The "Gay Girl in Damascus" Hoax: Some Reflections

It's been not 24 hours since the mystery behind detained Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Abdallah Arraf Al-Omari has been solved. What began as an international outcry over the arrest of a popular blogger giving voice to the queer side of the "Arab Spring" quickly turned into a frenzy of Internet investigations, carried out by journalists and bloggers, that has reached a sad and predictable end - there was never an Amina in the first place. The blog, and even more disturbingly, an entire online identity going back almost four years, was the creation of a 40 year-old American man from Georgia now studying in Edinburgh, Tom MacMasters, and his wife Britta. In what follows I'll quickly recount the story, from first suspicions to this morning's denouement, then offer a few thoughts on what this might mean in the larger context of queer politics and the Middle East.

It all began with this post detailing Amina's capture by Syrian security forces, ostensibly put up by Amina's cousin Rania Ismail. The response was swift, with several newspaper reports and a flurry of "Free Amina" facebook groups, like this one and this one, mobilising concerned people around the world. But within a few days, as reporters and State Department officials in Syria attempted to contact Amina's family, doubts began to emerge. No one, it seems, had ever met or spoken to Amina, not even her girlfriend in Montreal, Sandra Bagaria (they had only communicated via e-mail). One of the first to publicly question the story was NPR's Andy Carvin, who was sceptical yet cautious to declare that she didn't exist. Maybe she was simply very good at concealing herself, as all activists living under repressive regimes must be. But then a Croatian woman living in London, Jelena Lecic, noticed that the photos of Amina being circulated were actually of her. There were hundreds, including all the photos on Amina's personal facebook page, all apparently stolen from Jelena's facebook. Troubled, she went on the BBC to prove her identity, and wonder how all this had come about. The evidence was increasingly pointing to an elaborate hoax.

I began following the controversy at Liz Henry's blog, where commenters took to the Internet to uncover as many details about Amina as could be found. The mass of details was confusing, and involved an extensive cast of characters, some real and some fictional. Amina had stated she was born in Virginia and went to high school and college in Georgia. She had a previous blog where she declared her intention to mix fact and fiction; she had also been active in posting on alternate history Yahoo mailing lists, declaring her interest in medieval Byzantium. There were several online dating profiles, one in which she listed her language as Hebrew. Some used pictures of Jelena Lecic, some of another woman. Her cousin Rania Ismail's facebook page turned out to be a likely fake; no one had been able to contact her either. Anything seemed possible. Was she the creation of Rania, a married Syrian woman looking for an escapist fantasy? Did Rania even exist? Was Amina a creation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian girlfriend? Or perhaps it was Jelena Lecic herself, whose first statement to the media was released through a suspicious P.R. agency? These theories may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but only through this kind of free-thinking exercise could all options be considered. The truth, when it came out, was perhaps stranger still.

Parallel to Liz Henry's and Andy Carvin's efforts, which later turned out to involve e-mail communications with someone likely to be the person behind the hoax, the website Electronic Intifada and the Washington Post were putting together a story based on two concrete leads. One came from Paula Brooks, an editor at the website LezGetReal (which was the first to introduce Amina's blog to a wide readership). She provided two IP addresses used by Amina, both in Edinburgh. The other came from Scott Palter, a moderator on the alternate history boards, who had once gotten a mailing address from Amina in Stone Mountain, GA. This, it turned out, was Tom MacMaster's home. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place: MacMaster was born in Virginia, had lived in Georgia, currently studies in Edinburgh, and plans to write a thesis on medieval Byzantium. He is a pro-Palestinian activist, and his wife Britta, a Quaker, was involved in organising events on Syria and Israel. Britta is a fellow at St. Andrews in the Centre for Syrian Studies, writing a thesis on the Syrian textile industry. She had posted pictures of her travels in Damascus, the same ones also used by Amina. The game was up.

MacMaster's so-called apology on the blog, posted this morning, is a remarkable display of narcissism, self-delusion and self-righteousness. He declared, "While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground," with the exception, of course, of all the key facts on the blog - that a gay woman, living in Damascus, was experiencing the revolution and had been detained by security forces. He had the gall to claim that, "I do not believe that I have harmed anyone." Let me count the ways:
1) Closest to home, it was Sandra, the Canadian girlfriend, who had been privately lied to for months. Reading her tweets from before the abduction story, one is struck by the sincerity and passion with which she speaks of Amina. She had to endure constant media questioning, when it became clear just how deep the deception went. Interestingly, the abduction story was posted only a few days after Sandra attempted to call Amina at home in Syria and got no answer. That day Amina wrote about security forces visiting her family and her subsequent need to go underground. It may be that this is the point at which Tom and Britta freaked out and looked for a way to take their character off the stage, at least temporarily.
2) Everyone else who had an online relationship with Amina, and who has been affected by the investigation. The website LezGetReal, for example, was subjected to intense scrutiny because Paula Brooks and other editors, who have families working for the federal government and do not wish to be outed, write under pseudonyms; they, too, were suspected of being fake.
3) Finally, most obviously and most importantly, this is a devastating blow to queer activism in Syria and everywhere else in the Middle East. These furious reactions from actual Syrian activists give a sense of the damage. Not only does the hoax make it more difficult for Syrian bloggers to be heard in the future without undue suspicion, but it puts LGBT activists currently in Syria under the spotlight of the authorities. In every way, MacMaster has done about as much harm to the Syrian revolution as could be imagined from a computer in Scotland.

It is, however, the following sentence that deserves the greatest outrage: "This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism." Not only is MacMaster not apologising, he is in fact blaming everyone else for the very sin he has committed. In a sense, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was the perfect instantiation of liberal Orientalism, wherein Western audiences are enjoined to sympathise with a young, attractive, Westernised and courageous individual battling against the forces of dark, oppressive Islam. If Amina didn't exist, one would have had to invent her. MacMaster's twisted activist vision piled on all the desirable characteristics for what he thought the West should know of the Middle East, but didn't bother because of the biased, Zionist media. The cruel irony is that in not finding a real Syrian who could represent some or all of these things, he confirms the very fantasies he set out to dismantle are just that, fantasies.

It is also troubling, it must be said, how those sceptical of Amina's story from the start have slipped into the same traps of Orientalist fantasy. One of the earliest arguments for the hoax was that, "No one in Syria would ever kiss their girlfriend in public," or speak so freely, etc. Though this may be in a very general sense accurate, it further adds to the erasure of the public presence of LGBT Syrians. Another argument from a commenter on one of the investigating blogs was that MacMaster had wished to show that being gay in Arab countries is not so bad, when in fact he had proved the opposite. There could be no one as free as Amina in Syria; but, the commenter added for good measure, there could be in Israel. It was MacMaster's anti-Israel bias that made him paint such a rosy picture of an Arab country. Both Amina's blog and the arguments of the sceptics are symptomatic of a wider set of highly debilitating discourses. In effect, it is becoming impossible to speak of what being queer in the Middle East is like without falling into one extreme or the other.

All of this brings to mind Jasbir Puar's extraordinary theoretical work Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, in which she tracks the complex ways in which queer activism in the West has become implicated with imperialist projects and mindsets. One effect is the erasure of Muslim queer sexuality, and its converse -Israel's propaganda efforts to brand itself as the only "gay-friendly" country in a homophobic region (known as "pinkwashing"). One of her tasks is to affirm the voices of queer Muslims and queer Arabs speaking out against state violence, against religious intolerance, and against US and Israeli colonialism all at once.
This is the kind of person whom MacMaster, no doubt familiar with this literature, wished to concoct. Two of Amina's blog posts, for example, were on the phenomenon of "pinkwashing." What this odious, despicable individual has managed to do instead is produce the perfect mockery of queer scholarship and activism, a farce that feeds right back into the very discourses he sought to resist, feeding them to the brim and sustaining them for years to come.



EDIT: On point #2 above, regarding the website LezGetReal and its editor, "Paula Brooks," evidence came to light one day after I posted that this person, too, was a man masquerading online as a lesbian blogger. After providing the information that helped expose MacMaster, a 58 year-old man from Ohio named Bill Graber was forced to admit that he had been involved in several online communities using the persona of a deaf lesbian woman. This raises many, many further questions about a possible widespread effort to infiltrate progressive movements, and reminds us once more of the need for vigilance and careful verification in online activism. The indefatigable Liz Henry has a summary of the whole sordid Bill Graber affair here.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/

Technologies of Non-Violence: Bayard Rustin in India

After Proposition 8 passed in California last year, there was much discussion about the "black vote" and how it had damaged the cause of gay rights. Here was a sad case of two kinds of minority politics clashing with each other amidst a dizzying variety of overdetermined oppositions (black v. white, urban v. suburban/rural, middle class v. working class, religion v. secularism).

The figure of Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader and organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, as a black, gay, and labour activist all in one, is occasionally brought up as a hopeful reminder that we can live outside these binaries. Rustin is often quoted in the service of "coalition building," particularly this 1986 speech: "The new 'niggers' are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people."

But Rustin's life is exemplary in one more sense, demonstrating how certain organisational methods for social movements, particularly techniques of non-violent protest, circulate across borders. We are told that the civil rights movement was "inspired by" Gandhi's efforts against the British. But how did this transfer actually happen, and what tensions did the process reveal? Rustin's trip to India in 1948 provides a sketch of the painstaking ways in which the transfer of ideas happens "on the ground."

Rustin's visit must be placed in the context of a decades-long relationship between African-Americans and India, cultivated by prominent figures like W.E.B. DuBois, and of international pacifist networks in which Rustin participated. He was there for the precise purpose of drawing some lessons from the Indian experience with a view to applying them to the U.S. In other words, Rustin did not come as a wayward traveler: he had a definite agenda and mission, and he was immediately critical toward nationalism and militarism in India as he saw them. John d'Emilio's book Lost Prophet reveals how Rustin was severely disappointed that the Gandhian cause had ultimately served nationalism, and concluded that it was "non-violent in its means, but essentially violent in its ends." At the same time, Rustin tried during his stay to influence Nehru to move in a more pacifist direction (this is, we must remember, the high point of the nation-state's birth, the time of Kashmir and Telangana).

Where should these technologies of non-violence be situated? Did they happen "in India" and were then "brought over" to the United States? Were they located instead in the insitutional workings of international pacifist organisations, or in the very minds of individuals like Rustin, in their ideologies and convictions? We should be aware of the conditions that give rise to certain openings for communication, to exchanges of people and ideas that can be traced, to use that ugly term, "transnationally." The many possibilities of the postwar moment to forge such links, whether in the service of anti-colonialism, anti-racism or anti-nationalism, can serve as examples and warnings for the fractured resistances of today.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.

Democracy and Popular Protest in India

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last month's attacks in Mumbai was not the sudden realisation by many in the West that India, as the world's largest democracy, was an ally worth standing by far more so than our friend for so many decades, Pakistan. There are serious questions on a large geo-political scale that need asking, but they are part of the ebb and flow of statecraft in South Asia and will not find easy answers soon.

No, what is downright amazing is a less-reported story that, following a wave of popular protests over the handling of the attacks by the Indian government, the Home Minister and national security adviser resigned. The BBC says "hundreds of people took to the streets" in a show of demanding accountability for the government's failure to protect its citizens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7757122.stm

Reading this story from the U.S., where the parallel with 9/11 has been pushed repeatedly by an unimaginative media, one is struck by the incongruity of such a response: after all, when their country was attacked, why did Indians not rally around their leaders and give Manmohan Singh a 90% approval rating, as George W. Bush was honoured seven years ago? The answer lies, shockingly for Westerners accustomed to believing that their variant of "democracy" is the highest stage of political development, in the truly substantive nature of Indian democracy. The Indian public sphere is not content to shore up the establishment in a show of good faith and solidarity, as the docile and ill-informed American public did. No, the supposedly flawed and backward Indian democracy produced a textbook response to the failure of its government. Where were the masses of people in the streets demanding to know what the Bush administration knew, and did, about terrorism in the year before 9/11? Why was that infamous P.D.B. of August 2001 entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." not burned in effigy by angry mobs on the streets of New York, Cleveland, and Omaha? And why, if Bush and his national security team presided over the most devastating attack on American soil in history, were they furthermore given carte blanche on their judgment in starting a war?

The answer lies in different traditions of democracy in the U.S. and India, indeed in the differential basis of the nation-state. The U.S. government is an entrenched and hegemonic apparatus that presides over an apathetic and generally politically uninvolved consumer society. In India, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay entitled "'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," traditions of popular protest by workers, peasants, and other marginalised groups survive from the early 20th-century struggles of the independence movement to challenge the nation-state. Nehru was opposed to any kind of "unrest," believing it to be incompatible with a "civilised" and mature democracy (where tamer forms of accountability like petitions and the ballot box should prevail). Of course, what the nationalist elites continually failed to understand about the character of the Indian nation was the vast spectrum of minority interests found within it that could not be cajoled, appeased, or integrated without a painful process of adjustment (in other words, that hegemony was hard to come by). In all, this adds up not to a backward and unruly system but to a rich, vibrant, and relevant sense of democracy in India, which should give skeptics about India's future at least some consolation in these dark times.