The article interrogates the meaning of terror in India, enacted through the recurring articulation of a particular logic of blame, via a specific focus on the train blasts in Mumbai in July 2006. The conceptual extent of ‘violence as terror’ is examined broadly: as boundaries erected to equal ‘war on terror’ with ‘war on Muslim terror’, as a purifying of the Indian ‘Self’, and as shifting thresholds in state rationalities pertaining to terrorist activities. The Indian state is torn between blaming domestic organisations and ‘cross-border terrorism’ for involvement in acts of terror. The vagueness and ephemeral character of where to lay down the frontiers of blame is placing Muslim citizens in a precarious situation.
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Ted Svensson (2009) studied this question.
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