India offers sad lessons

By Ryan Falls

Published: November 29, 2008

A country whose attention has been devoted to an economy in the throes of recession received a jolting reminder on Thanksgiving eve of terrorism’s abiding threat. Though cowardly Islamist killers have been foiled in attempts to strike again at America, they have succeeded elsewhere, in Mumbai this time, when jihadists killed more than 100 people, gunning down among others a Nelson County man and his teenage daughter.

India’s financial center frequently has been the target of terrorist venom. A series of bombings there killed 187 people in July 2006. Beyond Mumbai, jihadists have spilled blood in other symbolic and commercial centers, hitting New Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur earlier this year. But though India, with its heavily Muslim population, is a mecca for terrorists, the object of their hatred and thuggery remains familiar.

The attackers who thundered into Mumbai’s five-star hotels Wednesday set their gun sights on Americans and Britons. The nature of terrorism is to care nothing for who gets hurt, and so into the spray of bullets fell Alan Scherr and his daughter, Naomi, 13. Their crime: Stopping for a snack in the Oberoi Hotel café. Their killers neither knew nor cared about Naomi’s glittering future. In India, she had been preparing an essay for her application to the Emma Williard Academy, a boarding school in Troy, N.Y.

“She was a shining star, absolutely brilliant,“ said Bobbie Garvey, vice president of the Synchronicity Foundation, the Faber-based meditation center, where Naomi and her father lived. Alan Scherr, a former arts professor, was the foundation’s president. “Alan was probably one of the most beloved persons here. He will be greatly missed,” Garvey said.

In solitary blasts, the Scherrs’ dreams and those of so many others vanished.

These horrors surely will not be the last. While America has meticulously constructed a vast anti-terrorism network of intelligence, law enforcement and military agencies in the wake of 9/11, other democracies, India primary among them, remain desperately vulnerable. The country prizes its diversity, making it difficult to build a legal system capable of thwarting the radical elements lurking among the millions of Muslims who mostly live quiet, productive lives there.

India is little helped by its proximity to neighboring breeding grounds of militant Islamism in Pakistan and Bangladesh. But Indonesia, the only country with a Muslim population larger than India’s, demonstrates that quelling terror is feasible. Though radicals thrive there, too, they do so in hiding for fear of stumbling into Indonesia’s powerful antiterrorism unit known as Detachment 88.

There are lessons here for Americans, especially those inclined to chafe at this country’s efforts to staunch terror in the states. Razor-thin are the lines policymakers walk in seeking to stop terrorists before they strike while keeping alive the precious freedoms so many of America’s enemies despise. The era demands careful steps. No weapon in India has proved more deadly than leaders’ refusal to cast aside the political benefits of cowering to ideological extremists’ resistance to tighter, tougher antiterrorism policies.

Liberty is lifeblood in America. Without it, the country we know ceases to exist. To safeguard it against those who would destroy it, our leaders must continually fortify the antiterrorist network that so far has effectively halted killers in their tracks. India must look to that model and others. Otherwise, it will remain a dangerous and troubled place, especially for Westerners who dare tread there.