The Mumbai massacres tell us a lot about the way power works (and doesn’t) these days.

This is not a classic terrorist atrocity, but rather a fairly sophisticated military attack:

The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a major city to conduct multiple attacks on carefully chosen targets.

The primary weapon was the gunman, not the suicide bomber. The attack itself has paralyzed a city of 18 million. And two days after the attack began, Indian forces are still working to root out the terror teams.

As it happened, I was on the train into London on 7 July 2005 when several bombs went off in the city centre. It quickly became clear what had taken place.

Yet as the scale of the carnage emerged, I wondered what would have happened if instead of planting these bombs for a single day’s one-off mayhem, the suicide terrorists had detonated bombs on successive days or weeks. The ‘terror’ effect and associated chaos and disruption would have been all the greater.

Or what if a small group of terrorists armed with kalashnikovs had started to shoot up the West End, in a sort of mobile Mumbai episode?

Many more people would have been killed. And it would have taken a huge use of force on military scales to corner them and finish them off. They might even have escaped, had their area of operation been big enough to make creating a cordon impossible as tens of thousands of people fled for safety.

My general idea is this.

Back in, say, 1200 there was not that great a difference between the power available to the leaders and the power available to the masses. More or less everyone fought with bits of sharpened metal. Some had horses, most not.

Not surprisingly it was not easy for big political spaces to emerge, as they could not be controlled for any length of time.

Instead there were many smaller units: kingdoms, duchys, principalities and city-states where a strong ruler could control a reasonable space and in ever-shifting personal alliances with some others hope to be part of a bigger power. Leaders had to depend to a great extent on their subjects’ and other rivals’ loyalty.

Where that loyalty faltered, the best hope to keep control deter people from trying to overthrow the leader was to do something slow and strikingly painful to anyone who tried and failed. See that accordinging to Wikipedia it took until 1878 for the US Supreme Court to observe that drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive and disemboweling would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

In the meantime we had seen centuries of increasingly ‘heavy’ weaponry. The idea of the ‘state’ emerged. And states achieved a pretty efficient grip on the quantity and impact of weapons in private hands. Machine guns, tanks, aircraft were all expensive to make and made in a small number of controllable factories.

Now we maybe are seeing a move back to a long-lost paradigm. The balance of power as between rulers and ruled is shifting in unpredictable ways.

It is fairly cheap and easy for villains and honest citizens alike to acquire impressively strong weapons, and/or to use hi-tech methods of command and mobilisation.

Highly networked citizens can do remarkable things, for better or worse.

Hence overweight, cumbersome state bodies stagger around faced with a grim choice.

Try to keep ‘control’ by ever-more oppressive methods and so risk losing voters’ confidence – and core loyalty?

Or opt for devolving power back to citizens and risk looking unambitious, clueless and weak – thereby losing core loyalty?

Mumbai. A big step back to a world of dis-integration?