Students react to Mumbai attacks

After last week's siege in Mumbai, students and professors are talking.

By Sam Butterfield

Published Dec. 2, 2008

In the wake of last week's terrorist siege of prevailingly Western targets in Mumbai, India, American students of Indian descent were shaken and uncertain about India's future security.

Palwasha Khan, director of the South Asian Student Association and a Pakistan native, said she saw the attacks as an opportunity for unity in the South Asian community, as, she said, partisan nationalism divides the nations of South Asia.

"I think finally it's not just about India, I think it's about awareness coming out of this as well," she said. "Stuff like this happens in Pakistan every day, but people don't really pay attention anymore because it's happening so often. Now that this is happening in India I think it's raised a lot of awareness and people want to do something about it."

Khan said the attacks should serve as a wake-up call to South Asians that they have more in common than they might think.

"I may not be from India, but it still hurts me personally because India and Pakistan are like one culture," Khan said. "It's the same religion, the same language. I feel like it affects everyone in Pakistan and everyone in Sri Lanka because we're all kind of the same people."

Khan said she is unsure what SASA plans to do to mark the attacks, but that she will leave the club's decision to its executive board.

Sophomore Ajay Nagar, an exchange student from India, saw the attacks as the culmination of tensions between Islamic and Hindu Indians.

"One of the biggest effects on India is in Kashmir with the struggle between Hindus and Muslims," he said. "The government didn't have any chance to put a stop to it."

MU political science professor and South Asia expert Paul Wallace also felt the attacks were the result of Pakistani-Indian tensions.

"This was executed by a well-trained group of Jihadists that emanate from Pakistan," Wallace said.

Wallace said the Lashkar-E-Tayyaba, a group that has been suspected of conducting the attack has been supported by Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Wallace said there is a rift between Pakistan's moderate government and factions of its military, elaborating that Pakistan and India were in the midst of normalization talks regarding opening the Kashmir border. He said there are now railroads and bus routes across the border, as well as much overlap in pop culture and friendly competition in sports like cricket. However, contingents of the ISI intelligence agency retain power almost solely through Pakistan's sustained conflict with India and hope to disturb the peace process.

For Pakistan to become a viable player in the global market, and for it to survive financially, Wallace believes it will have to suppress its radical elements and make peace with India in order to appease world powers like the U.S. and China, who believe instability in the region is economically unsound.

"The financial element suggests that Pakistan has to draw closer to the position of the U.S. and other countries in terms of dealing with these terrorists, so the economic situation would also embolden these rogue, hawkish elements in the ISI to strike at Mumbai, because they don't want to succumb to the pressures that the Pakistani government and military have to take," he said.

Wallace said the radical factions of the Pakistani military do not want peace with India, and that by attacking they hoped to provoke India into a response against Pakistan, perpetuating the animosity between the two nations.