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COMMENTARY
July 30, 2008
Indian bombings
Recent bombings around India, especially the fairly large-scale attempts to create bloody chaos in the commercial centres of Ahmedabad and Bangalore, afford us at this distance an opportunity to review the question, “Is India’s experience of terrorism any different from our own?”My short answer will be, No. Previous terror strikes against Indian domestic targets have been plausibly traced to sponsors in Pakistan and Bangladesh. I write “plausibly” with diffidence: the incompetence of Indian domestic security forces invariably leaves us with open questions. But the more recent strikes would seem to be almost entirely “home-grown.” That is, they have been mounted by an “Indian Mujahideen” in a pattern suggesting purely domestic intentions. The targets have been within states controlled by the BJP, India’s mainstream Hindu party. Beyond creating commercial havoc, they are designed to trigger an anti-Muslim backlash with attendant communal riots. The targeting of, for instance, two hospitals in Ahmedabad was obviously to this end, in a city where communal tensions had previously degenerated into open massacres. The (psychotic) reasoning behind this strategy is clear enough. India’s native jihadis patently do not enjoy the visceral support of India’s vast Muslim minority. Their only hope of gaining credibility -- especially now they know that the Kashmir issue truly does not resonate among India’s Muslims the way it does among Pakistan’s -- is to make themselves the only visible defenders of a persecuted tribe. In the West, as in the East, the principal practical object of Islamism is to separate Muslims from the surrounding population; to prevent their assimilation into Western societies. This is advanced as much by the Saudi-sponsored Islamic schoolbooks -- which continue to indoctrinate the Muslim young in the need to hate Christians, Jews, Hindus -- as it is through terror strikes against symbolic targets. While it is obvious that the Indian police could be better staffed (they had gleaned no warning at all of several recent multiple-location strikes), a police force that does not receive tips, and otherwise enjoy the cooperation of Muslims, is powerless to anticipate anything. Naturally, policemen whom Muslims do not trust are the jihadis’ most useful accomplices. Several Muslim leaders in India have now spoken volubly against the terror cells, but they still fall short of advising their co-religionists to cooperate with the authorities. The BJP from its side continues to play with inflammatory Hindu rhetoric, and when in power, to draft “populist” security legislation that can only alienate Muslims further. The Congress party, which enjoys widespread Muslim support, then compounds the error by stripping away the legislation entirely, the necessary measures together with the unnecessary. Nevertheless, on balance, my impression is that Indian governments have too much at stake, in a highly combustible subcontinent, to continue political posturing in the face of the terror threat. And the Indian electorate, seasoned through six decades of voting experience, is proving more mature than the political class expected. Thanks to the leadership that was shown by Bush and Blair, thanks to the stamina the West has shown in Afghanistan and Iraq, thanks to (American-led) special forces operations that continue unpublicized in remote locations, thanks to European governments that have gradually withdrawn toleration and even encouragement to the radical Wahabi subculture spawned among Europe’s Muslim youth, thanks to unprecedented international police cooperation -- outward progress has been made against the Islamist enemy. India, too, benefits from this. The progress is in two forms, of which, the physical destruction of Al Qaeda cells and related terror infrastructure is the necessary condition for the second and more important. The prestige of the Islamist ideology, within Islam, appears to be fading, as it fails to achieve its objectives. Soon after 9/11, I made the hopeful analogy to the triumph of Nasserism in an earlier generation. The Arab socialist movement associated with the Egyptian dictator and ideologue enjoyed international prestige in its day, of a kind partly comparable to the later prestige of the Islamists. It was a much different historical situation, and the use of Egypt as a Soviet proxy in the Cold War encumbers any comparison. Notwithstanding, Nasserite socialism appealed in a similar way to another generation of young men, frustrated by the failure of Arab and Muslim societies to master conditions in the late modern world. The death of Nasserism was sharply portended in the Six Day War of 1967, as the Israelis annihilated the Egyptian air force, and routed the soldiers of Egypt and all her allies. Nasserism began to be associated, even in the minds of its supporters, with humiliating defeat. To the external observer, however, this was not immediately obvious. Our common enemy cannot be Islam -- for that is too vague -- but rather, a political ideology within Islam. Our task is to defeat its partisans wherever they show themselves. The end is to make it a movement that no one could want to join. From this, there must be no retreat.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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