We're told that this atrocious assault on several sites in the city was the work of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba. Vijay Prashad ("The Fires in South Asia," Counterpunch) points out:
"The Lashkar is one of those organizations that emerged in 1991 out of the detritus of the Afghan jihad (it was formed in Kunar province). Carter’s Brzezinski vowed to 'sow shit in the Soviet backyard.' His Afghan toilet overflowed into South Asia."
But was it them? Ayesha Ijaz Khan ("Mumbai Terror Attacks," Counterpunch) writes:
"The fact that the Indian government is accusing Pakistan is taken with a grain of salt as this is not the first time the Indian government has blamed Pakistan, only to find later that Pakistan had nothing to do with the violence it was being accused of. Interestingly, four times previously the Indian government falsely accused Lashkare Taiba directly as the organization sponsoring violent incidents in India, and Pakistan indirectly for harbouring the militant group, although Pakistan officially banned the outfit in 2002.
"In each of the incidents, namely, the Chattisinghpura massacre, the attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001, the Malagaon blasts and the Samjhota Express incident, investigations were either refused or revealed that neither Lashkare Taiba nor Pakistan but groups from within India were responsible."
Alexander Cockburn, writing in The Nation, raises the question of perspective:
"No Western journalist chose to bewail a huge human catastrophe when that same chief minister of Maharashtra, Deshmukh [who resigned last week, accepting 'moral responsibility' for the attacks], supervised the destruction of 84,000 homes in Mumbai back in 2004-2005, nearly three times the number rendered homeless in Nagapattinam by the tsunami. 'Many people will be inconvenienced and will have to make sacrifices if the city has to develop,' Deshmukh said then. Once again, the lowly were making sacrifices in the interests of the mighty, many of them real estate gangsters in league with Deshmukh and the ruling Congress party."
Finally, in "Hotel Taj: Icon of Whose India?" the Tamil writer Gnani Sankaran questions where the cameras were pointed, and why. Which is the true icon of Bombay, the Hotel Taj, "where the rich and the powerful of India and the globe congregate," "the icon of the financiers and swindlers of India," or the first site attacked, the Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus (CST) railway station [better known by its old name, Victoria Terminus, or VT]? It's through the latter that
"Indians from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Tamilnadu have poured into Mumbai over the years, transforming themselves into Mumbaikars and building the Mumbai of today along with the Marathis and Kolis.
"But the [TV] channels would not recognise this. Nor would they recognise the thirty odd dead bodies strewn all over the platform of CST. No Barkha Dutt [NDTV English news editor] went there to tell us who they were. But she was at Taj to show us the damaged furniture and reception lobby braving the guards. And the TV cameras did not go to the government-run JJ Hospital to find out who those 26 unidentified bodies were. Instead they were again invading the battered Taj to try in vain for a scoop shot of the dead bodies of the page 3 celebrities.
"In all probability, the unidentified bodies could be those of workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrating to Mumbai, arriving by train at CST without cell phones and pan cards to identify them. Even after 60 hours after the CST massacre, no channel has bothered to cover in detail what transpired there."
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