2008 Mumbai attacks

The 2008 Mumbai attacks (also referred to as 26/11) were a series of terrorist attacks that took place in November 2008, when 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist terrorist organisation from Pakistan, carried out 12 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across Mumbai. The attacks, which drew widespread global condemnation, began on Wednesday 26 November and lasted until Saturday 29 November 2008. A total of 175 people died, including nine attackers, and more than 300 were wounded.

Quotes

• Commenting on the 26/11 massacre of Mumbai, Bimal, Politburo member, was quoted in Hindustan Times, saying: ‘We do not support the way they attacked the Victoria station, where most of the victims were Muslims. At the same time, we feel the Islamic upsurge should not be opposed as it is basically anti-US and anti-imperialist in nature. We, therefore, want it to grow.’
  • Vivek Agnihotri - Urban Naxals The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)

• Mainstream media coverage of these rampaging, cold-blooded murderous acts of jihad terrorism—perpetrated by a self-professed mujahideen organization (i.e., “The Deccan Mujahideen”2)—consistently ignored the clear ideological linkage to Islam. .... Blithely ignoring obvious Islamic and Muslim connections—credit taken for the attacks by a mujahideen organization;13 or testimony from a Turkish Muslim couple (Meltem and Seyfi Muessinoglu) briefly apprehended and then released unharmed by the jihadists because, “[w]hen the Muezzinoglus said they were Muslims, their captors told them that they would not be harmed”— some media (e.g., NPR) even voiced their own “speculations” about the possible culpability of “Hindu extremists,” an absurd calumny, stated in full paranoid transference mode by the Muslim Brotherhood: "A photograph published in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched."
  • Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism. citing Amaresh Misra . chapter 7

• On the floor of parliament, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram officially dismissed comments made by the Minority Affairs Minister A.R. Antulay that implied Hindutva elements may have been involved in the Mumbai attacks. Antulay sparked a political controversy on December 17 with comments insinuating that the killing of Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) Chief Hemant Karkare by the Mumbai terrorists was somehow linked to Karkare's investigation of bombings in which radical Hindus are suspected. The outlandish comments suggested that somehow Hindutva elements were in league with the Mumbai attackers, or used the attacks as cover to kill Karkare. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) immediately called for Antulay's resignation and protested with boisterous walkouts in parliament over the course of five days. Compounding matters, the Congress Party, after first distancing itself from the comments, two days later issued a contradictory statement which implicitly endorsed the conspiracy. During this time, Antulay's completely unsubstantiated claims gained support in the conspiracy-minded Indian-Muslim community. Hoping to foster that support for upcoming national elections, the Congress Party cynically pulled back from its original dismissal and lent credence to the conspiracy. Regardless of Chidambaram's dismissal (and Antulay's party-ordered retraction), the Indian Muslim community will continue to believe they are unfairly targeted by law enforcement and that those who investigate the truth are silenced. The entire episode demonstrates that the Congress Party will readily stoop to the old caste/religious-based politics if it feels it is in its interest.
  • U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford. Quoted from Wikileaks cable 2008 December 23, [1] CONGRESS PARTY STUNG PLAYING RELIGIOUS POLITICS WITH TERRORISM. Also quoted in part in Economic Times and Opindia
  • About the conspiracy theory that the Hindu nationalists committed the terror attacks.

• [India cannot] “jump on an entire nation” (Pakistan) just because some people from there came and did something.”
  • Sam Pitroda about the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Quoted from Indian Express, Rahul Gandhi’s negative campaign didn’t work: Senior Congress leaders on eve of CWC [2]

• Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims’. In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages’. In this manner, she has been effective in shifting attention away from anti-India terrorism.
  • Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan̲, A., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2016). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines.

• I had broken the initial barrier and I had found a chink in his armour. If all had gone well, he would have been dead with a red string tied around his wrist like a Hindu. We would have found an identity card on his person with a fictitious name: Samir Dinesh Chaudhari, student of Arunodaya Degree and P.G. College, Vedre Complex, Dilkhushnagar, Hyderabad, 500060, resident of 254, Teachers Colony, Nagarabhavi, Bengaluru. Ramesh Mahale, Prashant Marde and Dinesh Kadam would have been on their way to Hyderabad to find more about him. There would have been screaming headlines in newspapers claiming how Hindu terrorists had attacked Mumbai. Over-the-top TV journalists would have made a beeline for Bengaluru to interview his family and neighbours. But alas, it had not worked that way and here he was, Ajmal Amir Kasab of Faridkot in Pakistan, and I was asking him, ‘Ki karan aya hai?’ (What are you here for?)
  • Rakesh Maria - Let Me Say It Now-Westland (2020)

• How exactly did they embark upon the sea journey? Kasab was asked. On the fifteenth day of Ramzan, they were taken to a hilly area, where in addition to the firing practice, they were trained to assemble bombs with timers. They were also schooled to dismantle and assemble an inflatable dinghy and taught to remove its sea valve. They were trained to surreptitiously plant bombs below the driver’s seat in running taxis. Soon their hair was cut and the beards shaved off. New clothes and shoes were purchased for them and they were also given watches set to Indian time. The labels on their clothes were removed to prevent identification. Their photographs were clicked to make fake identity cards to pass them off as Indian Hindus. To complete the Hindu impersonation, they were instructed not to forget tying the red sacred threads around their wrists before landing. They were then taken by a train to a LeT safe house in Azizabad in Karachi.
  • Rakesh Maria - Let Me Say It Now-Westland (2020)

• This appears to be a pattern: whenever Muslim riots or bomb attacks target Hindus, it is thought acceptable to accuse the victims, in order to avoid possible revolts. Thus in 1993 in Mumbai, after eleven coordinated bomb blasts in Hindu majority areas, which killed 257 people and injured 713, the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar quickly cooked up a twelfth explosion ... in a Muslim area! “I have deliberately misled people,” he explained later, to show that both communities had been affected.” And to portray both communities’ potential to behave as “terrorists”. Truth and clarity of mind are the casualties.
  • Sharad Pawar, as quoted in The Godhra Riots: Sifting Fact from Fiction, Nicole Elfi, 2013, quoting The New Indian Express, August 13, 2006.