From here
This is Mumbai or India's 9/11!
As shown in this story, anti-terror experts are divided over the provenance of this attacker with some claiming Al-Qaida links while other implicitly laying the blame back on India by insisting that this is a result of India's treatment of it's muslim minority.
For instance,Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, says
Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept Gujarat State near Mumbai in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."
I agree that the incident was a tragedy, but if you look at India's history, you will find riots of same magnitude occuring alarmingly frequently.
So these events are connected to the original 9/11 by giving inspiration to domestic terrorist to plan in such coordinated scale and also by, perhaps, making them contact international terrorist groups.
So while, I do believe that the Indian government and the public has to fight terror by rational and empathetic and yet firm policies, it will only succeed if the international community (a stupid code word for the west) also takes a similar approach.
I hope that under Obama's rule we get exactly that.
