The solution will not be televised

• Last Updated: December 12. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 12. 2008 5:30AM GMT

Tired of watching the media misunderstand Mumbai, Kanishk Tharoor tried to take his own views on air.

Even from my distant perch in London, it was difficult to escape the paralysing effect of the attacks on Mumbai. As soon as word of the unfolding tragedy reached me, I found myself immersed in a blizzard of images and reports. I jumped between BBC’s flustered “breaking news” and live internet streams of multiple Indian news networks. The same mute pictures cycled through all the channels. Frantic reporters gave minute-by-minute updates of what they didn’t know. Uncertainty proliferated through the night. Yet amid all the jarring and insensible media coverage, I was transfixed, unable to turn away. I was reminded of a very different day seven years ago when I couldn’t lift my gaze from the TV, even though I had only to look out the window of my family’s Manhattan apartment to see the billowing smoke of the twin towers.

It was inevitable that what happened in Mumbai would be compared to the September 11 attacks, the mother of all 21st century terrorist spectacles. The perpetrators of this atrocity intended nothing less. Their run-and-gun rampage through the iconic heart of south Mumbai was calculated to draw the kind of media attention that bomb blasts – in their sudden boom and vanish – never can.

It helped, of course, that the bastions of India’s affluent class were singled out. Likewise, the Western press would never have lingered so long over Mumbai were not so many foreigners targeted. But what will make Mumbai’s “26/11” live long in the global imagination is the way it was watched. After several days of attrition, Indian special forces eventually managed to clear the gunmen from the smouldering hotels and high-rises, the opaque buildings that we knew hid so much horror. Every preceding moment, studied in excess and empty detail by the ubiquitous camera, was a testament to defeat, a reminder of how a handful of men could bring an entire nation to its knees before the blinking TV screen. And the world peered over India’s shoulder; I received a flood of texts from normally apolitical friends in London, all awed by the tragedy.

My friends and many others struggled to digest the torrent of information coming from Mumbai. Just like the spectacular shock of September 11, the chaos in Mumbai seemed to demand that meaning be imposed upon the otherwise meaninglessness of brutality. Western editorials (and many Indian commentators) were quick to namecheck “India’s 9/11”. Accepting her nomination as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton invoked the carnage in the Indian city as an American challenge. Alongside New York, London and Madrid, Mumbai now stood as a pillar in the edifice of the “war on terror”. What was visceral suddenly appeared abstract; the local became global. The world significance of Mumbai’s tragedy seemed to reach well beyond the remit of the fumbling reporters who brought it to us live and direct.

It is a peculiar feature of the hyper-informed age that supposedly momentous events are accompanied by complete bewilderment. That confusion – itself “spectacular” – lends itself to distortion. I quickly grew dispirited by the way the attacks were being covered and interpreted around the world. In my view, what happened in Mumbai was not “India’s September 11”. We gain very little from such sweeping parallels, from freeing catastrophe from its proper context. I was impassioned enough to write an op-ed in a prominent British newspaper laying out the case against the September 11 comparisons. I thought it was necessary to explain that India is no stranger to terrorist outrages, having weathered 15 years of Islamist (often Pakistani-inspired) atrocities. For Indians to give in now to the temptation of the September 11 tag is to surrender to the particular power of this terrorist spectacle and, perhaps more insidiously, to the gloomy truth that the lives of the poor matter far less than those of the rich. A robust democratic society should not need to see the blood of its elite to be shaken.

Of course, such words of criticism do not play well in Mumbai and elsewhere in India, where the pain and fear is real. Though I personally did not lose any family members or friends in the attacks, others close to my family in the upper crust of Mumbai society did. For them and many others across India, it continues to feel like a seismic moment, a break from the past.

But we must remember that the last thing India needs is its own September 11. There is no space in the complexity of its geopolitical position and history for the phoney, black-and-white existentialism of the “war on terror”. It will make for counterproductive policy if India sees its confrontation with the terrorist threat as part of a universal, ideological struggle against radical Islam. Such an approach will only strengthen the shrill clamour of hawks and neoconservatives within and without India.

In the days after my op-ed ran, I made tentative forays into the British radio and TV in order to further warn against the simplifying lure of the right-wing “war on terror” explanation. When The Islam Channel asked me to appear on its live hour-long political discussion programme Ummah Talk, I accepted. I knew very little about the channel, but as a scruffy, young journalist still finding his feet, I could not refuse the opportunity of a larger audience. When I arrived at their perfectly respectable studio in central London and met the affable presenter and my co-panellist, I anticipated an engaging and productive conversation.

What ensued on Ummah Talk was nothing short of farcical. The host and my co-panelist attempted to wrestle me into a preposterous discussion of conspiracy theories. In their view, the attacks were just as likely to have been the work of the Indian intelligence services or Hindu militants as that of Pakistan-backed terrorists. My protestations about evidence (and the lack thereof) were ignored because all their pointless conjecture was, in fact, very pointed at a single argument: Islamist terrorism is an exaggerated fiction, no more serious than any other kind of political violence (similarly, the misdeeds of Pakistan and its notorious intelligence services are just as bad as anybody else’s). It was unfair, they seemed to suggest, to cast the first stone – just before they started chucking stones in all other directions.

Without agreeing in any way with their logic, I did have sympathy for my interlocutors. Rightly or wrongly, many of the channel’s audience of Muslims in the United Kingdom feel embattled within the West, hounded by a media prone to dangerous sensationalism (which is perhaps why they seek solace in the Islam Channel). The host and my co-panellist were also not wrong to bring up India’s heavy-handedness in Kashmir as well as the recent history of violence against Indian Muslims, including the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. As an Indian citizen, I readily agreed on air that my country has much to account for.

But at other moments in the programme I struggled to contain my irritation, my eyes rolling upwards in disbelief. In that fashion so reminiscent of old, hard-bitten leftists, my adversaries insisted on equating all evils, and on justifying one wrong with an unrelated another. It is dangerous to level all distinctions – to pretend, for example, that Pakistan’s security establishment is no different from India’s. If, as a Muslim, you think of yourself as part of one besieged global identity, then this relativistic moral murk is inevitable. It is similar to its supposed polar opposite, the moral clarity of the Western neoconservatives. The fog of the former and the blinding light of the latter do nothing to illuminate what happened in Mumbai.

The turbulence of terrorist spectacle and its subsequent media storm require more sophisticated navigation. In the midst of my ambush on Ummah Talk, I sparred more than I wanted to. Were I to return to the show, I would plea for a different understanding of the attacks, one that roots any judgement in context and detail, and, most importantly, in the willingness to embrace self-critique. We don’t need moral clarity or moral relativism, but truly courageous moral modesty.

Kanishk Tharoor is an associate editor at Open Democracy and a frequent contributor to The Review.