In the wake of a recent announcement by Al-Qaeda that it has a new South Asian branch to include India, I recall a BBC commentator who was announcing on 26 November 2008 that Mumbai and Goa were two likely targets for international terrorism such as the one that took place in Mumbai with tragic consequences.
This topic dominated Goanet forum during some weeks, and it was linked with November 25, the date that marked the conquest of Goa by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510. A Macau-based Goan was quick to pronounce somewhat morbidly on the Mumbai tragedy: “All those countries involved in anti-Portuguese campaigns ended in misery.” Given the right conditions, such creatures with deep-seated anger against some established order can turn good candidates for jihadis.
The Goanet discussion about November 25 cannot be dismissed lightly. It marks the date when a band of highly motivated adventurers, now known as “foreign fighters”, funded and trained in a distant country, were roving in the Indian Ocean for nearly a decade with Anjediva as their base of operations.
Goa was captured for being a strategic outpost on the mid-west coast of India, and became the military headquarters and later the financial capital of the Portuguese eastern empire. That event had all the hallmarks of what happened in Mumbai recently.
In 1508 the Portuguese had attacked the port of Dabhol, another important trading outlet of Bijapur. In 1510 the defence structure of Adil Shah of Bijapur and his local governor Malik Yusuf Gurji in Goa crumbled beneath the onslaught of Albuquerque’s men, even before Timoja’s promised assistance could arrive!
The attack was well planned and the bar of Goa had been fathomed in advance. India’s sea front was its weakness, and the recent Mumbai tragedy proved once again that its sea coast remains vulnerable despite the technological advances and resources available to the modern Indian state.
K.M. Panikkar, author of the celebrated Asia and Western Dominance (1953), wrote in an earlier study India and the Indian Ocean (1945) about the vital importance of controlling the ocean in a country like India. He predicted rightly that “the Indian Ocean will be one of the major problems of the future.” He made a strong plea for strengthening the country’s naval capacity. To this he would have added today: its intelligence-gathering skills.
Afonso de Albuquerque described his feat in a letter to his king in Portugal, in gruesome detail: “Our Lord helped us to do this job better than we had planned or expected. Over 300 Turks died, and till Benastery and Gandauly the roads were strewn with dead bodies and others who lay wounded and dying. Several died while trying to cross the river with their horses. I had the city put to fire and sword. During four days our men made the city bleed. No moor was given a chance to escape alive. They were driven into mosques which were then set ablaze. I ordered that the land cultivators and the Brahmins should not be killed. Nearly six thousand moors, men and women, were killed. No burial place or houses belonging to Muslims were left standing. Anyone now caught is fried alive.”
The determination and bravery of these few Portuguese had been proved with a thunderous victory against the combined naval forces of the Turks and the Indian Muslims at Diu in 1509. Curiously, the world scenario of international relations was not very different from what we are seeing today. There seems to be little new under the Sun.
Instead of President Bush and his global war against the axis of evil represented by Al-Qaeda, and now carried forward by President Obama against its more ruthless avatar called IS, the early sixteenth century saw king Manuel in Portugal who mounted a global war against the Muslims, extending from Africa till the Southeast Asian waters.
King Manuel regarded himself as God’s predestined agent to wage a global war to dislodge the Muslims from the Holy Land after weakening their power that was sustained by their trade control of the Indian Ocean region. Instead of the war for oil in our times, the prized objective of those times were the spices of India.
The media comments in the wake of the 11/08 Mumbai attacks suggested that not all assailants were from outside. There are other issues which call for serious reflection: whose India is represented by the icons chosen for attack? A Tamil writer was quoted in some forums as describing them as “the icons of the financiers and swindlers of India”. There was hardly any media coverage of the unknown citizens of India mowed down at the CST railway terminus or many unidentified wounded in the hospitals.
Just like this Tamil critic from south India, Malabar-based Zain al-Din, wrote Tuhfat-al-Mujahidin (Gift to the Holy Warriors) in Arabic. He addressed it to the Mappilas at the close of the sixteenth century, reminding them of the duty of all Muslims to wage jihad against the Portuguese who had invaded the Indian waters. This account is preserved in several British archives and first published only in the mid-nineteenth century, including a Portuguese translation by David Lopes. It probably circulated earlier in the Madrasas in manuscript form.
When will we know what all is being written and circulated today among one hundred and fifty or more million Indian Muslims who feel marginalized in the Indian national system? While such situations continue unchecked, it is but natural that no amount of security measures can protect the icons of success for the prosperous Indians that make the emerging dominant elites of the country.
(Teotonio R. de Souza – Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research).
