspapers, due largely because the attacks on the three top hotels were directly aimed at those who frequent these places, for business or pleasure (contrast this with the scant coverage of the carnage at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, for example, where commoners were involved).

All the same, the bleeding-heart liberals would be back to their routine ways after a few days. They will lament that the captured terrorist has not been given his favourite food and not allowed to watch TV or use his cell phone; they will say his human rights are violated. Just wait for the chorus.

Of course, this time it will be between Page 3 and the jholawalas (activists) and that should be an interesting match to watch, but that's another story.

In the last ten years, not a single session of any seminar sponsored by the CII or Ficci or business/general journals has focussed on terrorism. When this writer once broached the importance of talking about it, a senior business captain said it is for the government to deal with.

Many of those seminars gave importance to Musharraf and now Zardari, as if they are going to provide any solution when they are a part of the problem.

Now, at least, terrorism is being realised as a problem facing the country.

Let us summarise what the real situation is and what the corporate sector should do if we are serious in fighting terrorism on our soil.

1. Recognise and treat Pakistan as a terrorist state. The state policy of Pakistan is terrorism and their single-point programme is to destroy India. This needs to be internalised by every business baron including the owners of media.

2. Now, the elite of Pakistan are more angry, since India is growing at 7% and they are given CCC rating and stiff conditions for borrowing from the IMF.

Many an academic from that country, who I have met in global conferences, has openly lamented that nobody talks about Indo-Pak relations anymore, but only Indo-China or Indo-American, etc. They want to be equal but they are in deep abyss.

3. Pakistan is the only territory in the world where an army has a whole country under its control. This is an important issue since studies have found that a large number of corporates in Pakistan are ultimately owned by the Fauji Foundation (FF), Army Welfare Trust (AWT) Bahria Foundation (BF), Shaheen Foundation (SF) all owned by different wings of armed forces (See paper presented by Dr Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha on 'Power, Perks, Prestige And Privileges: Military's Economic Activities In Pakistan' in The International Conference on Soldiers in Business -- Military as an Economic Actor; Jakarta, October 17-19, 2000).

Hence, do not try to think of Pakistan without its army, irrespective of who rules that country temporarily and nominally. At least 70% of the market capitalisation of the Karachi stock exchange is owned by the army and related groups.

4. There are three groups in India, who are obsessed with friendship with Pakistan. One is the oldies born in that part before partition and who are nostalgic about the Lahore havelis, halwas and mujras. The second is the Bollywood and other assorted groups, who look at it as a big market. The Dawood gang has financed enough of these useful idiots. The third is the candle light holding bleeding heart liberals (BHLs) who cannot imagine India doing well without its younger brother taken care of.

All three have been proved wrong hundreds of times, but they are also opinion makers. Shun them, avoid them and ridicule them.

5. We should categorically, unambiguously, unequivocally boycott Pakistan in all aspects for a decade or more. Be it art, music, economy, commerce, or other hand-holding activities. That army-controlled state has to realise that it has done enough damage to global civilisation.

More than 100 acts/attempts of terror recorded in the world since 9/11 have had their roots in Pakistan. More than 40% of the prisoners in Guantanamo are Pakistanis.

6. We should recognise that it is our war and nobody in the world is going to wage it on our behalf. What the Americans are thinking, or what the Britishers are going to do, will not help. A determined country should have a sense of dignity and independence to fight its war.

We should stop interviewing leaders from that country who mouth the same inanities that "you have not produced any proof." The Government of India should perhaps create a museum of proof between India Gate and North Block.

I am amazed that a country of a billion is required even to furnish proof. If one-sixth of humanity says that the terrorist state of Pakistan is the root cause of global terrorism -- it is factual. Let us not fall into the trap of providing proof to the culprits.

7. We should realise that a united Pakistan is a grave threat to the existence of India. Hence, we should do everything possible to break up Pakistan into several units. This is required to be done not only for our interest, but for world peace.

8. We have made a grave blunder by suggesting in the international fora that "Pakistan is also a victim of terror." That is a grave error and it will haunt us for decades. They are perpetrators and our government is in deep illusion if it tries to distinguish between organs of power in that country thinking it is like India.

There is only one organ, namely its army (with ISI as a sub-organ) in that country, which owns and controls at least 70% of the GDP in that country.

If we want the world to treat Pakistan for what it is, then we should start practising it. Always call it the 'terrorist state of Pakistan' and never have any illusion that it is going to be any different.

If corporate India, including electronic/ print media, starts practising this, we should see results in a few years. Are the elites listening?

The author is professor of finance and control, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, and can be contacted at vaidya@iimb.ernet.in. The views are personal and do not reflect those of his organisation

Pakistani Standard Response Template For India

Calling All Pakistanis

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 2, 2008

On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?


After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.

So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.

First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered.

At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of Nov. 29 from Karachi: “ ‘I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,’ the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told I.P.S. ‘I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.’


But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.

Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.

Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.”

Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can’t have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight — including some 40 other Muslims — in a suicide-murder operation, without even bothering to leave a note. Because the act was their note, and destroying just to destroy was their goal. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process.

“I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community.


We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.

Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.

The Hindu Rate Of Wrath

Outlook Magazine| Nov 10, 2008

Opinion

The Hindu Rate Of Wrath

When the Mahatma's cowards erupt in fury, it hurts. It isn't terror.

Francois Gautier



Is there such a thing as 'Hindu terrorism', as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur for the recent Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign correspondents—a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and non-Hindu, I do hope I'll be given some credit for my opinions, which are not the product of my parents' ideas, my education or my atavism, but garnered from 25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le Journal de Geneve and Le Figaro).

In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo features on kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the true spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million villages possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your diversity, whether you are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or Chinese. It is this Hinduness that makes the Indian Christian different from, say, a French Christian, or the Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim. I also learnt that Hindus not only believed that the divine could manifest itself at different times, under different names, using different scriptures (not to mention the wonderful avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st century religious strife) but that they had also given refuge to persecuted minorities from across the world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, and today, Tibetans. In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions.

You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups like SIMI, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that most of these communal incidents often involve persons from the same groups—often Dalits and tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity and others not.

However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no Muslim was killed in the process; compare this to the 'vengeance' bombings of 1993 in Bombay, which wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet the Babri Masjid destruction is often described by journalists as the more horrible act of the two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister of Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed to have gone off in a Muslim locality of Bombay.


I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this so-called Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at the receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which crucified Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the Haj. They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity through inducements and financial traps, see a harmless 84-year-old swami and a sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are blasphemed.

So sometimes, enough is enough.At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed, should not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices be heard.

There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet. They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities in the world today. Can you call them terrorists?



(The writer is the editor-in-chief of the Paris-based La Revue de l'Inde.)

Sardarji Jaago!!!!

We had a Sikh ruler (Maharaja Ranjit Singh) who was even feared by the Afghans and there is a Sikh leading India now who cannot proceed against Pakistan without taking permission & approval from the West and then a nod from Ma’am Sonia. Somewhere a Pakistani told me that India is not US and they are not Georgia to be run over that easily. This same stigma has made our leaders a group of eunuchs. India has existed for more than 5,000 years without the help of any Western power. We are more than capable of dealing with terrorism and the domestic problems. All we Indians need is self belief…..Yes! Self belief. The days of the “Raj” robbed us of that and twisted our way of life. We are 20% of mankind; everyone must remember that. They need us more than we need them. God bless India!

Jai Hind! Jai Maharashtra!

What They Hate About Mumbai

By SUKETU MEHTA
Published: November 28, 2008 in the NY Times

MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t you know it, the keeping of songbirds.

Bollywood dream-makers are shaken. “I am ashamed to say this,” Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. “As the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow.”

Mumbai is a “soft target,” the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag checks? In Mumbai, it’s impossible to control the crowd. In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.


And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against. It is, as a monk of the pacifist Jain religion explained to me, “paap-ni-bhoomi”: the sinful land.

In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets — for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai. Now these young Muslim men murdered people in front of their families — for the crime of visiting Mumbai. They attacked the luxury businessmen’s hotels. They attacked the open-air Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India. Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the righteous believers in the jihad. They attacked the train station everyone calls V.T., the terminus for runaways and dreamers from all across India. And in the attack on the Chabad house, for the first time ever, it became dangerous to be Jewish in India.

The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?

So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro. Stimulus doesn’t have to be just economic.

Suketu Mehta, a professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

Pak media taunts India, Israel & the USA

Please forward this to every Indian!

I hope the patriotism and sensitivity that may be dormant in some of us will rise after watching this.

Let us take this opportunity to believe that we as Indians can rise above this - we can show the world that we are not cowered by their actions. We will face this and face this bravely and continue to grow as a nation despite our religious diversities.

Sadly, we don't have one leader who puts the party's interests behind the country's.

Let us pray our leaders wake up from their slumber. At least now! And not politicise the terror situation further.

Jai Hind!

This is the first time I was made to feel like Jews

As a Christian, I occasionally remind my Jewish friends that I owe my faith to them. Indian tradition maintains that a few years after Christ's death, one of his apostles, Thomas (‘the Doubter’), sailed to Kerala to share the Good News with his co-religionists. Jews have lived in India for thousands of years, perhaps arriving on a mission from the court of King Solomon to trade in ‘elephant's tooth, peacocks and apes’. The Jews of Cochin are said to have been less than receptive to Thomas’s message, though he did make many other converts.

India’s ancient Jewish history, evidence of the country’s tolerance for people of all faiths, has long been a source of pride for us. But an even greater cause for satisfaction has been the fact that Indian Jews have never faced persecution. Indian Jews have flourished, and nowhere is that more evident than in Mumbai. Some of the city’s best-known landmarks, including Flora Fountain, have been built with donations from Jewish philanthropists who grew prosperous on trade and manufacturing. Most notable among them were the Sassoons, a family from Iraq. Their name is etched in plaques in at least four schools, a magnificent library, a dockyard and at least two of the city’s nine synagogues.

A more chilling reminder of the city’s role as a sanctuary for Jews is to be found on another set of marble tablets in a cemetery in Chinchpokli in Central Mumbai. One wall bears memorials to people who died in faraway concentration camps such as Auschwitz. It was donated by friends and relatives who found refuge here. Many of these exiles had arrived in India because of the intervention of Jawaharlal Nehru. “Few people can withhold their deep sympathy from the Jews for the long centuries of most terrible oppression to which they have been subjected all over Europe,” Nehru wrote, as he lobbied the British government to allow Eastern European Jews into India. “Fewer still can repress their indignation at the barbarities and racial suppression of Jews which the Nazis have indulged in during the last few years.”

Many of the exiles soon became an important part of Mumbai society, serving as catalysts for the modern Indian art scene. Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer, and Emanuel Schlesinger had brought with them full-colour reproductions of European masters and a world of ideas and discussion. They proved vital in helping the Mumbai artists discover a new way of seeing. These ideas found expression on canvas when painters such as M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, and K.H. Ara founded the Progressive Artists Movement in 1947, bound together by the desire to find a new way to depict the stories of their newly independent nation.


Despite the significance of the contributions of the Baghdadis or the European exiles, the Jewish community that has left the deepest impression on the city are the Bene Israelis, who believe their ancestors were shipwrecked just south of Mumbai in 175 B.C.E. Centuries later, many of them migrated to Mumbai, where they built a synagogue in 1796.

Perhaps the best-known member of the community was Nissim Ezekiel, one of the pioneers of Indian poetry in English. My favorite of his poems is ‘Island,’ a tribute to my home city. The first stanza says, “Unsuitable for song as well as sense/ the island flowers into slums/ and skyscrapers, reflecting/ precisely the growth of my mind./ I am here to find my way in it.”

Though thousands of Indian Jews have emigrated to Israel over the years, many of those who stayed behind have an ambiguous relationship with the country that offers them the Right of Return. Among them is my friend Robin David, the author of City of Fear, a gem of a memoir that describes the horrors he witnessed as a reporter during the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. He also explains his frustration with Israel, a country to which he has attempted to emigrate three times, only to return. “I realised that the Promised Land was not my country,” he writes. “Even the strong fragrance of spices, wafting in from the Arab market through the yellowing Jerusalem sandstone, did not help. Just like Teen Darwaza [in Ahmedabad], but not quite home."

There’s another aspect to the relationship that goes unnoticed by most Indians. Each year, an estimated 20,000 Israelis take their vacations in India after finishing their three-year compulsory military service stints. Their 15,000-shekel bonuses go much further in India and, as one Israeli told me recently, “It’s nice to be in a place where you don't always have to watch your back.” The beaches of Goa and the slopes of Kulu and Manali rank high on the visitors’ itineraries. The massive numbers of Israelis in the subcontinent prompted the Brooklyn-based Lubavitcher sect to open its first Indian mission centre — known around the world as Chabad Houses — in Pune in 2000.

Two years ago, I travelled to Pune to interview Rabbi Betzalel Kupchick, who ran the centre. By offering his hundreds of Jewish visitors a year free meals and the chance to chat in Hebrew, Rabbi Kupchick believed he was opening an opportunity for dialogue. “There are many ways that God brings people to Him,” he told me patiently. “Here, without the pressure of family and society, Israelis are more open-minded. Often, this is their first exposure to spiritual things. When they're come to India, they’re searching.”

Mumbai’s Jewish community doesn’t have much to do with the Israeli visitors. The ultra-orthodox leanings of the Lubavitchers have been regarded with some suspicion by liberal Indian Jews. That divide disappeared on Wednesday night. When I spoke to Robin David on the phone on Friday, he was still trying to make sense of it all. “The Indian Jewish identity is the only one that hasn’t been created by persecution,” he said. “We’ve never felt scared. This is the first time we’ve been made to feel like Jews.”

That, to me, has been among the most tragic casualties of this terrorist attack. In a barrage of grenades and bullets, a part of the Indian dream that’s 2,500 years old has now been buried in a pile of bloody concrete shards.

By Naresh Fernandes
Editor of Time Out Mumbai

Shame on Us!

Vote out this incompetent weak, government and speak out against these impotent corrupt politicians!
Vote for zero tolerance against Pakistan and any other hostile neighbour.
Stop this drama of Indo-Pak friendship tours/talks.. anything...boycott everything Pakistani....hurt their economy so their bankrupt government does not sponsor ISI/terrorism.
Look at Israel... 4 million citizens with 40 million hostile neighbours but no one dares pick up a fight with them..
Don't believe anything politicians say from across the border.
Start with convincing our pseudo-wanna-be-politicos like Mahesh Bhatt & co to stop all these pseudo-friendship tours to hostile neighbouring countries... their states kill and maim us repeatedly and we go wagging our domesticated tails to get patted on our backs by these masters of ISI...
And please stop lighting candles at the Gateway of India. We have been doing this after every terrorist attack on Mumbai.
If Javed Jaffrey is not happy staying in India, he should be free to go settle in Pakistan.
Shame on us!