Human beings are creatures of habit. Like other politically unaffiliated people of my generation, I think of renamed cities by their old names. Since that is not the house style, I shall not refer to the Western metropolis by any name at all.
Terrorists are human beings and, therefore, also creatures of habit. In intercepted conversations, the creatures who caused chaos on November 26, 2008, and their handlers, used the old name of that city. Since the early nineties, the city has been a default location for terror attacks.
There are several interlinked reasons for this. The city is a very soft target. There are multiple ways to enter by sea, land, rail and air and those routes cannot be shut down or policed. It is also insanely congested, guaranteeing lots of casualties in any act of terror. The crowds make it impossible to put effective physical security checks in place. Therefore, the terrorist can pick times and spots.
The crowding is a consequence of the driving forces that make the city India’s financial capital. Ilya Prigogine, Nobel prize winning chemist and chaos theorist, once described how great cities develop around hot spots of specialisation.
Human habitations start at desirable locations — river banks, the seaside, fertile fields, defensible strong points and so on. As communities grow, individuals specialise. As more individuals specialise, a positive feedback loop develops. More talented individuals migrate into the hot spot. It becomes a city, once it hits a critical mass of people with widely diversified specialisations. That attracts new successive waves of migration as the feedback loop gets more powerful.
At some stage, the city has to develop sophisticated governance systems to manage population concentrations and cater to the citizens’ needs. If this is done with common sense, it creates a better environment that attracts even more people, who add further value to the hot spot.
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The waves of migration continue because there is an enormous upside for any ambitious individual. There are jobs, and business opportunities galore at every price point. But there is no governance. The city has grown unsupervised. Its civic services and public transport systems have long been overwhelmed. The pressure on space is so high that real estate prices compare with New York, which has about 20 times the per capita.
So what exists is a chaotic mess inhabited by millions of specialists, mostly focused on their goals of making a living. Unfortunately, some of those specialisations are criminal. The city has always had a symbiotic relationship with its low-lifers. This is inevitable where normal governance is absent. The mafia fills the vacuum and acts as a parallel government, providing all sorts of “services” including loan-sharking, dispute resolution and so on.
In the seventies and eighties, the criminals smuggled gold. Once gold was decontrolled, they found new revenue streams in drug dealing, kidnapping, oil adulteration etc. They managed the real estate deals. They financed the film industry. The city cannot survive without them — they service too many needs.
The criminals turned terrorists in 1993. Given their intimate knowledge of the metro’s underbelly, they are formidably effective at this. The biggest don lives in Karachi and remote-controls a multi-billion empire in his old hometown. There are a dozen other dons and thousands of young men willing to be cannon fodder in the hopes of becoming dons. It’s just like Bollywood, where all the extras dream that they will become stars some day.
If the terror is to actually stop, the city must provide governance of an order that renders the bhailog irrelevant and, thus, cuts the umbilical links between organised crime and terrorism. It must develop local and global intelligence that can offer credible warnings of impending terror attacks. Nothing in the historical record suggests that this is at all within the realms of the possible. So what we’ll get instead are more terror attacks and more platitudes about resilience.