India's 9/11?

Does history repeat itself? Not really; but the fact that people make mistakes and live to see the failed results of those mistakes does not prevent the people who come after them from making the same mistakes.

Arundhati Roy is unhappy with the intellectual laziness that leads some in the media to call the recent massacre in Bombay, 'India's 9/11'. She writes:

November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Her conclusions are grim: India is wracked by fighting between various religious/ethnic bigots, crimes by Hindu nationalists are ignored, the partition was a bloody caessura that hasn't healed, Pakistan is ready to collapse, terrorism has no goals aside from creating these bloody caesurae, Indian elites are calling for a police state, something like that already exists in the country, and minority groups in the country have their backs to the wall.

So, not the same; just worse.