9/11 as a pernicious symbol

Priyamvada Gopal, whose name isn't one to encourage the expectation of wisdom imminently to follow, says:

To characterise last week's tragedy as India's 9/11 is to privilege the experience of the United States as the iconic form of national suffering.

Another way of looking at the same thing is that 9/11 was a dramatic recent act of terrorism, resulting in innocent death on a rather large scale, and there's a natural tendency amongst people to treat events like this as symbolic reference points, as comparative reference points. Their doing so doesn't necessarily mean that they are under the spell of American cultural and economic hegemony, or that they see American suffering as the definitive model for all suffering.