India’s Muslim Time Bomb
By PANKAJ MISHRA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/opinion/15MISH.html
NEW DELHI - Soon after arriving at the site of the bomb explosions in Bombay that killed more than 50 people last month - the sixth and most lethal in a recent series of blasts in the city - Lal Krishna Advani, the deputy prime minister in India’s Hindu nationalist government, blamed terrorists based in Pakistan.
This was to be expected: the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party routinely describes India as besieged by Muslim
terrorists backed by Pakistan and based there or in the disputed valley of Kashmir, where Indian security forces have fought a Muslim insurgency for more than a decade. This time, however, Mr. Advani’s accusation was swiftly contradicted by the Bombay police. The four people arrested this month in connection with the attacks were Indian Muslims, part of a new group called the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force. They may have received logistical support from a Pakistani militant outfit with links to Al Qaeda, but they were Indian citizens.
This can be only disturbing news - for India, the region and the United States. The radical Islamist movements that spread so quickly in the last decade in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan had heretofore left untouched India’s 140 million Muslims, even as the Hindu nationalists rose to power in India by demanding, among other things, that Muslims adopt what they define as India’s “Hindu culture.”
Indian Muslims had stayed away from the anti-India insurgency of their culturally distinct co-religionists in Kashmir. More remarkably, they had not heeded the many pied pipers of jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan who lured Muslims from all parts of the world, and managed to delude even a non-Muslim from California.
It may be that most Indian Muslims are too poor and downtrodden to join radical causes elsewhere. It is also true that they have an advantage denied to most Muslims in the world: they can participate in regular elections and choose - since they comprise just 13 percent of India’s population - their representatives if not rulers.
But this faith in democracy, which Indian Muslims have long expressed by voting tactically and in large
numbers, has been tested repeatedly in the last decade. In 1992 Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya that they claimed was built by a Muslim conqueror of India upon the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which assumed power in 1998 promising to restore Hindu pride, promises to soon complete the construction of a temple on the site of the demolished mosque.
In the nationwide violence that followed the demolition of the mosque a decade ago, almost 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in Bombay alone. In 1998, an inquiry identified some Hindu police officers and politicians responsible for the killings; not one has been tried or convicted. Observing the 10th anniversary of the killings last year, Amnesty International noted that “even when those responsible are identified, they are allowed to go unpunished.”
And early last year, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed in the western Indian state of Gujarat in a series of attacks by mobs that Human Rights Watch has said were organized and protected by Gujarat’s Hindu nationalist rulers. Here, too, the perpetrators of the very public massacres are mostly known. But they are
unlikely to face justice, judging by the collapse of one recent trial in which the primary prosecution witness in a massacre case withdrew her testimony; human rights groups say she was threatened by Hindu extremists.
So the surprising thing, perhaps, is not that militant groups like the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force are now
emerging in India, but that it has taken so long. As revealed by the English-language newspaper The Indian
Express, most of the 27 Muslims who have been arrested by the Bombay police in connection with the string of
bombings confessed that they did so in revenge for the state-assisted killings of Muslims in Gujarat.
What is particularly worrisome about the new Muslim terrorism is the backgroud of its adherents. Many of
these young men have degrees in business management, forensic science, and chemical and aeronautical
engineering. They have been radicalized in a geopolitical environment that has never been more highly fraught for the Muslim community at large. And so while the rage and resentment of such educated Muslims may have purely Indian origins, they are now likely to feed faster on the international events - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombings in Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Baghdad - that probably still seem too remote to an older, impoverished generation of Indian Muslims.
The parallel with Indonesia, a new and floundering democracy, is striking. In the only country with more Muslims than India, a new, educated and politically aware generation has outgrown the old tolerant culture
of Indonesian Islam. Its distrust of the Indonesian government, which they call anti-Muslim and pro-American, is increasingly channeled into the politics of anti-Americanism and, for some young Muslims at least, into association with Al Qaeda and radical Islamist groups in East Asia.
Yet while religious violence has made the Indonesian government cautious in its dealings with both radical
Islamists and the Bush administration, the Hindu nationalists in New Delhi and the provinces seem eager
to expand the Indian Muslim list of grievances. Their initial desire to assist the Bush administration and
commit Indian troops to postwar Iraq was checked only by strong protests from opposition parties. And in a
spectacular reversal of India’s traditional support for the Palestinians, the Bharatiya Janata Party is developing close political and military relations with Israel, whose prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited India last week.
With general elections next year, the nationalists are unlikely to tone down their anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan language. Muslims pondering their fate in Hindu- nationalist-ruled India will feel only a greater sense of isolation and impotence.
It is exactly these sorts of local political frustrations that - in North Africa, the Middle East and, more recently, East Asia - have given the network of terrorism its global range and resilience. In historical retrospect, the explosions in Bombay may come to be seen as the moment when the recruiters of Al Qaeda, heartened by the mess in Iraq and by fresh gains in Indonesia, received news of some more unexpected bounty: militant disaffection among the second-largest Muslim population in the world.
Pankaj Mishra is author of “The Romantics,” a novel.
Comment:
Finally the muslims of India have come to realise that they can never live in peace and security under the rule of non-muslims and non-islamic systems. Contrast this with the time when the jews were persecuted in spain and for their security and protection they rushed to the Islamic khilafah state in Turkey.