VERLA, India  This was not terror  not as Indians understood it. This was war.  TO THE FIGHT An Indian commando runs into the Taj Hotel before a gun battle there on Friday. As the attacks continued into a second and third day, parts of Mumbai resembled a war zone.  The killers stormed the streets of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, with machine guns and bags of grenades. They did not strike with the terrorist’s fleeting anonymity. Their work was fastidiously deliberate. It went into a second day, then a third. They took time to ask your nationality and vocation. Then they spared you, or herded you elsewhere, or shot you in the back of your skull.  As a surprise attack became a 48-hour struggle, the burden of responding transferred from the police to soldiers. The language was of war: television anchors spoke of buildings “sanitized” and “flushed out,” of “final assaults” and “collateral damage.” Helicopters hovered over Mumbai, and commandos dropped onto roofs. The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the shapeless, omnidirectional chaos of Iraq.  While the hostage situation endured, more was unknown than known. Rumors flew, unconfirmed. Did you hear? They shot all the women at the hotel switchboard. Did you hear? They executed a young mother and her children. Did you hear? They sent a hostage out of the building to get food for their attackers. Truth was complicated; everything blurred.  But what slowly became clear was that this was an attack of especial barbarism, because it was so personal. It was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards. They seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made.  A good story has characters, and a terrorist attack without characters tempts a society to forget. A wave of recent Indian attacks, more anonymous and less dramatic, offered little focus for public opinion.  For better or worse, the public has its characters now. As the weekend arrived, it was not clear who the men were, even as India’s government hinted at Pakistani connections. But even without learning their names, it was so easy to imagine them this time, combing the hallways, asking life-or-death questions, pulling women and children from their rooms at midnight.  For a country with no dearth of terrorism in its past, it is perhaps the fleshy immediacy of these men and their deeds that makes this a defining assault  one that separates all attacks of the past from those yet to come. In the television studios, on the roads, in the anguished phone calls of friends to friends, Indians said the words again and again: This is our 9/11.  “It is an Indian variant of 9/11, and today India needs to respond the way America did,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, a member of Parliament from the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, said on television.  But if this was India’s 9/11, it seemed so only to certain citizens, and not, apparently, to their government.  It took 18 hours for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to come on television. He is a reflective, decent man. But he was emotionless, his mouth moving and nothing else. He knows all too well the history of blaming Pakistan and its militants for attacks, only to come up short on evidence. He said the attacks “probably” had a foreign hand. His most specific idea was “police reform” and the “tightening” of laws to close “loopholes.” He called for “peace and harmony.”  His temperateness helped to keep the ever-present threat of religious riots at bay. But it also seemed to misread the mood of a country that wanted it to be 9/11  if not in the sense of war and conquest, then in the sense of instant clarity, of the simple feeling that an era had ended and that enough was, at last, enough.  When the video of Mr. Singh’s address was posted on YouTube, many said online what others were saying on the ground. He was “expressionless,” a “brilliant teacher but no leader,” an “ineffective puppet.” One user wrote: “He should have given a strong warning and threat to terrorists and those who support them. Unfortunately he is too soft.”  Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, recently completed three and a half years as a correspondent in Mumbai for that newspaper and The New York Times.
Some Indians see the siege of Mumbai as their 9/11: A moment that separates past attacks from those to come.