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Taj Mahal flashback to Red House 1990

Mumbai, scene of recent terrorist massacre and hostage-taking, was still called Bombay in 1990. In July that year, Bombay Bazaar was a Port-of-Spain shop among those looted or gutted—or both—amid terrorist bombing, shooting and hostage-taking.

The flashback impulse connecting the siege of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel with the siege of the Red House here, 18 years ago, defines a 1990 historical fixation.

It reflects the lingering interest of those who refuse to “get over,” or to “move on,” from the episode inadequately summarised as the “attempted coup.”

We qualify as a recalcitrant minority, comprising those who simply resolve to remember. We who allow hard-edged historical facts, the stuff of memory, to shape meaning and inform discernment of later trends.

In Mumbai two weeks ago, the authorities say, about 170 people died from gunfire and bomb blasts by ten insurgents, whose stash of two more kilos of high explosive was later found.

The Mumbai Ten had hijacked a trawler, and made the captain pilot them across the Arabian Sea. Then they boarded an inflatable vessel to power ashore.

Little resisted at first, they shot up a railway station, an upscale restaurant and other places, before holing up with hostages at a Jewish centre and at the Taj Mahal.

This was hardly imaginable, in 2008, in a major city of “emerging” world power India. Before July, 1990, a projection of ferocious, organised, violence against the State and whoever got in the way was the stuff of comic-book fiction in T&T.

Indian police took high-ranking casualties. The image of Indian security suffered heavily in the eyes of the world.

Army commandos rappelled cinematically down from helicopters onto rooftops, and sniped from cherry pickers. Still, they took long days to defeat the kamikaze youngsters of the Mumbai Ten.

T&T and India have proved vulnerable to well-armed and focussed fanaticism associated with triple-barrelled Arabic names: Lashkar-e-Taiba in India; Jamaat-al-Muslimeen here.

Most people in T&T refused to recognise what they saw.

The event entailed killing, maiming, bombing, hostage-taking and torture. But it was received as something other than terrorism carried out by local people with Arabic names.

Over six days of siege, we had quickly got used to what it constituted, even made friends with it.

Finance Minister Selby Wilson, hog-tied and beaten in the Red House, his trousers dropped to his ankles, later called the experience “an unfortunate incident.”

Opposition MP Kelvin Ramath confessed more outrage and terror against the besieging T&T Regiment troops than against the gunmen who, for days, had kept him bound and gagged, and wet in his own piss.

John Humphrey, also UNC MP, recalling the captive’s plastic bands that cut into his wrists, cheerfully pronounced the hostage experience the finest parliamentary session ever.

On Emancipation Day, 1990, all the hostages emerged from the Red House, stepping past bloated bodies, with kerchiefs over their noses against the newly familiar stench of decomposing human remains.

Kerchiefs remain metaphorically over all our noses. T&T has become used to murder, in numbers passing 500, even as Mumbai was counting its own toll.

About 30 people were killed in T&T’s 1990 episode. The Police Service suffered a military, but more enduringly important, a moral defeat.

Police Headquarters was overrun and burned; in flight, the commanding officer broke a leg scaling the Edward Street wall. Other officers tore off uniforms and boots as they fled down St Vincent Street.

Stations remained barricaded. In the streets, anarchy reigned.

Yet, the most righteous indignation was pointedly directed against the ANR Robinson-led NAR administration. Its structural-adjustment policies, adopted from the IMF, and “insensitively” applied, were said by influential commentators to have provoked everything.

Prayerfulness prevailed; the preaching was against “vengeance” and, indeed, in favour of forgiving the Muslimeen their trespasses, and freeing them even before their arraignment.

Eventually, the courts justified the amnesty, a judgment the Privy Council later overturned. By then, however, T&T had moved on, refusing to set its face against the event by defining it as terrorism, or other evil, and choosing not to know what had really taken place.

The NAR administration, principal target, never set up an inquiry. The consequent softening of the core of the T&T State accompanied a willing suspension of public curiosity, and a collective denial of our witness of Islamic terrorism.

Policing lost its macho character, which had arisen from a sense of being in charge, knowing what’s going on, and being damn-well capable of affirming the rule of law, and order.

Commissioners since 1990 have defined themselves by what they cannot do, for being “toothless.”

To raise the Police Service flag from the dust in which it drags, former Flying Squad members touched down back home, and claimed headlines again.

Today’s “serial assassins,” as the Police Service Commission calls them, leave the police, like the rest of us, as largely helpless bystanders.

Eventual disgrace of Randolph Burroughs, late Commissioner and Flying Squad commander, attached to that old style of policing.

What succeeds it is a vacancy of leadership and inspiration.

Indian officials and ministers responsible for security have been falling on their resignation swords.

Parallels with T&T end there. Here, the worst defilement of our “hallowed” Parliament represents only the “unfortunate” turn of some ill-willing fate.