A Muslim friend who was returning to his room at the Oberoi Trident on the fateful night of 26/11, and thankfully found himself locked out of the hotel, described the panic that seized him as south Mumbai exploded all around. “My driver said, don’t you have any friends in this part of town with whom you can stay the night? That might be the safest place for me to take you. Yes, I did have some friends and colleagues in the area whose doorbells I could have rung at night. But then, weirdly, it struck me that they were all Hindu. Supposing the attacks were linked to Hindu fundamentalists in the city, then I would be endangering my life. And if the attackers were Muslim I could be endangering theirs. It would be best, I thought, to be with a Muslim family.”
My friend, who is from Delhi, rang his family, got hold of the numbers of some distant cousins whom he hadn’t seen in years in Worli and spent the night with them. But in his frank tone I could detect fear as well as embarrassment: that in his moment of crisis, safety lay with distant family rather than close friends—and in a Muslim household. “I know you may think it odd,” he said apologetically, surprised at himself, “but that is how I thought.”
Ah well, if that’s the thin line between life and death…
If this how a highly educated young Muslim executive, employed in a large firm and from generations of an assimilated family and milieu, found himself responding to a situation of siege, consider how less confident or less well-off Muslims might feel?
In the kind of wild guns-and-roulette scene that consumed Mumbai (who would die? who be saved?), personal survival was paramount. Therefore my friend can be forgiven for believing that creed would save him. But if there is one fortunate fallout of the Mumbai disaster it is that Indians, Hindus and Muslims, are thinking differently. Two kinds of sms’s have jammed my cell phones in recent days.
One, exhorting the Thackerays, father, son and nephew Raj to come and save the city they claim is their own: Where are their armies against “northerners”, outsiders, who they have agitated against? And the other from Muslims begging their co-religionists to wear black bands on Eid: “We are as betrayed and angry, as hurt and let down as all…Muslims are against terrorism.”
Many Muslims were killed in Mumbai, and Jews, and people of many hues and nationalities. At a diplomat’s house this week the Western press counsellors appeared as stressed as the news reporters. They were huddled in a corner, comparing the casualties and the saved: 30 Germans trapped, 3 Germans killed, an Italian shot dead at Leopold’s, the Italian chef who got out with his baby—and did you know the chief minister of Madrid province was checking into the Taj with her delegation? All had been on round-the-clock duty, answering to their media, their governments, above all, the families of the missing or dead.
It’s easy to forget in the context of its own neighbourly quarrels how cosmopolitan a place India is—has always been—and the stream of people who pour into the narrow entrance of the Gateway of India or other metros.
As this week’s election results show, especially in Delhi (which voted in the midst of the Mumbai terror), outsiders are not an issue nor are terror attacks. The city is big enough to contain a large population of Bangladeshi Muslims and has yet managed to move forward with a semblance of governance and management.
A liberal, pleasant, attentive aunty like Sheila Dikshit, who speaks good English and whose son-in-law is Muslim, who delivers yet plays to all constituencies that other self-aggrandizing politicians in other states cannot deliver. After all, more than roti, kapda aur makan, the essential security that every human being needs is security of life.
