What They Hate About Mumbai

Bombay native and journalism professor Suketu Mehta writes about the religious extremism plaguing India:

MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness...

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against. It is, as a monk of the pacifist Jain religion explained to me, “paap-ni-bhoomi”: the sinful land.

In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets — for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai. Now these young Muslim men murdered people in front of their families — for the crime of visiting Mumbai. They attacked the luxury businessmen’s hotels. They attacked the open-air Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India. Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the righteous believers in the jihad. They attacked the train station everyone calls V.T., the terminus for runaways and dreamers from all across India. And in the attack on the Chabad house, for the first time ever, it became dangerous to be Jewish in India.

Comments

[Novalis]

The same reasons they hated New York City...

[francis]

Why we have Constitution and supreme court.It has become utmost necessary to use these methods because in future we will have non secular Govt.The laws are taken in hand by mass following associations and we plus govt are mere spectators.The police should dig on their own in these cases without waiting for complaint.
Our religious leaders are hypocrit .They preach one thing and practice differently I had gone to my religious leader when my wife' father was beaten by daughter in law .The priest in question instead of helping asked me what action you would have taken if not heard.I said I will go to police .Imediately this priest said,she will allege rape complaint against you.Now you judge ,My church Nativity of lord kandivali east mumbai collected cores of rupees for buiding fund ,but refuses to give balance sheet .
The govt is also behaving like hypocrit .Take example of MHADA.They collected cores by forms and hundred of cores by EMD.For each scheme the Emd was to be paid seperately and forms taken seperately.When we apply for Ipo ,SEBi ask the company to return the money within 45 days or pay 18 pecent intresr .Will gov pay intrest to our emd if returned after one month?