This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram. ‘I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate.’ It was hope that the terrorists in Mumbai came to attack and, though the appalling bloodshed in that great city is over, the battle to replace hope with hate is still raging, and has not yet been won or lost.

Mumbai is no stranger to religious communal violence or to terrorist assaults: this great world city has long veered perilously between the cosmopolitanism and hyper-modernity of New York and the divisiveness and atavism of Jerusalem. But this attack was of a different order, both in scale and strategic ambition: it bore all the foul trademarks of previous operations by al-Qa’eda and its affiliates.