By Sankrant Sanu
The attacks in Mumbai have brought forth a parade of subtle and not-so-subtle denial. The sound of gunfire and the counting of the dead had not yet been finished in Mumbai when the terror apologists had already explained it. Aryn Baker writing in Time Magazine, spoke of how "the roots of Muslim rage run deep in India." His article meandered over economic disparities faced by Indian Muslims and the need for justice, else the people like the gunman in the Oberoi Trident Hotel would "keep calling." Tariq Ali stated, that India needs to look closer to home to Kashmir where "conditions have been much worse than Tibet." Martha Nussbaum, writing in the Los Angeles Times about the Mumbai attacks focused her entire article on the terrible doings of the "Hindu Right." Arundhati Roy, asked us to "contextualize" the Mumbai attacks as a choice for India to make between "justice and civil war." And parts of the Pakistani blogosphere and Pakistan television and sites like countercurrents.org were alive with murmuring of a conspiracy by--who else?--Hindus, Jews and Americans, all to defame Muslims. Practically all these Ostrich-like responses, burying their head in the sand with various forms of denial and apologia, chose to ignore the elephant sitting in the room--the reality of Pakistan-based Islam-enabled terrorism. Sacrificing this elementary truth to the gods of politically correctness, helps no one--including the many Muslims, among them Pakistanis, who are genuinely aghast at these acts.
The first kind of apologia is denial. This generally takes the form of elaborate conspiracy theories--such as the most popular theory doing the rounds of the Muslim world after the 9/11 attacks, "the Jews did it." For what? "To blame the Muslims" of course. It appears that the entire world is engaged in the construction of elaborate hoax plots to kill themselves simply to blame Muslims. The version doing the rounds in the Mumbai terror attacks was that the attackers were Hindu, evidenced by the fact that one of the photographs of a suave young man, casually toting an AK-47 with a back-pack full of ammunition, showed him wearing a thick red band on his arm. "Tying a red thread or cord around the wrist is a Hindu practice" proclaims the blog, titled "Evidence being deliberately ignored" perhaps not quite aware that the Hindu practice involves a sacred thread or mauli, not a broad band, though at least one report pointed out that they were specifically instructed to wear a red band to cause confusion. And wearing a band is hardly clinching evidence versus the spate of satellite, phone, ordnance-based and confessional evidence that is available. Already this "clinching" evidence of the "Hindu band" has been picked and quoted up by numerous people with Muslim names posting comments on the news as incontrovertible proof of the conspiracy. But the conspiracy theory proponents are not found only in the anonymous blogosphere. It is broadcast as the explanation on mainstream Pakistani TV. No less than Maulana Syed Nizamuddin, All India Muslim Personal Law Board general secretary, has latched onto the ascription of the Mumbai attacks to Muslims as a conspiracy. Abdul Rahman Antulay of the Congress, in remarks disowned by the party, has come out with his own version of the conspiracy. So the arrest of the Pakistani operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba; the selective targeting of Americans, Britons, Hindus and Jews, the "Western powers" and Yehudi-Hindu "devils" that form the backbone of the Islamist terror universe; the evidence of traced satellite calls to Pakistan, is all rendered meaningless by this single red-band. The explicit instructions they carried to "kill indiscriminately, particularly white foreign tourists, and spare Muslims" that led them to spare the Turkish Muslim couple at the Taj and massacre the 13-year old American girl is of no consequence.
All this, say the conspiracy theorists, is simply a grand plot to "defame Muslims."
Denial is an understandable emotion. There are many Muslims in India and abroad, who go about their quiet lives, just like everyone else. They are neither scholars nor historians delving deep into their texts or constructing grand histories. Their lives revolve around their close circles and their concerns for them. They have been told that Islam is a religion of a peace, the greatest religion, and that is enough for them. They cannot identify with these mass-killers and fear being associated with them. They have seen good Muslims all around them, in their friends and family. Denial, then is an understandable response at being told that the killers are Muslim espousing Islamic causes.
The second form of apologia is the apologia of "just cause." This form of apologia bandies about every imaginable excuse--economic disparities, the pulling down of the structure of the Babri Masjid, the situation in Kashmir, the riots in Gujarat, the alleged persecution of "minorities" in India and so on and so forth as the reason for terror. All this must apparently be fixed, we are told, before the terror will go away. The choice as the doyen of selective apologia, Arundhati Roy, herself informs us in an article about the Mumbai attacks that the choice is between "justice" for all these things and "civil war" in India. How that relates to Pakistan-based terror groups with a pan-Islamic mission killing Jews in Mumbai is somehow lost in the fog of her own picturesque prose. Yes, somehow, the persecution of the Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh to the point of elimination in Pakistan and to truly genocidal proportions in Bangladesh, has yet to generate bands of Hindu terrorists turning into random mass-murderers in those countries. By contrast, Muslims have increased, both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms in independent India. These are simply facts to be acknowledge. Severe genocidal persecution would show up in census data. Ask the Tibetans. The Tibetan genocide by the Chinese, a real genocide in an age of hyperbole, in which over 1 million Tibetans have been killed, their monasteries have been destroyed and their identity and culture under attack has continued for decades, have scarcely turned Tibetans into taking AK-47's into their hands and blasting Chinese tourists in Mumbai. The Ahmediyas, an unorthodox Muslim sect, are likewise a severely persecuted minority in Pakistan who have not take recourse to terror. Nor did Buddhists the world over start blowing people and declare Muslims as their enemies because of the great injustice in the destruction of the magnificient Bamiyan Buddhas, a marvel of far greater grandeur than the obscure and relatively insignificant Babri Masjid, by the Taliban.
Who remembers the riot in India a few years ago where a particular community was targeted and hundreds were killed and over twenty thousand people were rendered homeless? This is not Gujarat 2002 but something that took place after that--Assam in 2003. Its victims were "Hindi-speaking" Biharis living in Assam, some for generations. It is a riot that has virtually vanished from history. No "Concerned Citizens" tribunal went to do a probe. No Nussbaum's write about it. No campaigns will be launched to deny the Chief Minister of the state at the time (anyone remember the name?) a US Visa. No University Chairs will be created in its name. There is not even an entry in Wikipedia. The Biharis are among the poorest and most underprivileged groups in India, many of them facing discrimination as they seek employment as migrant laborers across India. One wonders why the Biharis have not unleashed a reign of terror across India, despite being the repeated target of attacks, most recently in Mumbai itself. When Poverty, discrimination, even selective targeting during riots and killings from Assam to Mumbai is amply available to Biharis as a justifying "context."
The final apologia is the apologia of mitigating circumstances--that of poverty and lack of education. Among its recent proponents--none other than the good doctor Chopra, amiably turning Larry King's questions on the Mumbai attacks into the "root causes" of "poverty", "education" and lest we forget, "fundamentalist Hindus." In the bliss generated by the chanting of mantras and the counting of dollars, while carefully distancing himself from Hinduism to skillfully market himself to the broader American public, Dr. Chopra also distanced himself from reasoned analysis. If poverty and lack of education were the root causes, it is strange that most of the 9/11 suicide-attackers were both well-to-do and educated as is Osama Bin Laden himself. The "Indian Mujahideen" that claimed responsibility for recent bomb blasts included well-educated and well-off software engineers and college students. Of course all these arrests have already been dismissed by the apologists as part of the unending conspiracy against Muslims. The Versace T-shirt wearing Lashkar-a-Toiba attacker in Mumbai who gleefully shot down bystanders and police officers alike may have been poor, but it was not poverty that turned him into a lethal killer. That required something else. The trained Mumbai attackers had little problem using the GPS or Google Earth to carry out their blood-soaked plots. Neither poverty nor lack of education is the "root cause" propelling these cold-blooded and merciless killers.
This is not to say that innocents, Muslims and others, are not targeted by the Indian State or that the Indian police is not often sloppy, venal and corrupt. The problems with the Indian state are manifold and are the subject of other writings. However, the Indian state is by- and-large an equal-opportunity oppressor in addition to being blissfully incompetent. But its acts alone do not yield clues into the phenomenon of terrorism by Islamic groups in India.
By their choice of targets, and by the causes they espoused, there is sufficient cause to conjecture that the Mumbai attackers were Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, fighting for what they considered as Islamic causes. They were specifically indoctrinated using Islamic concepts and the promise of Islam-justified heavenly rewards. And, in this case, they were specifically the product of the terror apparatus from Pakistan. Now whether Islam is properly or improperly used and how deeply the Pakistan state is implicated are reasonable follow-up research questions.
But we can ask these questions properly once we go past the three forms of apologia. Whether or not other Muslims agree with their actions, the first step is to admit the existence of Islam-inspired terror groups. Denial and apologia, both by Muslims and by others on their behalf, is much more damaging to Muslims. This is because, even when the thought censors of political correctness refuse to look at this inconvenient truth, it doesn't go away--it simply becomes part of private conversation rather that open public discourse. And it is these private conversations, about anti-Muslim conspirators on the one hand and all-guilty Muslims on the other, which are far more dangerous to the future of a harmonious India.
On the other hand, once we plainly admit of Pakistan-based Islam-inspired terror without pretending it away, we are able to examine it in the light and come up with possible solutions. This will be the subject of the next article.
Sankrant Sanu is an independent writer based in Seattle. |
After protests on the campus and outside, the University of Beautiful Downtown Peshawar syndicate on Monday set aside the Academic Council's decision to include a controversial writer's books in MPhil and PhD courses offered by the English Literature department.