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Vol. 72/No. 49      December 15, 2008

 
Mumbai attacks set
back toilers in region
(front page)
 
BY CINDY JAQUITH  
An armed attack on several sites in the Indian city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, killed some 170 people November 26-29.

Indian police said the one attacker captured alive, Ajmal Amir Kasab, told them he was trained at a camp in Pakistan and is a supporter of the Islamist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. The group has carried out armed attacks against Indian targets in the past. The Indian government accused the organization of a 2006 train bombing in India that killed at least 200 people.

According to press reports, two armed men entered the Chatrapati Shivaji train station the night of November 26 and began indiscriminately machine-gunning people. Fifty-four were reportedly killed. The train about to depart the station regularly takes migrant workers who work in Mumbai back to their homes.

Another band seized a Jewish center where they killed six more people. Gunmen took over the Cama hospital, where several more people were shot. The attackers also drove through the streets, firing at pedestrians. They took hostages at two luxury hotels frequented by tourists, killing some 52 people at the Taj Mahal and 38 at the Trident/Oberoi, including children.

Among those killed were railroad workers at the train station, and cooks and waiters at hotels who attempted to help people evacuate buildings and find safe places to hide.  
 
Proxy for Pakistani rulers
Lashkar-e-Taiba is an anti-working-class organization that has acted as a proxy for wings of the Pakistani capitalist class in its battles with rivals in the Indian bourgeoisie and elsewhere. In the past it has been used by the Pakistani government to attack Indian government forces in the state of Kashmir and more recently India as a whole.

The group’s name means “Army of the Pure.” It calls for imposing Islamic rule and “seeks to bring about a union of all Muslim majority regions in countries that surround Pakistan,” according to a pamphlet put out by the group.

Lashkar-e-Taiba was set up at the end of the 1980s with the support of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s secret police. Founders of the group had helped recruit volunteers to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan following Soviet withdrawal from the country. Lashkar-e-Taiba later turned to opportunities to serve the Pakistani rulers in their efforts to undermine the government of India.

Following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Washington demanded the Pakistani regime end all support to the organization and similar armed groups. Islamabad formally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba. Its public face now is Jamaat ud-Dawa (Party of the Calling), which operates businesses, schools, and relief agencies near Lahore, Pakistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, like al-Qaeda, is a bourgeois group that has arisen in the absence of working-class leadership in this part of the world. Such groups are a major obstacle in the way of workers and farmers in the South Asian region having the space to put together a working-class leadership that can begin to tackle the legacy of imperialist exploitation.  
 
British colonial rule
Bourgeois governments’ use of religious and ethnic differences to weaken and divide working people goes back centuries. Britain colonized India in the 1800s and was finally forced to grant it independence in 1947, in the face of a powerful struggle that included massive strikes.

In order to divide workers and farmers, the British imperialists partitioned India following independence, creating Pakistan, with east and west sections 1,000 miles apart, where the majority was Muslim. What remained as India was majority Hindu.

Muslim landlords and other bourgeois elements collaborated with the British to set up Pakistan. In India the main party of the capitalist class, the Congress Party, supported the partition as well, out of fear of the strong working-class movement that had emerged in the fight for independence.

There have been three wars between the governments of India and Pakistan since. Two of them, in 1965 and 1990, centered on the contested state of Kashmir, which is majority Muslim but remains partitioned, with Indians troops occupying two-thirds of the territory. In 1971 a war resulted when toilers in East Pakistan, resenting domination by the rulers of West Pakistan, rebelled. They were backed by the Indian government and succeeded in establishing the nation of Bangladesh. Washington supported the West Pakistani regime in the war.

In 1990 New Delhi and Islamabad came close to using nuclear weapons against each other. Islamabad placed its nuclear weapons arsenal on alert and massed troops on the border with India. Leading up to this, the Indian government integrated tactical nuclear weapons into border maneuvers threatening Pakistan.

In the six years prior to the Mumbai attacks, some 600 people in India had been killed in bombings and other armed attacks by Islamist forces. Last July a bomb killed 60 at the Indian embassy to Afghanistan in Kabul. At the time U.S. spy agencies accused their counterparts in Pakistan’s ISI of complicity in the bombing.

For its part, the Indian ruling class has used anti-Muslim, chauvinist campaigns to dampen the class struggle as well. This has come mainly through appeals to Hindu nationalism. The rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, which led the government in the early part of this decade, has been the principal force doing so. It is widely viewed as responsible for the massacre of more than 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarati in 2002, when gangs of Hindus were organized in a pogrom against fellow Indians who were Muslim. Hindu nationalists have also targeted working-class Indians from other religions.

The working class and peasantry of India and Pakistan have born the brunt of the wars these two bourgeois governments continually wage, and they have been the overwhelming majority of those killed and maimed in the religious pogroms. They will also be targets as New Delhi steps up “antiterror” measures, using the Mumbai events as a pretext. Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh has already announced a big expansion of the National Security Guards.  
 
U.S. role
Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its growing military operations in Pakistan, exacerbate these conflicts between bourgeois regimes throughout South Asia. When U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Washington pressed then Pakistani president Parvez Musharraf, who had been a staunch supporter of the Taliban, to change his stance. He became a firm ally of the U.S. government in the war and the Pakistani army began working with the U.S. military to target Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.

The U.S. rulers succeeded in establishing strong ties with the government of India, including its two main bourgeois parties. Prior to the early 1990s, the Indian government had closer relations with Moscow than with Washington. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, relations with Washington have steadily drawn closer.

In a bid to improve relations with India, Pakistan’s new president, Asif Zardari, recently pledged Pakistan would never be the first to use nuclear weapons and condemned Kashmiri insurgents as “terrorists.” The Zardari government is a civilian one, replacing the military regime that was run by Musharraf. Zardari was exiled under Musharraf’s rule. His wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in a bomb attack while campaigning for president last year.

Zardari’s initial response to the Mumbai bombings and charges by the Indian government that Pakistanis were involved was to send the head of the ISI to India to help with the investigation. That offer was quickly withdrawn, however, and a lower-ranking ISI official assigned instead.

As tensions rose between the Indian and Pakistani regimes, Islamabad threatened to move 100,000 troops to the border with India. The troops are currently involved in operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda forces near the Afghanistan border. India’s minister for home affairs, Sriprakash Jaiswal, replied that New Delhi had put its security forces on a “war level” and increased Navy and Coast Guard patrols. The Pakistani government denies any connection to the attackers and refuses to extradite any suspects to India.

The outbreak of fighting between the Indian and Pakistani governments poses a big problem for Washington, which is moving quickly to significantly expand its war in Pakistan. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interrupted a trip to Europe to fly to India and Pakistan for talks. She urged Islamabad to help track down the assailants and called for calm, as have President George Bush and President-elect Barack Obama.

Despite projecting an image of “peacemaker,” however, Washington is on a course with its “war on terror” that can only sharpen the conflicts in India and Pakistan, producing more devastating consequences for the workers and peasants of those two countries. Nor will workers in the United States be immune. Already federal, state, and local politicians and police departments are calling for stepped-up “anti-terror” measures. The New York City police announced it would hold “live exercises simulating scenarios in the Mumbai attacks,” USA Today reported December 5.  
 
 
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