How Mumbai defeated the logic of terror

By Shiv Visvanathan The Mumbai blasts created a hornet’s nest enacting a new urban drama. Terror creates its own timeline of responses and narratives treating society like a Pavlov’s dog trained to behave in a predictable way. The response is always one of shock, anger, stupor at the senselessness of the act. There is then a feeling of helplessness as people fail to identify cause or origin.The collective space empties out to security forces which create a network of suspicion and scientism. With a terror attack, everyone is vulnerable, everyone is a suspect. The state like a failed magician recites the old formulas with little effect. The abracadabra of security remains just that; an official lullaby lulling itself to sleep. Manmohan Singh visiting Mumbai could be a sleepwalker, mumbling as he moves around. The media that provides a story creates a stereotype of narratives. The announcements emphasize repetition – “the third time” — and replay constantly the few documentary minutes of real time explosion. Hysteria sustains the media narrative as it desperately seeks to pin point responsibility, origin, even cause. All it describes weakly is the bomb mechanism, identifying the trigger and listing chemicals as if it is some arcane formula.There is little that is substantive to say and even less to control. The narratives become apocalyptic, signaling the immediate breakdown of a society. This is the predictable response that terror demands. It seeks anomie, the emptying and breakdown of social space. It wants to emphasize its sense of control, of its unpredictability and contrast it with the helplessness of authority. For the terrorist, the fragmentation of bodies, breaking out like a bloody jigsaw puzzle literally signals the fragmentation of  society. The victim sits bloodied, stunned into a stupor as if life has hit a standstill. The scrap book of photographs is the still life of terror that every newspaper publishes, with the statutory warning about horror. It underlines the horror and the obscenity of the act. Every map of bomb blasts across the city sounds like a new indifference curve of terror. I want to contrast the unpredictability of the strike with the predictability of the response. Any act of terror is always an ambush, an act of surprise in terms of when it strikes and where it strikes. In that sense, urban society is perpetually pregnant with terror which stuns because it is unpredictable. What terror creates is a tactility of fear. You can smell it, touch it. Both state and society are desperate to christen it, label it and identify it. To invoke ISI, Mujahideen or some handkerchief size group as the potent force behind these events provides some sense of stability. Even bad narratives create a geography of familiarity around the unfamiliar.   [caption id=“attachment_43302” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Terror hides its own face behind the mask. Terror cannot meet face to face or see its targets as a face. Reuters”] [/caption] Terror is an attempt to re-read the city. Decades ago, the great German critic, Walter Benjamin felt the city is best traversed through the eye of the flaneur. The flaneur is the individual who roams the city remaining anonymous and invisible and yet curious and interested in everything. There is an innocence about the flaneurian eye. At the most, it is voyeuristic. The eye of terror roams the city in a different way. It seeks vulnerability, surprise, the chink in the armour of the city. The happy networks of neighborhood and commerce  collapse as terror becomes the spectacle, the performance one watches helplessly. The eye of terror is indifferent to who it hurts but proprietorial about its claims to damage. The terrorist is possessive about his acts of violence, his claim to virulence and masculinity, emphasizing the impotence of the city. Terror hides its own face behind the mask. Terror cannot meet face to face or see its targets as a face. Terror needs to dehumanize the face it attacks to facelessness. The logic is ironic. The potency of terror lies in the impotency, its inability to face an encounter, where the other could be a friend, person or neighbour. It is a cowardice that threatens through anonymity. Terror cannot survive on the humus of normalcy. It has to disrupt. It needs a response which mimics it, a violence that meet its own violence in mutuality. A violent state, an epidemic of paranoia is aphrodisiac to terror. It gorges on it. Everydayness deflates terror. It is a heroism it cannot cope with. Among commerce, survival, trade and everydayness, terror gets repeatedly effaced. Ordinariness resists terror and this terror can never accept. A terrorist must hate a city like Mumbai. Every time he disrupts and disfigures it, Mumbai bounces back like a piece of elastic. It does not forget. It mourns, it grieves and goes on. The creative power of a city lies in its resilience and Mumbai is a city that always bounces back, confident in its everydayness, dizzy with its own normalcy. This is why Mumbai as a city will stand up to terror. It’s a toast to life that no terrorist can tolerate. The Indian state would do well to follow Mumbai’s lead. Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist.