India's Internal Reckoning

Bob Kaplan explains the Hindu-Muslim divide that helps frame the Mumbai terror attacks:

The immediate result of the Mumbai terror attacks will be a further hardening of inter-communal relations within India. The latest attacks will also increase the likelihood that in national elections slated for early 2009, the result will be a BJP-led government, as Hindus, who comprise the overwhelming majority of Indian voters, take on another layer of insecurity.

Internationally, this event will further aggravate Indian-Pakistani relations, making it harder for the incoming Obama Administration to effect a rapprochement between the two countries, necessary for progress in Afghanistan, where the two subcontinental states are engaged in a proxy struggle that goes on behind the immediate conflict between the United States and al-Qaeda.

But the real story is India itself, whose undeniable rise as a major world power is being threatened by these civilizational tensions.

(Photo: Indian soldiers take up position outside the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel hotel during an armed siege, on November 28, 2008 in Mumbai, India. The city of Mumbai was rocked by multiple coordinated terrorist attacks that targeted locations popular with foreigners, late on the night of November 26 and into the next morning, killing scores and wounding hundreds in shootings and blasts around the city. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.