Summary

The subtitle for “Nine is Not Eleven” is “(And November Isn’t September).” The chapter focuses on the four-day-long attacks on the city of Mumbai in 2008, which was frequently considered “India’s 9/11” (184). Roy criticizes the people who refuse to see terrorism within its historical, geographical and economic context. She writes, “We need context. Always” (188).

That context includes Partition, which led to the massacre of millions of people and a lasting wound between the two countries. While Pakistan became a “corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths” (189), India set itself up as a supposedly “inclusive, secular democracy” (189). Nonetheless, since 1947, Hindu nationalists have been working to set the country up as a religious state. Almost immediately, the Indian state announced the terrorists responsible, ignoring the “complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen, and…. Counterintelligence operatives working not just on...