The Kaplan View of Mumbai

Robert Kaplan just spent a month in Gujarat reporting on Hindu-Muslim relations (does trouble follow this guy or what?). He has a few brief words on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Kaplan argues that “India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world” and that despite the terrorist’s call to history “this is not an ancient historical divide so much as a recreated modern one.” Some “rudimentary” background from Kaplan:

The Mumbai terrorists announced themselves as the Deccan Mujahideen. The Deccan is a rugged plateau region in south-central India that Aurangzeb, the fierce Sunni emperor of the Mughals (India’s most historically significant Muslim dynasty) could never subdue and in fact died trying in 1707. The Islamic Mughals vanquished all of northern India, Pakistan, and a good part of Afghanistan, but they could never consolidate the Deccan against the Hindu Maratha warriors.