Will there be War?

No, not yet.

Last Wednesday, people in Bombay formed a human chain. It was two weeks since the bombs had gone off, and from Virar to Colaba people congregated for a few minutes to form a chain of a hundred kilometres. It was to remember the victims of 26/11, and to remind each other that the soldarity among the survivors still held.

But there were many gaps in that chain. After the saturation bombings of TV images, there was little live reporting. And the next morning, the newspapers buried the event in the inside pages.

The front pages, instead, were full of Pakistan. How Pakistan needed to be taught a lesson, how that country was in denial by blaming India for the attacks rather than taking a look at itself, how India needed to free Pakistan from its own demons . The shouts for war are growing louder. I was startled by the voice of a man whom I know well, a reasonable and warm-hearted human being. He said: "We have to finally show the Pakistanis that we mean business".

The statement of Arun Shourie, member of parliament for the BJP, in the debate on the terror attacks, got wide coverage. Who wants to listen to Gandhi, he seemed to ask, who wants the Mahatma's bland admonition, that 'an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind': "Not an eye for an eye, but an eye for two eyes!", he shouted in Parliament. "Not a tooth for a tooth, but a tooth for a whole jaw!" - the broken tooth being Bombay, and the jaw to be broken being Pakistan.

But there are also sane voices, authoritative ones.

Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said quite clearly that war is not an option, and numerous commentators explained why. In the 'Indian Express Shekhar Gupta warned that it would be a short war, with no permanent strategic gains for India. The US and the world community would do their best to stop the two nuclear States from spinning out of control. In fact a war would hurt India's interests, because it would bring down the civilian government in Pakistan, and with it its fledgling democracy, by restoring Army rule. Kashmir would be back on the front-burner, and with it the legitimacy of all these terrorist outfits in Pakistan. A war would reduce the pressure on them along the Afghan border. In short, it would strengthen the network which had brought havoc to Bombay rather than weaken it.

Finally, there was the voice of the electorate. Six States voted in regional elections, and from the villages of central India to the borders with Burma in the East and with Pakistan in the West, the verdict seemed unanimous: terrorism is bad, but so is the terrorism of poverty. Give us not only police security, but also food security, and we will (re-)elect you. (As I write, the results from Jammu&Kashmir are not yet in).

Yet, among the classes that count when it comes to military war - the urban electorate, the political class, the social and economic elites - there is no doubt that nerves are badly frayed, that frustration over Pakistan is at a high, that teeth are clenched. One more spark, and war could explode.

I remember a similar moment in 2002, after the attack against the Indian Parliament by the 'Lashkar-e-Toyba', among others. The Indian Army mobilised, Pakistan followed suit, and both moved their tank regiments to the border, staring at each other within shooting distance. For months, there was a delicate balance between war and no-war. Then, in May 2002, a three-man commando stormed into an Indian Army camp in Kaluchak near Jammu and killed 34 people, most of them wives and children of soldiers. Not only the politicians were furious, even the Army was bristling, rearing to strike back. For a moment it seemed that this had been the last straw, that an inflection point had been crossed. It took the whole weight of Western diplomacy - and Prime Minister Vajpayee's dithering - to stop India from crossing the border.

What will it be this time? What will happen if the next Indian city is attacked? Because make no mistake about it: the next attack will come. Internal security is in shambles, and to build it up will take five years, according to experts. And, as Shourie said in the same speech (rightly this time): The security apparatus will be preparing for yesterday's attack - yesterday's targets, yesterday's tactics - and not tomorrow's. And when it comes, the political masters will probably buckle under the pressure from an angry public and from their own frustration.

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But then, isn't traditional war old-fashioned and deja-vu, almost as old as a medieval clash of swords and lances, of horses and war elephants?

Earlier this week, when I took a train into town, I passed the Office of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the Mantralaya, the Police Headquarters, the Gateway of India on my way to the Alibagh ferry. It reminded me of Kabul.

My earliest recollection of the Afghan capital is of a town with wide boulevards, with bustling bazaars and lawns in front of Government buildings, where people sat in groups and chatted. When I last visited, Kabul was in a state of siege, with police controls and security checks everywhere, the gardens full of sandbags instead of almond trees.

What I see in Mumbai today are the same signposts of war: police everywhere, X-Ray frames, even sandbags. And, in the last two weeks, the sound of helicopter rotors overhead. Of course, there still are the traffic jams, the beauty of 'Queen's Necklace', Rajabhai Tower and the Oval, the hawkers and the party-goers, the beggars and the tiffinwallahs. But by clinging to these securing images, aren't we screening out, unconsciously, all the tell-tale signs of a state of siege?

We are in a new kind of war, in which the concept of a frontline with trenches and bunkers seems like a romantic idea. Maybe our conscious mind refuses to accept that the new global warfare, like global trade, has no fixed borders anymore. We still cling to our old-fashioned concept of war so that we can create our comfortable private spaces, so that (at least in our heads) there is still the wide expanse of an open and friendly city.

But if we look closely, we will find that our unconscious selves have already internalised the fears of the new war. We worry when we send the children to school. When we take our morning stroll or drive to town, our eyes are alert instead of carefree or inward-looking. When I entered the train compartment yesterday, everyone looked at me intently, and observed my every movement - how I placed my shopping bag in the overhead compartment, how I took of my rucksack, and what I took out of it. Later, when I passed under the X ray frame at the Gateway and the beeper went off, the police asked what was in my bag. I said 'Laptop' and the officer, repeated loudly 'Computer' to his men, exchanging meaningful glances with them, as I unpacked it.

I was a bit angry, upset that I had passed through three checks on my way into town - MY town. But then I remembered the list of names and places which Mohammed Ansari had mentioned in his statement to the police. Ansari is the local Lashkar-e-Toyba accomplice who last February had reccied possible locations for the 'fedayeen' attack against Bombay. The list contained not only city landmarks and transport hubs, not only the Gateway and the famous hotels, the Government buildings and the Stock Exchange. There were also Temples and churches, suburban railway stations and picknick spots.

Among them was Mount Mary Church, not two hundred metres from where I live. Suddenly I realised, with a start, that war was not a distant thunder anymore, in far-away Kabul and Kandahar. Kandahar is also the name of a restaurant in the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay.

Will there be War? Aren't we in it already?