As a historian of the Partition of India and the concomitant creation of thestate of Pakistan, I study conflict and accommodation in the political arenas ofthe Punjab in the first half of the twentieth century. The most challengingpuzzles in that era, and in my work, deal with precisely the kind of conundrumthat Mumbai has thrown up. Coming close on the heels of President Zardari’scomment that ‘there’s a little bit of India in every Pakistani and a littlebit of Pakistan in every Indian’, the attacks on Mumbai insist on imprinting adifferent kind of equation. When shared culture and conflict are so closelyentwined, as they are in the Indo-Pakistani relationship, how does one respondto a crisis like Mumbai? Let me step back for a bit and speak of a prior momentof violation.