Mumbai needs U. S. attention
Terrorist attacks should not derail city’s future, India-Pakistan relations
Whichever path it takes, Mumbai is the future of the world.
The financial capital of India can regain its status as a thriving, creative polyglot of ethnicities, religions, languages and cuisines. Or it can be defeated by murderous fanatics who abhor that city, and every other city of its kind, for the very reasons that make it great.
It is in the vital interest of the United States that Mumbai once again be the kind of open city that fosters creativity and progress by gladly accepting from each individual whatever he has to contribute, unburdened by any need to separate people by race or creed. Anything our nation can do to assist the restoration of Mumbai’s peace and security, to defeat the kind of terrorists who held it hostage for three days and killed more than 170 people, should be done.
Both President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama are properly concerned. Obama’s newly named national security team has been examining the matter and Bush immediately dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India to offer sympathy and assistance.
Both the incoming president and the outgoing one rightly stressed India’s success in building a multiethnic democracy — the world’s largest — one that can withstand such attacks without abandoning the tenets of freedom.
Like New York, London and the other great cities of the world, Mumbai — formerly known as Bombay — has been a welcoming home for ethnic groups who, in other times and places, would have been at each other’s throats. Once rid of such burdens, people of all kinds are free to think, invent, create, trade, collaborate, compete, even intermarry in a way that moves humanity forward.
Such openness is exactly what the terrorists hate, exactly what moves them to violence. The challenge of the civilized world is to defeat such forces, not give them what they want by retreating into rival ethnic cantons and religious ghettos.
The United States has properly offered its investigative agencies and its good offices as a way to track down the terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks. That will involve working with the government of Pakistan, India’s neighbor and sometime rival, within whose borders the terrorists are thought to have originated — terrorists who may have intended, most of all, to derail the chance of accord between the two nations in the war on terror. And that will be a delicate process for which an alert, but not arrogant, United States could be a great help.
“In the world we seek, there is no place for those who kill innocent civilians to advance hateful extremism,” Obama said Monday. “And I am confident that India’s great democracy is more resilient than killers who would tear it down.”
Anything we can do to help make that confidence justified should gladly be done.
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments
Learn more about our moderation system.