Smoke was the first thing I noticed when the bomb went off in Central Park on Saturday. The blast had been less intense than I’d have imagined. A suppressed, contained explosion, like blowing crackers up in a tin can. The sound spread not vertically, but in a circle, all around Connaught Place. Perplexed and bewildered people rushed, oddly enough, towards the sound. They began to form a ring around the edge of the park- the opposite side from Palika Bazaar where the sound had come from. Without delay a police van whistled past us and the cold sensation began to creep in. As we headed back to the car, an ambulance wailed in traffic, pleading for right of way. But space is one thing Delhi roads are no longer equipped to give. On the way back home stray reports came in: from GK, Karol Bagh and apparently Barakhmaba Road- a blast strangely enough we didn’t hear although we were hardly that far away.

Investigations will unfold in the coming days, and ‘suspects’ will be nabbed. I doubt any of these arrests will be authentic. Calls for the suspension of freedoms will increase. As normal lives go on, the upholders of justice will urge us to not forget or forgive. It’s almost tiring to write this down, specially having done it once already. But maybe I’m trying to simply put into words a moment of historical significance- if only at a purely individualistic level. The suddenness with which lives end is a theme that has evolved into a national past-time. All our lives are spent waiting for the moment they will end. So we can grieve the fact that we never did quite enough. In the warm sun of Delhi on Saturday afternoon, I discovered John Coltrane and, what else, but A Love Supreme. There’s a cruel joke in there somewhere that a person as passionately uninterested in jazz as me stumbled upon an out of body experience on the same day that many were to suffer that same fate in a more literalist sense. A cruel joke, or cool poetry.

All forms of violence are terror. Apart from conventional warfare, which is now a figment of memory in our collective past. It’s only a question of perspective. The term ‘Islamic Terror’ is problematic not only because it indicates a clumsy causal relationship between an entire religion and one splinter fragment of its population. But more crucially, it ignores the fact that contemporary terror is a common form of political action and not the monopoly of one group of people. If there is Islamic Terror, there is also Hindu Terror, Maoist Terror, Zionist Terror (Israel,) Global-Imperialist Terror (America,) and the simple Short-Dick-Syndrome Terror (typified by our good old Indian state.) What ought to be foregrounded in these descriptions is the common disregard these forms of intimidation share for the dignity for human life and the process of political engagement. ‘Islamic Terror’ therefore, misses the point for it neither contextualises this form of violence as a response to other violences, nor does it recognise that the only difference between this and the other types of violence mentioned above is access to resources. And maybe and ideology of the practice of violence. I am reminded frequently of Mao’s oft-quoted line: “political power flows out of the barrel of the gun.” Contemporary terror of the non-state variety however, has displaced the gun and parodies all notions of geographically fixed exertions of force. The distinctive feature of what is out of bigotry or convenience called ‘Islamic Terror’ (IT) is its ability to defy space and time. After the Saturday bombings TV channels confidently reported that a twelve-year-old balloon seller had seen two terrorists in Barakhamba Road. They were tall, dressed in black, and dropped a package into the dustbin. Obscured in this narrative was the obvious fact that there might be thousands of tall men wearing black in Delhi on any given day; not to mention the fact that a dustbin’s stated purpose is the disposal of unwanted rubbish- of any shape or size. By the time investigations began, the suspects could have been long gone. Or they could have been watching from ten feet away, having shed their black clothes for bright red suits… or jeans and t-shirts. What disturbs and horrifies (more on that later,) about IT is precisely this element of surprise: IT abolishes distance and energises a radical politics of spatial desegregation. Even the richest can be struck dead in a matter of seconds; class, religious, sexual, caste elitisms honed over lifetimes of narrow-minded socialisation can collapse in the moment of extinction. In this sense, IT- which often appears in popular depiction as deideologised- is more complex than Maoist violence. For one thing, it is a true leveller, striking blindly at whatever body is in its way. The stated purpose and the course of action seldom come together. The rhetoric of Maoist violence is archaic, its methods even older, its victim-demography always static. Maoist terror is fiercely located, it occurs in specific places, targets specific people, uses a homogenous and hegemonic vocabulary. IT by contrast is discreet, dispersed, technological, hypermodern. Indeed, its overpowering emphasis on traditional values and religion serves to mask its mastery of modern technology, which it has learnt to evade and simultaneously master.

Terror unleashes spectacle. Reading about violence of this scale is less entertaining than seeing it on display. The media thrives on satisfying our desires. The chemical bomb and the image bomb coexist with perfect civility. Without one the other would be finished. Both speak the obsolete language of morality in a world where morality is in its last throes. Both uphold a discourse of purity, of absolutes. Both are dysfunctional-utopian in that they are forever condemning the ethical looseness of the other in the name of Greater Good, but with full awareness that in the end without one the other cannot survive. In this endless game of blood and death, the body lying on the ground is the common gift they accept and offer. Reflecting on the 9/11 attacks Baudrillard made the following important point about the symbiotic relationship of exchange between violent death and the image: “In the aftermath of the attack we seek to give it whatever meaning we can, to make whatever interpretation. But there is no meaning, and the radical nature of the spectacle, its brutality, is the only thing about it that is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces upon us the terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it elicits universal moral condemnation) the political order can do nothing. It is our very own theater of cruelty, the only one we have left-extraordinary because it represents both the high point of the spectacular and the high point of defiance.“

In a slim but superb book titled simply On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad takes on the mighty forces of liberalism and how it (dis)engages with IT. His account lays bare the violent foundation of liberalism, of liberal law, and of the liberal political community. Such a doctrine as liberalism, which offers highly universal yet highly subjective understandings of war and “unnecessary suffering” becomes queasy at the thought of suicide bombing not because of the fact of death. Rather, what disturbs the liberal mind is the unregulated nature of this violence, which erupts outside law, outside historical narrative, and therefore (conveniently) outside all notions of rationality. War, on the other hand, is perfectly theorised by liberal doctrine. Conventional warfare (which I referred to in passing above,) is a thing of the past as new technologies of death invade the battlefield- even as the battlefield vanishes. War now goes into towns, cities and villages. Collateral damage has to be minimised as the enemy is targeted by weapons of immense precision. There is no exchange of life and death in war anymore. Now the soldier aims to kill from a safe distance. No fair play here. Underlying all this is a fundamental (some might say racist) distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised. This is why the tremendous march forth of medical science in prolonging human life does not seem incompatible with continued justification of wars which eliminate millions.

Terror emanates from these contexts and others. The bomb becomes a proletarian weapon, signalling the democratisation of violence, where potentially anyone can become a killer. If a few years ago the terrorist was ingrained in popular imagination as a masked man wielding an AK-47, today he is invisible, one among the many. To paraphrase Blackadder, nabbing a terrorist is like trying to find a piece of hay in a large stack full of needles. Terror, (of the non-state variety,) is in constant violent dialogue with democracy, pushing it to its limits. How we react to terror is a window into how we interpret the violent democracy we have all conspired to be parts of. Yet, my proposal is not to justify Terror. Far from it; I think it is essential we understand Terror. And that understanding involves not only the knowledge of its history and context, but also the emphatic assertion that all forms of Terror are pitiable, wretched, cowardly and foolish. Their random power-play based on a violent politics of chance deployed safely from the shadows merely serves to push into the despotic limelight of state repression more dignified members of their community. These acts become de-facto justifications for expanding state power, they erase all possibilities of critique and unleash cycles of relentless violence where the poor and innocent are sacrificed, their bodies and lives held up as trophies won in a sadistic ritual of confrontation. The world, paraphrasing Ian Mckellen, is a far more interesting place than fundamentalists believe. And while Terror is highly imaginative in some of the ways I examined above, what we are left with ultimately, is not the wondrous acrobatics of space it achieves, but the narrow-minded authoritarian brand of politics it unleashes where the only rules of the game are those it decides to play by.