Pankaj Mishra, in his op-ed piece in The New York Times earlier this week, says:

...the surprising thing, perhaps, is not that militant groups like the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force are now emerging in India, but that it has taken so long. As revealed by the English-language newspaper The Indian Express, most of the 27 Muslims who have been arrested by the Bombay police in connection with the string of bombings confessed that they did so in revenge for the state-assisted killings of Muslims in Gujarat.

This is obvious enough though perhaps not all there is to it as Sudha Ramchandran of Asia Times points out:

...it is inaccurate to describe the recent wave of terrorism as mere reprisal attacks carried out by disaffected individuals. The hand of international terrorist outfits hoping to destabilize Mumbai, the commercial capital, and in the process India is visible. The explosions were an attempt to strike at the Indian economy, spread terror and trigger off mass violence.

The news stories about the recent Mumbai bombings tell us that the "Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force," which was implicated in the bombings, is a group of determined and sophisticated Muslims who were apparently able to "brainwash" at least two otherwise possibly harmless people into avenging the state-supported Gujarat pogrom of last year by detonating car-bombs in a tourist and a commercial district. While the "mastermind" is said to have been shot by the police, details about the planning and funding of the operation are still emerging.

Indians have always felt short-changed in the world arena because our "largest democracy" has never had the recognition and respect that we deserve. We were already an unabashed nuclear power, we now have "militant Islamists" targeting us and our POTA would make a nice companion to the PATRIOT Act. This should begin to seal our junior superpower status based upon the example set by a certain world's-only-superpower. There is a problem however; Indians are not as sanguine about their government's competence and benevolence as their counterparts and that's sure to handicap them. Fortunately, they can unleash the heartiest patriotism when called upon to do so.

--aslam

9:23:56 PM