Driving through the city of New Delhi after midnight, in the early hours of the 14th of September, one could have easily mistaken the eerie calm in the broad avenues that skirt the hollow centre of Lutyens Delhi as the lull of a city tranquil and asleep to itself and the world.

Normally, when I drive late, I am stopped at least twice, by gentlemen of the Delhi police, (‘With us, for us, always’) with torches, who peer into my face, and sometimes ask to see some ID. This time, a few hours after 5 bombs ripped through New Delhi’s crowded markets and public spaces (on the evening of the 13th of September), claiming (at the last count) 21 lives, while the city, and indeed the country, was placed on ‘Red Alert’, the police barricades did not obstruct my night journey. A few police cars crawled a few kerbs, cruising, idling. There was nothing more eerie than this strange lull after the storm.

Perhaps they were at the city’s borders. Perhaps they were at hospitals and bomb sites, perhaps they were kicking down a few doors, finding a few men to exhibit for the morning edition of the newspapers. Perhaps they were doing nothing.

Terror has a strange banality. It strikes at its victims without discrimination. It snuffs out lives, dismembers limbs, breaks bones and punch through the face of everyday without thought or care. Terror does not care whether you are a patriot or a renegade, a traitor or a loyalist, a bomb has no way of knowing which way your heart inclines in the matter of fealty to the state. It simply kills, without favour, without prejudice, without qualms.

Remote terror has a greater, even more chilling banality. And the remotest terror of all is the kind that gets exercised by mandarins who dictate the agendas that footsoldiers execute, often without a clear sense of who it is that directs the hand that primes the timer that sets off the bomb.  Sometimes, in this shadow play, the state and the ‘would be state’ meld into a strange non-entity, a non-person who disappears into shadows, only to find a biography or a precociously premature obituary in the column inches of a journalist who also doubles up as a counter insurgent.

(See the apparently ‘oracular’ piece written by Praveen Swami in yesterday’s Hindu that is a very interesting instance of this uncanny and serendipitous synergy between a well timed newspaper spin and a well timed set of bomb blasts)

What makes terrorism, which is only a sub-branch of modern warfare particularly lethal is the distance between the bomber and his or her victims (including the paradoxical distance and intimacy of the suicide bomber, who embraces as well as obliterates his or her victim)

This distance creates an ethical parallax error – a blurring of the kind of distinction that makes us value the the particularity of each life – such that lives cease to matter and all that begins to matter is a kind of pornography of the quantity of casualties, with twenty dead producing the paradox of a more acute numbness and arousal than sixteen would. This is what makes a great deal of news television the kind of pornography that I actually find degrading. Far more degrading than the honest and often wholesome tittilation offered by the erotic acrobats of porn.

We will see a lot of news-porn in the days to come. Arousals will be offered on the cheap by patriotic politicians ranting against terror. Narendra Modi’s skin will glow with the shine that only an ‘I told you so’ can bring on.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, (after whom avenues and bridges are named in our beloved Capital city) patriot, steadfast Indian nationalist, and erudite aficionado of the bomb, loved the Bhagavad Gita, and particularly its exhortation to give effect to a ‘dispassionate violence’, one that unites the slayer and the slain in a single stroke of moral equivalence for a higher purpose  – na hanyate, hanyamane sharire (there is no slayer, there is no slain) – because for him, it  brought about a fine tuned karmic resolution of the messy details of whether or not life was lost for the sake of a cause. To him, like to many nationalists, the cult of the bomb, was not simply a means to an end, it was the end because it produced the circumstances for a blooding, a sacrifice, in a manner conducive to the purposes of the nation, or the nation-in-waiting. Blood irrigated the nation. It continues to do so. It is easy for those who today rail against terrorism to forget that some of their heroes in fact championed terrorism. There is something inevitable about the fact that yesterday’s ‘terrorist’ always ends up as tomorrow’s ‘freedom fighter’.

Tilak writes, – (I am grateful to a citation of this remarkable passage from his works in a recent lecture delivered by Christopher Pinney on the iconography of Indian Nationalism at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU)

“The Bomb is not a thing like Muskets or Guns, it is a simple sport of science. Muskets or guns may be taken away from the subjects by the means of the ‘Arms Act’, and the manufacture, too of guns and muskets without the permission of the government may be stopped, but is it possible to stop or do away with the bomb by means of laws or the supervision of officials or the busy swarming of the detective police? The bomb has more the form of a knowledge, it is a (kind of) witchcraft, it is a charm, an amulet. It has not much the features of a visible object manufactured in a big factory. Big factories are necessary for the bombs required by the military forces of Government. But not much in the way of materials is necessary to prepare for five or ten bombs required by violent turn-headed persons. Virendra’s big factory of bombs (was stored) in one or two jars and five or ten bottles.”

[ From – ‘These Remedies are Not Lasting’ by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, published in The Kesari, Poona, 9th June 1908, cited in “Full and Authentic Report of the Tilak Trial (1908) being the only Authorized Verbatim Account of the Whole Proceedings with Introduction and Character Sketch of Bal Gangadhar Tilak together with Press Opinion” by N.C. Kelkar,  (Poona, 1908) ]

The bomb is a peculiar form of arcane urban knowledge. it is made by those who know how. It is placed by people who have secret agendas, lead illegible lives, and often operate within the zones of ambiguity where there are neither friend nor enemies, only assets and liabilities.

This simple sport of science, which can be played with a few jars of the right chemicals, has only one goal. Whosoever plays, there is only one winner, and that is the state. Every time a bomb goes off, the repressive apparatus of the state gets another big rush of adrenalin. Terror and State Terror need and feed each other. Sometimes, they are each other.

As this city that I live in and love and hate crosses the turbulence of a night still acrid with the smell of ammonium nitrate and cordite, I can only hope that the days to come will offer us a few rationed portions of respite. Each time an anonymous purveyor of terror closes a deal, he (and its mainly he isn’t it) spreads out a doormat welcoming state-terror to come and claim its victory. Whosoever plants bombs in dustbins, in busy market places, whatsoever be their motive, their cause, their sick and hollow dream of heaven, all that they do is to make the state stronger, more repulsive, more bloated. The terrorist is the best footsoldier that the state can ever have. And the most terrible thing is, not every footsoldier is a mercenary. Sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, a ‘freedom fighter’ is the best asset that his antagonist can ever hope to possess.

And that is why terror, in whatever form, for whatever reason, is pathetic, sad, and really ugly. it leaves us restless at night and listless by day. It excites our fear and enervates our hope. It leaves us empty, hollow and full of dread. It eats into and corrupts the simplest of conversations about freedom, leaving ugly scars of suspicion. Terror requires only one response – total rejection, especially from those interested in fighting the daily depredations of the state.

(Adapted from a posting made earlier today on the Reader List)