By M H Ahssan
Taliban attempt to choke NATO supplies offers India diplomatic opportunity
In the aftermath of 26/11, Taliban forces have attacked NATO military vehicles and supplies passing through Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) five times over the last week. This is the route through which 70 per cent of NATO supplies for troops in Afghanistan pass. But close to 250 NATO vehicles have been blown up over the past week alone. Given the international nature of the outcry following 26/11 and the Security Council’s ban on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), this could be the Taliban’s way of warning the US not to put too much pressure on Pakistan.
Despite repeated Taliban attacks security at NATO’s shipping terminals appears to have been left to overstretched local police. Taliban violence against members of the secular Awami National Party now ruling NWFP has also been spiralling, unchecked by security forces. Meanwhile, President Asif Zardari has demonstrated the shakiness of civilian control by acting on the basis of a hoax call supposedly made to him by Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, which resulted in the redeployment of troops from the Afghan to the Indian border. The lack of security for NATO supplies suggests that somebody is sending the message that Pakistan controls a critical route for supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan, and too much pressure on Pakistan could lead to this route being choked.
This, however, is a high-risk strategy as it will end up alienating the world. Even a minimal definition of the Pakistani military’s responsibilities would require it to protect NATO’s supply lines. Consistent failure to do so would expose unwillingness to assume any responsibility. At the same time, failure to protect NWFP’s elected government would end up ceding the province to the Taliban, in which case the army would have demonstrated its incapacity to defend Pakistan’s sovereignty. Neither will choking what is currently NATO’s main supply route into Afghanistan work, as NATO is already working on two alternative supply routes, one through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and the other through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
German interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said in New Delhi on Friday that Pakistan needs to do more than just banning the JuD. The Taliban attacks offer a diplomatic opportunity to New Delhi to build an international coalition to pressure Pakistan to curb jihadi militias, as everybody’s interests — including Pakistan’s — are affected by Islamabad’s inability to rein them in. India suffered 26/11 and would like to prevent further terrorist attacks. President-elect Barack Obama plans to increase US troop presence in Afghanistan, which would require enhanced rather than degraded supply lines, not to mention the denial of Pakistani territory as a safe haven to launch attacks on NATO troops. Pakistan itself can undergo true democratic consolidation only when religious extremists and their sympathisers in the security services are taken out of the equation.
Monday, December 15, 2008
It’s all in the Mind
By Mukul Sharma
People who believed the development of language, writing, printing and the internet were revolutionary milestones in communication, are in for a surprise: the next revolution will literally blow their minds. For starters, being able to control a computer with the mind was the ultimate goal of human-machine interaction. It’s now going to be available from next year. An Australian company plans to release an adventure game which will allow players to move items on screen using merely their thoughts. Move over Yoda.
The game comes with a helmet containing non-invasive brainwave sensors to tune into electroencephalograph (EEG) signals that are naturally produced by the brain to detect players’ thoughts and connect them wirelessly to their PCs. So when the action requires a boulder to be moved out of the way, all that the player has to do is concentrate mentally on shifting it. No keystrokes, no mouse, no joystick.
Want to make it more magical? Why not will the rock to vanish? Volunteers testing the game who did that the first time said it left them feeling totally freaked out and spooky, as if some ‘Star Wars’ kind of force was suddenly with them.
And that’s not all. Such helmets are also capable of monitoring a subject’s emotional state and facial muscle movement so that even a wink, frown or smile can be transferred automatically without any added input to onscreen personas. People who have a presence in such virtual worlds like ‘Second Life’, for example, and have to key in ‘grin’ for their avatars to do likewise now merely have to grin themselves.
Among other things it means that communication between humans and machines which has so far been limited to conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication — expression, intuition, perception — reserved solely for the human realm, is about to change forever.
More significantly, what’s also about to change is how people communicate with one another. The US Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to the universities of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon and Maryland to start work on developing similar ‘thought helmets’ that would harness silent brainwaves for secure communication among troops. The army hopes the project will lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone and the idea is to have the device evaluate parts of the brain that interpret speech, translate the activity into information that can be relayed wirelessly to someone else’s headset, and then send the other person the message.
Initially the receiver would hear a robotic voice speaking the command into his headphones but scientists plan to develop a more sophisticated version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice. Ultimately, the voice too could be retranslated back into reversed EEG signals and delivered directly to the brain so that the recipient would perceive the message as a thought.
With advances in miniaturisation and nanotechnology it’s only a matter of time before the helmet functions become small enough to be implanted directly into the brain so that the headset can be done away with altogether. People are already talking about the first civilian use for such embedded ‘radio telepathy’ being used for cellphone talking.
Does this mean our thoughts would be available to everybody? Not at all; just like our talking on telephones is not for general public consumption (but yes, hacking could still be a problem). Also, like cellphone service providers that exist today, there would then be thought transference providers who would automatically route callers through a controlled gateway and if one then didn’t want to pick up an incoming or ‘missed thought’, he or she could refuse to acknowledge or answer. A social network of concurring group minds, though, would flourish who wouldn’t require any other device to communicate between themselves.
At present we have no way of telling what such a world would be like to live in but — mind it — it would be spectacularly different from the one in which we live now.
People who believed the development of language, writing, printing and the internet were revolutionary milestones in communication, are in for a surprise: the next revolution will literally blow their minds. For starters, being able to control a computer with the mind was the ultimate goal of human-machine interaction. It’s now going to be available from next year. An Australian company plans to release an adventure game which will allow players to move items on screen using merely their thoughts. Move over Yoda.
The game comes with a helmet containing non-invasive brainwave sensors to tune into electroencephalograph (EEG) signals that are naturally produced by the brain to detect players’ thoughts and connect them wirelessly to their PCs. So when the action requires a boulder to be moved out of the way, all that the player has to do is concentrate mentally on shifting it. No keystrokes, no mouse, no joystick.
Want to make it more magical? Why not will the rock to vanish? Volunteers testing the game who did that the first time said it left them feeling totally freaked out and spooky, as if some ‘Star Wars’ kind of force was suddenly with them.
And that’s not all. Such helmets are also capable of monitoring a subject’s emotional state and facial muscle movement so that even a wink, frown or smile can be transferred automatically without any added input to onscreen personas. People who have a presence in such virtual worlds like ‘Second Life’, for example, and have to key in ‘grin’ for their avatars to do likewise now merely have to grin themselves.
Among other things it means that communication between humans and machines which has so far been limited to conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication — expression, intuition, perception — reserved solely for the human realm, is about to change forever.
More significantly, what’s also about to change is how people communicate with one another. The US Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to the universities of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon and Maryland to start work on developing similar ‘thought helmets’ that would harness silent brainwaves for secure communication among troops. The army hopes the project will lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone and the idea is to have the device evaluate parts of the brain that interpret speech, translate the activity into information that can be relayed wirelessly to someone else’s headset, and then send the other person the message.
Initially the receiver would hear a robotic voice speaking the command into his headphones but scientists plan to develop a more sophisticated version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice. Ultimately, the voice too could be retranslated back into reversed EEG signals and delivered directly to the brain so that the recipient would perceive the message as a thought.
With advances in miniaturisation and nanotechnology it’s only a matter of time before the helmet functions become small enough to be implanted directly into the brain so that the headset can be done away with altogether. People are already talking about the first civilian use for such embedded ‘radio telepathy’ being used for cellphone talking.
Does this mean our thoughts would be available to everybody? Not at all; just like our talking on telephones is not for general public consumption (but yes, hacking could still be a problem). Also, like cellphone service providers that exist today, there would then be thought transference providers who would automatically route callers through a controlled gateway and if one then didn’t want to pick up an incoming or ‘missed thought’, he or she could refuse to acknowledge or answer. A social network of concurring group minds, though, would flourish who wouldn’t require any other device to communicate between themselves.
At present we have no way of telling what such a world would be like to live in but — mind it — it would be spectacularly different from the one in which we live now.
The Guilty Men
By V Balachandran
Our intelligence agencies must be held to account.
On September 28, 1977, Japanese airliner JAL 472 from Paris to Tokyo was hijacked by Japanese Red Army (JRA) terrorists and taken to Dhaka. The hijackers had boarded the aircraft at Bombay. Osamu Maruoka, a JRA leader, when arrested in Tokyo on November 25, 1987, told his interrogators that they chose Bombay airport for its lax security after surveying other airports.
I was asked to fly to Pretoria in December 1994 to get a briefing from South African intelligence agencies on a possible white extremist plot to kill President Mandela during his ensuing visit to Delhi in January 1995. The intelligence report said that the assailants had chosen India for its lax security. Fortunately, nothing happened during that visit.
Nothing has changed during the last 30 years. It is, therefore, not surprising that a handful of terrorists could hold Mumbai to ransom for four days last month. Over a period of time our security institutions have deteriorated to such an extent that it would have been better had some of them been disbanded. It was reported that the NSG team could not reach Mumbai in time because the aircraft was not ready. When the NSG was raised in 1984-85 there was a standing instruction that a contingent should be ready at the Delhi airport with an ARC aircraft 24 hours, 365 days a year. Who has amended these instructions?
There have been several instances when ARC aircraft have been used for private purposes — as a VIP taxi — disregarding the standing orders. A parliamentary committee should go into the logs of the ARC fleet to find out how many private visits have been undertaken in the recent past under the guise of security-related visits. UPA leaders who had totally ignored internal security all these years now want to position NSG detachments all over the country. This is a knee-jerk reaction. The success of the NSG is thanks to its constant training in weaponry and mock exercises in their base camp, which keep them alert. Would such training be available all over India? How many years will it take to organise such facilities?
The biggest lacuna in our anti-terrorist methodology is intelligence integration. After every terrorist strike, state police and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) indulge in shadowboxing over the IB’s ‘alerts’ with the latter leaking information to the press that it had passed on intelligence and the states maintaining that what they received was not actionable information. Neither the IB nor the RAW has any legal standing. By the same token they have no legal accountability. The
state police forces, however, are answerable to the courts. They always get the rap.
Most intelligence establishments elsewhere in the world, barring dictatorships, have a system of accountability. The US has the Congressional Intelligence Committee authorising intelligence budgets. UK Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee inquires into major incidents involving its three major intelligence services. Most of these reports are available on government websites. In contrast, our intelligence services operate in great secrecy, mostly hiding their failures. It is high time we started an audit system to judge the performance of our intelligence outfits. The huge amounts of secret funds spent by these organisations should also be subjected to external audit since complaints abound that top intelligence officials spend some of the funds on personal indulgences.
While the US could establish a major overhaul of its internal security within 46 days of 9/11 thereby averting any subsequent attack on its soil, we have done nothing despite being battered by major terrorist attacks starting with the 1993 Bombay serial blasts. Till September 2008 the government of India did not think of studying the US government’s successful homeland security system (DHS). The pivot of this system are 58 DHS-funded 24-hour state fusion centres that continuously update state police and local security agencies with inputs from the National Counterterrorist Centre which integrates intelligence from a 16-member Intelligence Community.
In India, coordination between different state police systems and central agencies on terrorism is woefully inadequate. This would not have happened had we adopted a central counterterrorist information exchange centre as recommended by the Kargil review committee. Unlike the clear-cut demarcation of responsibilities laid down when the DHS was formed, we in India have a colonial and antiquated system of rules of business, which only lists the portfolios of different ministries without any description of responsibilities. We still do not know what the exact roles of the National Security Council or national security adviser are vis-a-vis that of the ministry of home affairs with regard to internal security. If at all the responsibilities are demarcated, it is not known publicly.
In the US, apart from constant Congressional oversight, pressure to perform well is codified and monitored by a legally empowered Homeland Security Advisory Council with 24 members, and a majority of them are from outside the bureaucracy. This is because of the belief that citizens are affected by terrorism and they should have a clear idea of what the government is doing for them. Unfortunately in India, general public or their representatives have no say in such matters.
Our intelligence agencies must be held to account.
On September 28, 1977, Japanese airliner JAL 472 from Paris to Tokyo was hijacked by Japanese Red Army (JRA) terrorists and taken to Dhaka. The hijackers had boarded the aircraft at Bombay. Osamu Maruoka, a JRA leader, when arrested in Tokyo on November 25, 1987, told his interrogators that they chose Bombay airport for its lax security after surveying other airports.
I was asked to fly to Pretoria in December 1994 to get a briefing from South African intelligence agencies on a possible white extremist plot to kill President Mandela during his ensuing visit to Delhi in January 1995. The intelligence report said that the assailants had chosen India for its lax security. Fortunately, nothing happened during that visit.
Nothing has changed during the last 30 years. It is, therefore, not surprising that a handful of terrorists could hold Mumbai to ransom for four days last month. Over a period of time our security institutions have deteriorated to such an extent that it would have been better had some of them been disbanded. It was reported that the NSG team could not reach Mumbai in time because the aircraft was not ready. When the NSG was raised in 1984-85 there was a standing instruction that a contingent should be ready at the Delhi airport with an ARC aircraft 24 hours, 365 days a year. Who has amended these instructions?
There have been several instances when ARC aircraft have been used for private purposes — as a VIP taxi — disregarding the standing orders. A parliamentary committee should go into the logs of the ARC fleet to find out how many private visits have been undertaken in the recent past under the guise of security-related visits. UPA leaders who had totally ignored internal security all these years now want to position NSG detachments all over the country. This is a knee-jerk reaction. The success of the NSG is thanks to its constant training in weaponry and mock exercises in their base camp, which keep them alert. Would such training be available all over India? How many years will it take to organise such facilities?
The biggest lacuna in our anti-terrorist methodology is intelligence integration. After every terrorist strike, state police and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) indulge in shadowboxing over the IB’s ‘alerts’ with the latter leaking information to the press that it had passed on intelligence and the states maintaining that what they received was not actionable information. Neither the IB nor the RAW has any legal standing. By the same token they have no legal accountability. The
state police forces, however, are answerable to the courts. They always get the rap.
Most intelligence establishments elsewhere in the world, barring dictatorships, have a system of accountability. The US has the Congressional Intelligence Committee authorising intelligence budgets. UK Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee inquires into major incidents involving its three major intelligence services. Most of these reports are available on government websites. In contrast, our intelligence services operate in great secrecy, mostly hiding their failures. It is high time we started an audit system to judge the performance of our intelligence outfits. The huge amounts of secret funds spent by these organisations should also be subjected to external audit since complaints abound that top intelligence officials spend some of the funds on personal indulgences.
While the US could establish a major overhaul of its internal security within 46 days of 9/11 thereby averting any subsequent attack on its soil, we have done nothing despite being battered by major terrorist attacks starting with the 1993 Bombay serial blasts. Till September 2008 the government of India did not think of studying the US government’s successful homeland security system (DHS). The pivot of this system are 58 DHS-funded 24-hour state fusion centres that continuously update state police and local security agencies with inputs from the National Counterterrorist Centre which integrates intelligence from a 16-member Intelligence Community.
In India, coordination between different state police systems and central agencies on terrorism is woefully inadequate. This would not have happened had we adopted a central counterterrorist information exchange centre as recommended by the Kargil review committee. Unlike the clear-cut demarcation of responsibilities laid down when the DHS was formed, we in India have a colonial and antiquated system of rules of business, which only lists the portfolios of different ministries without any description of responsibilities. We still do not know what the exact roles of the National Security Council or national security adviser are vis-a-vis that of the ministry of home affairs with regard to internal security. If at all the responsibilities are demarcated, it is not known publicly.
In the US, apart from constant Congressional oversight, pressure to perform well is codified and monitored by a legally empowered Homeland Security Advisory Council with 24 members, and a majority of them are from outside the bureaucracy. This is because of the belief that citizens are affected by terrorism and they should have a clear idea of what the government is doing for them. Unfortunately in India, general public or their representatives have no say in such matters.
A Novel Way to Tackle Pakistan
By Sreeram Chaulia
\A new study entitled "World at Risk" by a bipartisan American Congressional commission reveals that if one were to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) today, then "all roads would intersect in Pakistan". It warns that the next attacks on America might originate from Pakistan and urges the US president to take steps on a priority basis "securing" Islamabad's biological and nuclear weapons. Paraphrasing the report, the New Yorker magazine commented that Pakistan as a "nation itself is a kind of WMD".
Coming on the heels of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, which were planned and organized by Pakistani fundamentalists, the American warnings reflect a major dilemma facing international policymakers - how to make the world safe from Pakistan? The nature and extent of this challenge has been summed up by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, "Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption [and is] very poor ... "
What options does the world have to counter the multiple threats to international security and peace being posed by a dysfunctional and dangerously adrift country? Should a country that is itself a WMD be allowed to possess actual WMDs, which are not only liable to fall into the "wrong" hands but also be used by the "right" hands for emotional blackmail?
Irfan Hussain, a leading Pakistani newspaper columnist, recently bemoaned that "Pakistan was the only country in the world that negotiates with a gun to its own head. Our argument goes something like this: If you don't give us what we need, the government will collapse and this might result in anarchy, and a takeover by Islamic militants. Left unstated here is the global risk these elements would pose as they would have access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal." A state which threatens to explode and destroy everyone else on the planet unless it is pampered is akin to a suicide bomber whose message to his enemies is to change their policies "or else".
The issue to ponder for world leaders is whether an "international migraine" and "suicidal" state should be allowed to possess WMDs or, for that matter, be self-governing? Sovereignty, as an organizing principle of world affairs, is not merely a bestower of rights but also comes with certain responsibilities towards one's own people and to other sovereign countries. Pakistan's track record is one of waving the red flag and screaming SOS to assert its rights as a sovereign country, without fulfilling the corollary obligations.
While many developing countries may have failed to live up to the expectations of their populations to improve living standards and governance, Pakistan has the extra cachet of exporting terrorism and extremist religious values to other countries. The controversial call for "international humanitarian intervention" over the failure of a state to protect its own people from grave human rights abuses is premised on what is happening within a country. To be fair, Pakistan has not fared worse than many other developing countries on domestic human development indices. Albright's mention of corruption and poverty as causes for concern about Pakistan is not relevant as these are not unique failings.
What stands Pakistan apart, though, is its ability to breed terrorism, extremist ideology and nuclear fecklessness and project these outwards at the rest of the world. The correct international response to this should not a "humanitarian intervention" but one based on global collective will, represented by the United Nations. Given the sui generis mixture of threats presented by Pakistan, an equally novel response is warranted. Since Pakistani sovereignty has been misused to impair the sovereignty of its neighbors - Afghanistan to the west and India on the east - the first strategy of an international collective will should be to circumscribe the country's sovereignty and place it under custodianship.
After World War I, when a transfer of colonies occurred between the losing German and Turkish empires to the victorious European ones, a mechanism called "mandate" was introduced at the League of Nations. Mandated territories were deemed unfit for self-rule by the victors of the war and taken over as de facto colonies "until such time as they are able to stand alone". After World War II, successors of the League mandates were rechristened "Trust Territories" and passed on to the UN to be "prepared for independence and majority rule".
Although mandates were thinly disguised veneers for colonial aggrandizement, they contain the germs of an idea for application to the now universally acknowledged "Pakistan problem". Both mandates and trusts were believed by practitioners at the time to be temporary waiting phases before a land could earn the spurs of a fully sovereign state. Although the judgement of whether these wards had the attributes of sovereign states was left to imperialist calculations, the notion that an international legal agreement could decide when and whether a country should be allowed to be sovereign is informative.
For Pakistan to be rid of its WMDs, hate preachers, terrorists and their infrastructure, only a handover of its sovereignty to a UN-designated custodian authority will be effective. Since sovereignty is closely associated with nationalism, such a grand experiment will undoubtedly meet fierce resistance within the Pakistani establishment and society. But there is no other way for the country's Augean Stables to be cleaned. Washington's pressure and protestations from Kabul or New Delhi have come and gone in vain for years without any concrete change in Pakistan's behavior.
A spell of international custodianship over Pakistan is the only feasible means for long-term transformation of the sub-continent's problem child. Those representatives of the Pakistani state who wish to strengthen moderation will benefit from a handover of sovereignty to the UN because the move promises to enhance civilian power and demilitarize policymaking. For Pakistani civil society, which has been struggling to counter what Harvard University professor Jessica Stern called the "jihad culture", a decade or so of international custodianship would open the space needed to rebuild the country with the cement of civic consciousness and religious tolerance. Pakistani activists should welcome coming under a UN trust and ally with like-minded forces pressing for this solution.
Besides Pakistani nationalism, an international campaign to bring the country under UN custodianship is bound to run into two stumbling blocks. The 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is likely to vote as a bloc in the UN General Assembly to stymie efforts to constrict the foreign and domestic powers of one of its members. Pakistan is no ordinary member of the OIC because of its possession of the so-called "Islamic bomb" and losing a nuclear-armed Muslim power will rankle with the OIC.
The other hurdle is China, for which the temporary loss of Pakistan's sovereignty will be a big blow to its strategic vision of dominating Asia by tying down India. The Chinese veto has been used sparingly in the UN Security Council, but it will definitely come down with a thump on the table if Pakistan is proposed to be delivered to international custodianship.
Can the OIC and China be convinced by a determined international movement to vest Pakistan's sovereignty in the UN's trust? Can Pakistan as a nation come around to accepting this bitter medicine as a necessary prelude to renaissance? These questions need to be answered soon for the sake of world peace. The longer the delay in legal takeover of Pakistan, the greater the chances are that the "WMD nation" will explode.
\A new study entitled "World at Risk" by a bipartisan American Congressional commission reveals that if one were to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) today, then "all roads would intersect in Pakistan". It warns that the next attacks on America might originate from Pakistan and urges the US president to take steps on a priority basis "securing" Islamabad's biological and nuclear weapons. Paraphrasing the report, the New Yorker magazine commented that Pakistan as a "nation itself is a kind of WMD".
Coming on the heels of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, which were planned and organized by Pakistani fundamentalists, the American warnings reflect a major dilemma facing international policymakers - how to make the world safe from Pakistan? The nature and extent of this challenge has been summed up by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, "Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption [and is] very poor ... "
What options does the world have to counter the multiple threats to international security and peace being posed by a dysfunctional and dangerously adrift country? Should a country that is itself a WMD be allowed to possess actual WMDs, which are not only liable to fall into the "wrong" hands but also be used by the "right" hands for emotional blackmail?
Irfan Hussain, a leading Pakistani newspaper columnist, recently bemoaned that "Pakistan was the only country in the world that negotiates with a gun to its own head. Our argument goes something like this: If you don't give us what we need, the government will collapse and this might result in anarchy, and a takeover by Islamic militants. Left unstated here is the global risk these elements would pose as they would have access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal." A state which threatens to explode and destroy everyone else on the planet unless it is pampered is akin to a suicide bomber whose message to his enemies is to change their policies "or else".
The issue to ponder for world leaders is whether an "international migraine" and "suicidal" state should be allowed to possess WMDs or, for that matter, be self-governing? Sovereignty, as an organizing principle of world affairs, is not merely a bestower of rights but also comes with certain responsibilities towards one's own people and to other sovereign countries. Pakistan's track record is one of waving the red flag and screaming SOS to assert its rights as a sovereign country, without fulfilling the corollary obligations.
While many developing countries may have failed to live up to the expectations of their populations to improve living standards and governance, Pakistan has the extra cachet of exporting terrorism and extremist religious values to other countries. The controversial call for "international humanitarian intervention" over the failure of a state to protect its own people from grave human rights abuses is premised on what is happening within a country. To be fair, Pakistan has not fared worse than many other developing countries on domestic human development indices. Albright's mention of corruption and poverty as causes for concern about Pakistan is not relevant as these are not unique failings.
What stands Pakistan apart, though, is its ability to breed terrorism, extremist ideology and nuclear fecklessness and project these outwards at the rest of the world. The correct international response to this should not a "humanitarian intervention" but one based on global collective will, represented by the United Nations. Given the sui generis mixture of threats presented by Pakistan, an equally novel response is warranted. Since Pakistani sovereignty has been misused to impair the sovereignty of its neighbors - Afghanistan to the west and India on the east - the first strategy of an international collective will should be to circumscribe the country's sovereignty and place it under custodianship.
After World War I, when a transfer of colonies occurred between the losing German and Turkish empires to the victorious European ones, a mechanism called "mandate" was introduced at the League of Nations. Mandated territories were deemed unfit for self-rule by the victors of the war and taken over as de facto colonies "until such time as they are able to stand alone". After World War II, successors of the League mandates were rechristened "Trust Territories" and passed on to the UN to be "prepared for independence and majority rule".
Although mandates were thinly disguised veneers for colonial aggrandizement, they contain the germs of an idea for application to the now universally acknowledged "Pakistan problem". Both mandates and trusts were believed by practitioners at the time to be temporary waiting phases before a land could earn the spurs of a fully sovereign state. Although the judgement of whether these wards had the attributes of sovereign states was left to imperialist calculations, the notion that an international legal agreement could decide when and whether a country should be allowed to be sovereign is informative.
For Pakistan to be rid of its WMDs, hate preachers, terrorists and their infrastructure, only a handover of its sovereignty to a UN-designated custodian authority will be effective. Since sovereignty is closely associated with nationalism, such a grand experiment will undoubtedly meet fierce resistance within the Pakistani establishment and society. But there is no other way for the country's Augean Stables to be cleaned. Washington's pressure and protestations from Kabul or New Delhi have come and gone in vain for years without any concrete change in Pakistan's behavior.
A spell of international custodianship over Pakistan is the only feasible means for long-term transformation of the sub-continent's problem child. Those representatives of the Pakistani state who wish to strengthen moderation will benefit from a handover of sovereignty to the UN because the move promises to enhance civilian power and demilitarize policymaking. For Pakistani civil society, which has been struggling to counter what Harvard University professor Jessica Stern called the "jihad culture", a decade or so of international custodianship would open the space needed to rebuild the country with the cement of civic consciousness and religious tolerance. Pakistani activists should welcome coming under a UN trust and ally with like-minded forces pressing for this solution.
Besides Pakistani nationalism, an international campaign to bring the country under UN custodianship is bound to run into two stumbling blocks. The 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is likely to vote as a bloc in the UN General Assembly to stymie efforts to constrict the foreign and domestic powers of one of its members. Pakistan is no ordinary member of the OIC because of its possession of the so-called "Islamic bomb" and losing a nuclear-armed Muslim power will rankle with the OIC.
The other hurdle is China, for which the temporary loss of Pakistan's sovereignty will be a big blow to its strategic vision of dominating Asia by tying down India. The Chinese veto has been used sparingly in the UN Security Council, but it will definitely come down with a thump on the table if Pakistan is proposed to be delivered to international custodianship.
Can the OIC and China be convinced by a determined international movement to vest Pakistan's sovereignty in the UN's trust? Can Pakistan as a nation come around to accepting this bitter medicine as a necessary prelude to renaissance? These questions need to be answered soon for the sake of world peace. The longer the delay in legal takeover of Pakistan, the greater the chances are that the "WMD nation" will explode.
The Monster in India's Mirror
By Arundhati Roy
We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys", he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.
But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
It's odd how, in the last week of November, thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara - one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects in these previous attacks, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television you might not have heard that ordinary people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness.
The Indian media, however, were transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of "India shining" and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish center.
We're told that one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) said, "Hungry, kya?" ("Hungry eh?"). It, then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that, on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia.
But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis (settlements) of our villages; on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.
That war isn't on TV. Yet.
So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
Terrorism and the need for context
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit, and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try to place it in a political context, or even to try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that, though nothing can ever excuse or justify it, terrorism exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.
The sayings of Hafiz Saeed who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shi'ites and democracy, and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world.
Among the things he said are:
"There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."
And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera):
We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire…we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don't care if I'm hanged ... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die ... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.
And where in Side A's scheme of things would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by M S Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. (The RSS is the ideological heart, the holding company of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and its militias. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr K B Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism.)
It says:
Ever since that evil day, when Muslims first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The race spirit has been awakening.
Or:
To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here ... a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.
Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently, in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two-and-a-half months of violence that left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of whom now live in refugee camps.
All these years, Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaatut Dawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jihad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11, the United Nations imposed sanctions on the Jamaatut Dawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest.
Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide, he left the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, a militia of the RSS) to join the Shiv Sena (another rightwing nationalist party). Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat.
So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata. Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said, "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted.
The RSS has 45,000 branches and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition L K Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats, police and intelligence officers.
And if that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organizations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.
A close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity and love
On this nuclear sub-continent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us in 1947.
Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India, left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Each of those people carries, and passes down, a story of unimaginable pain, hate and horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity, but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.
India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.
By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by L K Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it.
By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center in Delhi. The US "war on terror" put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy.
This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.
This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism on the sub-continent - and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and L K Advani of the RSS is from Sindh (Pakistan).
In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express, and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it had "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba, backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was behind the Mumbai strikes.
The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organization called the "Indian Mujahideen". Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a special police officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.
So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy.
Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously.
In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.
In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. And neither will war.
Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighboring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.
Releasing Frankensteins
Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.
As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.
Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders.
Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.
If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before.
If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.
It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.
On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.
The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary.
Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men, armed with guns and gadgets, exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard, and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.
While they did this, they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals, and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality.
(Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The US and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.)
But this was different. And it was on TV.
The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill - and be killed - mesmerized their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news.
Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.
Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.)
Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people, and inflict as much damage as they could, before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered.
Collateral damage When we say, "Nothing can justify terrorism," what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious.
So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.
One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself "Imran Babar". I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror e-mails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir.
"You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?"
"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.
If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?
Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the big picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.
It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.
A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theater, spectacle and symbolism, and today the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the Mumbai attacks were being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes was being magnified a thousand-fold by the TV broadcasts.
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least, there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed. (Is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?) We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation.
We had the death of former prime minister V P Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes, and the villain of upper caste Hindus, pass without a mention.
We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir give us his version of George W Bush's famous "Why They Hate Us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim, hate Mumbai, "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness."
His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever."
Didn't Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.
Shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks
Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state.
It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of grabbing by force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.
Dangerous, stupid oversimplifications like the police are good/politicians are bad, chief executives are good/chief ministers are bad, army is good/government is bad, India is good/Pakistan is bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.
Tragically this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that, in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles.
It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the past 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)
It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation.
Eventually, the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including S A R Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him, but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offense.
The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged that there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender."
Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19th of this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many "encounter specialists", known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists".
There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident.
In response, the BJP and L K Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying to do so was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national". Of course, there has been no enquiry.
Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted two kilograms of RDX (explosives) and two pistols on them, and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir).
Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.
This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, arrested Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man, Swami Dayanand Pande and Lieutenant Colonel Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the arrested belong to Hindu nationalist organizations, including a Hindu supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat.
The Shiv Sena, the BJP, and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists." L K Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.
On November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the blasts in Malegaon (a predominantly Muslim town). The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai attacks. Chances are the new chief, whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonizing and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces.
My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to the camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said. "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting."
For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today amounts to incitement, as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So, according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police.
This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world yet refuses to ratify the international covenant on torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.
The monster in the mirror
How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them?
There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering from now is far worse.
If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.
(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)
Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies/agents (including India) and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11.
George W Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11, is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by many of his own people.
Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the "war on terror?"
Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland.
We have a hostile nuclear-weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor; we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize, will end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.
If 10 men can hold off commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of homeland security can secure India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix.
Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go.
Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.
What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain - it would be naive to say end - terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice,” the other "Civil War". There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor and screenplay writer in India. A 10th anniversary edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, will be officially published within days. She is also the author of numerous non-fiction titles, including An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. This piece was published by Outlook India, which is sharing it with TomDispatch.com.
We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys", he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.
But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
It's odd how, in the last week of November, thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara - one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects in these previous attacks, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television you might not have heard that ordinary people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness.
The Indian media, however, were transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of "India shining" and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish center.
We're told that one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) said, "Hungry, kya?" ("Hungry eh?"). It, then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that, on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia.
But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis (settlements) of our villages; on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.
That war isn't on TV. Yet.
So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
Terrorism and the need for context
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit, and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try to place it in a political context, or even to try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that, though nothing can ever excuse or justify it, terrorism exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.
The sayings of Hafiz Saeed who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shi'ites and democracy, and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world.
Among the things he said are:
"There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."
And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera):
We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire…we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don't care if I'm hanged ... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die ... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.
And where in Side A's scheme of things would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by M S Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. (The RSS is the ideological heart, the holding company of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and its militias. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr K B Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism.)
It says:
Ever since that evil day, when Muslims first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The race spirit has been awakening.
Or:
To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here ... a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.
Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently, in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two-and-a-half months of violence that left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of whom now live in refugee camps.
All these years, Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaatut Dawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jihad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11, the United Nations imposed sanctions on the Jamaatut Dawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest.
Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide, he left the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, a militia of the RSS) to join the Shiv Sena (another rightwing nationalist party). Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat.
So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata. Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said, "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted.
The RSS has 45,000 branches and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition L K Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats, police and intelligence officers.
And if that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organizations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.
A close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity and love
On this nuclear sub-continent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us in 1947.
Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India, left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Each of those people carries, and passes down, a story of unimaginable pain, hate and horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity, but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.
India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.
By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by L K Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it.
By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center in Delhi. The US "war on terror" put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy.
This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.
This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism on the sub-continent - and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and L K Advani of the RSS is from Sindh (Pakistan).
In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express, and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it had "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba, backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was behind the Mumbai strikes.
The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organization called the "Indian Mujahideen". Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a special police officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.
So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy.
Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously.
In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.
In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. And neither will war.
Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighboring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.
Releasing Frankensteins
Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.
As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.
Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders.
Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.
If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before.
If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.
It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.
On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.
The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary.
Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men, armed with guns and gadgets, exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard, and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.
While they did this, they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals, and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality.
(Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The US and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.)
But this was different. And it was on TV.
The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill - and be killed - mesmerized their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news.
Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.
Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.)
Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people, and inflict as much damage as they could, before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered.
Collateral damage When we say, "Nothing can justify terrorism," what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious.
So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.
One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself "Imran Babar". I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror e-mails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir.
"You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?"
"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.
If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?
Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the big picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.
It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.
A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theater, spectacle and symbolism, and today the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the Mumbai attacks were being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes was being magnified a thousand-fold by the TV broadcasts.
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least, there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed. (Is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?) We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation.
We had the death of former prime minister V P Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes, and the villain of upper caste Hindus, pass without a mention.
We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir give us his version of George W Bush's famous "Why They Hate Us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim, hate Mumbai, "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness."
His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever."
Didn't Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.
Shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks
Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state.
It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of grabbing by force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.
Dangerous, stupid oversimplifications like the police are good/politicians are bad, chief executives are good/chief ministers are bad, army is good/government is bad, India is good/Pakistan is bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.
Tragically this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that, in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles.
It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the past 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)
It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation.
Eventually, the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including S A R Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him, but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offense.
The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged that there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender."
Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19th of this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many "encounter specialists", known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists".
There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident.
In response, the BJP and L K Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying to do so was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national". Of course, there has been no enquiry.
Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted two kilograms of RDX (explosives) and two pistols on them, and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir).
Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.
This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, arrested Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man, Swami Dayanand Pande and Lieutenant Colonel Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the arrested belong to Hindu nationalist organizations, including a Hindu supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat.
The Shiv Sena, the BJP, and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists." L K Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.
On November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the blasts in Malegaon (a predominantly Muslim town). The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai attacks. Chances are the new chief, whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonizing and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces.
My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to the camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said. "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting."
For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today amounts to incitement, as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So, according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police.
This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world yet refuses to ratify the international covenant on torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.
The monster in the mirror
How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them?
There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering from now is far worse.
If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.
(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)
Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies/agents (including India) and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11.
George W Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11, is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by many of his own people.
Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the "war on terror?"
Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland.
We have a hostile nuclear-weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor; we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize, will end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.
If 10 men can hold off commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of homeland security can secure India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix.
Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go.
Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.
What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain - it would be naive to say end - terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice,” the other "Civil War". There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor and screenplay writer in India. A 10th anniversary edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, will be officially published within days. She is also the author of numerous non-fiction titles, including An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. This piece was published by Outlook India, which is sharing it with TomDispatch.com.
Terrorism in India: An Uncertain Relief
By M H Ahssan
While India's relations with most of her neighbours remain fraught with tensions, her most urgent security crises remain overwhelmingly internal. Indeed, even international friction increasingly articulates itself through sub-conventional and terrorist wars that are predominantly internal, in that they manifest themselves principally on Indian soil. Islamist extremist terrorism sourced from Pakistan and, over the past few years, increasingly from Bangladesh, falls into this category.
A relief, in numbers
The recent trajectory of internal conflicts in India has been mixed. Overall, fatalities connected with terrorism and insurgency declined marginally from 2,765 in 2006 to 2,598 in 2007, and dramatically, from their peak at 5,839 in 2001.
In Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), for over a decade and a half the bloodiest theatre of terrorism in the country, there was strong relief, with terrorism-related fatalities – at 777 – falling below the 'high intensity conflict' mark of a thousand deaths for the first time since 1990. At peak in 2001, fatalities in J&K had risen to 4,507. Clearly, 2007 brought tremendous relief to the people of the state, but a great deal remains to be achieved before normalcy is restored.
In India's troubled Northeast, wracked by multiple insurgencies, the situation worsened considerably, with fatalities more than doubling, from 427 in 2006 to 1,019 in 2007, principally because of a dramatic escalation in terrorist activities in Assam and Manipur.
Effects of the war on terror
The numbers alone, however, do not give a clear picture of the magnitude of the challenges confronting New Delhi. Indeed, the sheer spread of Islamist terrorist incidents across India – linked to groups that originally operated exclusively within J&K – is now astonishing, with incidents having been engineered in widely dispersed theatres virtually across the country.
The trend in J&K has little correlation with specific changes in operational strategies or tactics, or with the range of 'peace initiatives' the Government has undertaken domestically and with Pakistan. This is demonstrated by the fact that the downward trend in violence has been consistently sustained since 2001, irrespective of the transient character of relationships between India and Pakistan, or any escalation or decline of operations within J&K, and has been maintained even through periods of escalating tension and provocative political rhetoric. This trend commenced immediately after the 9/11 attacks in the US and the subsequent threat by the US for Pakistan to "be prepared to be bombed back into the Stone Age."
It was this threat, a steady build-up of international pressure, and intense international media focus on Pakistan's role in the sponsorship of terrorism, which combined to force Pakistan to execute a U-turn in its policy on Afghanistan, and dilute visible support to terrorism in J&K. Thereafter, the unrelenting succession of crises in Pakistan have undermined the country's capacities to sustain past levels of terrorism in J&K – particularly since a large proportion of troops had to be pulled back from the Line of Control and International Border for deployment in increasingly violent theatres in Balochistan, NWFP and the FATA areas. Pakistan's creeping implosion has undermined the establishment's capacities to sustain the 'proxy war' against India at earlier levels.
Regrettably, if Western attention is diverted from the region, or if the Islamists in Pakistan are able to carve out autonomous capacities and regions, free of their dependence on the state's covert agencies, or if there is a radical escalation in the 'global jihad' in the wake of the proposed US withdrawal from Iraq in the foreseeable future, the 'jihad' in Kashmir and across India could, once again, intensify dramatically.
Bad governance and marginalization
Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that the limited 'gains' in terms of declining Maoist violence outside Andhra Pradesh, are the result, not of any significant initiatives on the part of the state's agencies, but rather, of a Maoist decision to focus on political and mass mobilisation in order to "intensify the people's war throughout the country, intending to cumulatively cover virtually the length and breadth of India.
Far from confronting this subversive onslaught, the incompetence of Governments – most dramatically the West Bengal Government and its actions in Nandigram, but less visibly in several other States – has presented the Maoists with proliferating opportunities to deepen subversive mobilization and recruitment.
Despite the dramatic macroeconomic growth experienced over the past decade and a half, vast populations have remained outside the scope of minimal standards on a wide range of developmental indices. Indeed, the processes of 'development' have themselves been severely disruptive; what we are witnessing today is at once a process of globalisation and marginalisation; the rise of oppressed castes through political processes, and parallel increases in the intensity of oppression; unimagined wealth and distressing poverty.
Need stronger political mandate
Nevertheless, in at least two major theatres of insurgency, Tripura in the Northeast and Andhra Pradesh in the South, local administrations have backed the police to execute extraordinarily successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Clearly, where the will and the vision exist, the Indian state has the capacity to combat violence and terrorism.
Unfortunately, a widening crisis of governance afflicts much of India today, with a continuous erosion of administrative capacities across wide areas. There is, moreover, an insufficient understanding within the security establishment of the details of insurgent strategy and tactics, and the imperatives of the character of response. The deficiencies of perspective and design are visible in the fact that no comprehensive strategy has yet been articulated to deal with insurgency and terrorism. The security forces have, at great cost in lives, made dramatic gains from time to time, but there have been continuous reverses, usually as a result of repeated political miscalculations and the refusal to provide the necessary mandate to the forces operating against the extremists.
While India's relations with most of her neighbours remain fraught with tensions, her most urgent security crises remain overwhelmingly internal. Indeed, even international friction increasingly articulates itself through sub-conventional and terrorist wars that are predominantly internal, in that they manifest themselves principally on Indian soil. Islamist extremist terrorism sourced from Pakistan and, over the past few years, increasingly from Bangladesh, falls into this category.
A relief, in numbers
The recent trajectory of internal conflicts in India has been mixed. Overall, fatalities connected with terrorism and insurgency declined marginally from 2,765 in 2006 to 2,598 in 2007, and dramatically, from their peak at 5,839 in 2001.
In Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), for over a decade and a half the bloodiest theatre of terrorism in the country, there was strong relief, with terrorism-related fatalities – at 777 – falling below the 'high intensity conflict' mark of a thousand deaths for the first time since 1990. At peak in 2001, fatalities in J&K had risen to 4,507. Clearly, 2007 brought tremendous relief to the people of the state, but a great deal remains to be achieved before normalcy is restored.
In India's troubled Northeast, wracked by multiple insurgencies, the situation worsened considerably, with fatalities more than doubling, from 427 in 2006 to 1,019 in 2007, principally because of a dramatic escalation in terrorist activities in Assam and Manipur.
Effects of the war on terror
The numbers alone, however, do not give a clear picture of the magnitude of the challenges confronting New Delhi. Indeed, the sheer spread of Islamist terrorist incidents across India – linked to groups that originally operated exclusively within J&K – is now astonishing, with incidents having been engineered in widely dispersed theatres virtually across the country.
The trend in J&K has little correlation with specific changes in operational strategies or tactics, or with the range of 'peace initiatives' the Government has undertaken domestically and with Pakistan. This is demonstrated by the fact that the downward trend in violence has been consistently sustained since 2001, irrespective of the transient character of relationships between India and Pakistan, or any escalation or decline of operations within J&K, and has been maintained even through periods of escalating tension and provocative political rhetoric. This trend commenced immediately after the 9/11 attacks in the US and the subsequent threat by the US for Pakistan to "be prepared to be bombed back into the Stone Age."
It was this threat, a steady build-up of international pressure, and intense international media focus on Pakistan's role in the sponsorship of terrorism, which combined to force Pakistan to execute a U-turn in its policy on Afghanistan, and dilute visible support to terrorism in J&K. Thereafter, the unrelenting succession of crises in Pakistan have undermined the country's capacities to sustain past levels of terrorism in J&K – particularly since a large proportion of troops had to be pulled back from the Line of Control and International Border for deployment in increasingly violent theatres in Balochistan, NWFP and the FATA areas. Pakistan's creeping implosion has undermined the establishment's capacities to sustain the 'proxy war' against India at earlier levels.
Regrettably, if Western attention is diverted from the region, or if the Islamists in Pakistan are able to carve out autonomous capacities and regions, free of their dependence on the state's covert agencies, or if there is a radical escalation in the 'global jihad' in the wake of the proposed US withdrawal from Iraq in the foreseeable future, the 'jihad' in Kashmir and across India could, once again, intensify dramatically.
Bad governance and marginalization
Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that the limited 'gains' in terms of declining Maoist violence outside Andhra Pradesh, are the result, not of any significant initiatives on the part of the state's agencies, but rather, of a Maoist decision to focus on political and mass mobilisation in order to "intensify the people's war throughout the country, intending to cumulatively cover virtually the length and breadth of India.
Far from confronting this subversive onslaught, the incompetence of Governments – most dramatically the West Bengal Government and its actions in Nandigram, but less visibly in several other States – has presented the Maoists with proliferating opportunities to deepen subversive mobilization and recruitment.
Despite the dramatic macroeconomic growth experienced over the past decade and a half, vast populations have remained outside the scope of minimal standards on a wide range of developmental indices. Indeed, the processes of 'development' have themselves been severely disruptive; what we are witnessing today is at once a process of globalisation and marginalisation; the rise of oppressed castes through political processes, and parallel increases in the intensity of oppression; unimagined wealth and distressing poverty.
Need stronger political mandate
Nevertheless, in at least two major theatres of insurgency, Tripura in the Northeast and Andhra Pradesh in the South, local administrations have backed the police to execute extraordinarily successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Clearly, where the will and the vision exist, the Indian state has the capacity to combat violence and terrorism.
Unfortunately, a widening crisis of governance afflicts much of India today, with a continuous erosion of administrative capacities across wide areas. There is, moreover, an insufficient understanding within the security establishment of the details of insurgent strategy and tactics, and the imperatives of the character of response. The deficiencies of perspective and design are visible in the fact that no comprehensive strategy has yet been articulated to deal with insurgency and terrorism. The security forces have, at great cost in lives, made dramatic gains from time to time, but there have been continuous reverses, usually as a result of repeated political miscalculations and the refusal to provide the necessary mandate to the forces operating against the extremists.
Islam And Compassion – An Scriptural, Historical And Contemporary Perspective
By M H Ahssan
Islam is generally associated with Jihad popularly interpreted as war. But the fact is that a careful understanding of the Qur’an in its totality clearly establishes that mercy, compassion and peace are the predominant values. There are few verses in Qur’an on war and killing. These verses have been given more importance both by some Muslims as well as antagonistic non-Muslims.
Muslims, because they wanted to justify war for territorial conquests and non-Muslims as they wanted to prove Islam is a religion of war and violence. Both these Muslim’s as well as non-Muslims, have strong vested interests in understanding the Qur’an in their own ways so as to promote their interests. However, those who have no such interests, would like to understand Qur’an in its real spirit.]
Before we proceed further I would like to emphasize that Islam is a religion, not a political system or ideology, as some Muslims and non-Muslims would like to project it. It is also not true that in Islam politics cannot be divorced from religion. If we examine Islamic history, it would be abundantly clear that Islam as a religion had always been twisted to suit political ends. It is politics which always reined supreme subordinating religion to its interest.
Religion represents human beings’ inner, spiritual need and always stresses spiritual values and practices designed to realize these spiritual values. Spiritual values can be realized only when there are conditions of peace both inner and outer. Inner peace is necessary for outer peace and similarly peace out there reinforces peace within. No religion thus will promote war and destruction.
It is only rulers and conquerors who resort to war and often use religion or certain aspects of religion for the justification of territorial war. But a truly religious person who takes spiritual aspects of religion seriously, would not only shun war but oppose it, whatever justification by the rulers.
The Prophet of Islam was intensely spiritual person and hence Qur’an describes him as Rahmatun lil alamin (Mercy of the worlds). Had he been in pursuit of power he would not be described as such. The whole biography of the Prophet (PBUH) shows he never went out in pursuit of power. He never raised an army for that purpose. He remained committed to peace.
However, there were occasions in his life when he had to fight, fight in defence of himself and fledgling community of Muslims as unbelievers of Mecca never left him in peace. He had to migrate from Mecca when oppression by Meccan unbelievers became intolerable. It speaks volumes for the Prophet (PBUH) that he never prayed against them even during worst of the situations he faced.
When he entered Mecca during last years of his life he never sought revenge from anyone.[1] He showed compassion to worst of his enemies like Hinda who had chewed liver of his Uncle Hamza. The tribal law of Arabia required that she be killed and her liver also be chewed. However, Prophet (PBUH) being highly spiritual man, resorted to compassion rather than qisas (retaliation in equal measure).
The Prophet never declared war against any nation, nor against any tribe. But when attacked he fought for his defense. All such verses in Qur’an about war pertain to such situations Prophet faced. In many cases the tribes with which Prophet had entered into peace treaty broke it and treacherously attacked Muslims. It was only then that Qur’an ordered him to fight in self defence.
We would like to quote some such verses so that we can understand its context. In this context the chapter 9 known as Surah Bara’ or chapter on Immunity. This chapter mainly deals with the problem of some tribes breaking their treaty with Muslims repeatedly and advises Muslims to declare immunity (bara’) from such treaty as these tribes were not observing terms and conditions of the treaty.
Maulana Muhammad Ali, a noted commentator on the Qur’an observed in the opening statement to this chapter, “The title of this chapter is taken from the opening statement, which contains declaration of immunity from obligations with such of the idolatrous tribes as had repeatedly broken their engagements. This declaration is one of the most important events in the history of Islam, for hitherto the Muslims had constantly suffered from the hostility of the unscrupulous idolatrous tribes who had no regard for their treaties, dealing a blow at the Muslims wherever they had an opportunity of doing so.”
Thus it should be remembered that in this chapter there are verses asking Muslims to fight and kill wherever they find members of the tribe who had broken the treaty and dealt heavy blow to Muslim’s. Taken out of this context the verses will surprise any reader of these verses as to how a compassionate and just God could order such killings. But these verses must be read in the context in which they were revealed and utter adversity which Muslims were facing in that society where violence was very way of life.
Thus this chapter opens with these words, ” A Declaration of immunity from Allah and His Messenger to those of the idolaters with whom you made an agreement.” (9:1) Now this statement right at the outset of the chapter 9 explains why Muslims were allowed to fight against idolatrous tribes. The fact that Muslims had entered into treaty with these tribes clearly show that they wanted to co-exist with these idolaters provided they reciprocated. Peaceful co-existence was the main objective.
But when these tribes broke their promise the Qur’an said to Muslims, “Will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and aimed at the expulsion of the Messenger, and they attacked you first. Do you fear them? But Allah has more right that you should fear Him, if you are believers.” (9:13)
Thus this verse clearly states that Muslims have been attacked first and hence they should defend themselves and fight back fearing only Allah and not the enemy. It is well known principle of the civilized world to defend oneself if attacked. How can then one say that Qur’an promotes war and bloodshed and requires believers to kill kafirs. The verses in isolation may seem to mean that way but one must understand significance of these verses only in totality of the Qur’anic verses including value-giving or normative verses. They cannot be taken in isolation.
What is often quoted is the following verse which is apparently shocking, if read in isolation, not only of the historical context but also of normative Qur’anic verses. The verse reads, “Fight those who believe not in Allah, not in the last Day, nor forbid that which Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the Religion of Truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” (9:29)
Obviously this verse refers to Christians and not idolaters as it uses the words ‘those who have been given the Book’. The Qur’an validates the religions brought by previous prophets from Adam to Christ and calls their followers as people of the Book. And hence there is no reason to declare war against them on the grounds of idolatry. The only reason to declare war against them was determination of Roman Empire which was Christian to uproot Islam and hence Qur’an wanted Muslims to fight to finish with them.
There are other verses in the Qur’an which clearly say that Jews and Christians are also believers and Allah has sent His prophets with truth to them and Muslims must respect them. The Prophet of Islam extended hand of friendship to the Christians of Najran and met their delegation inside his mosque and insisted that they (Christians) pray inside the mosque. He also signed a treaty with them guaranteeing them freedom of their religion and protection of their churches.
Also there are verses in Qur’an which guarantees paradise to Jews and Christians if they do good deeds. Thus in verse 2:62 we read, “Surely who believe, and those who are Jews, and Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the last Day and does good, they have their reward with their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve,” if the above verse clearly states that those Jews and Christians who believe in Allah and the Last Day and do good deeds they shall have their reward with their Lord then why Quran ask Muslims to fight until the followers of the Book are defeated unless they are trying to wipe out Muslims and uproot Islam as the Roman Empire wanted to?
The Qur’an in fact is book of guidance, not of war and encourages Muslims to live in peace and harmony and coexist with all people be they unbelievers or Jews or Christians or of any other persuasion whatsoever. It is thus highly necessary that we understand Qur’an and its purpose for which it was revealed. Thorough Meccan period Qur’an kept on advising Muslims to bear all problems with patience and steadfastness and not to retaliate. The Muslims bore all oppression with greatest patience.
In fact the great virtues Qur’an stresses are compassion (rahmah), forgiveness (’afw) and patience (sabr). The Qur’an opens with four words Bism Allah al-Rahman Al-Rahim i.e. I begin in the name of Allah who is Merciful and Compassionate. Thus mercy and compassion are among Allah’s names, among others. And Muslims begin all their work with these words i.e. I begin in the name of Allah who is Merciful and Compassionate. This is so to make Muslims aware of importance of mercy and compassion.
I can say without any hesitation that peace, mercy and compassion are very central to Islam not fighting with non-believers, as one finds in the theology developed during medieval ages. We must thus explore why mercy, compassion, steadfastness, justice and benevolence so central to Qur’anic teachings lost their importance compared to ‘jihad’. In the contemporary world also, some misguided youth who commit acts of terrorism continue to draw from this theology.
As for theology and religious laws called shari’ah were human product in as much as human beings formulated them on selective readings of Qur’an and hadith (Prophet’s sayings. There is definite difference between Qur’anic pronouncements and theological or Shari’ah formulations.
As to this difference we must bear in mind that a religion is practiced at various levels, by people of first generation who live and work with the founder, by ordinary people who convert to that religion for their own reasons, or conviction, by ruling classes to suit their own interests and by those who completely identify themselves with its spirit and renounce their worldly interests.
Among those who were of first generation and lived and worked with the Prophet (PBUH) there were those who imbibed true spirit of Islam and practiced its values and virtues given above. Then there were those who developed political ambitions and interpreted religion in their own way, yet tried also to follow its spirit to a limited extent. Also, Islam kept on spreading outside Arabia and people of non-Arab origin embraced it for their own reasons.
Thus various groups developed in Islam apart from the ruling class Muslims. Many ‘ulama sided with the ruling class and did what was desired by the rulers and some ‘ulama resisted temptations to side with rulers and ruling classes to adhere to the spirit of Islam. Many Muslims withdrew from this struggle and began to live life in isolation from public view in khanqah (hospices).
Those ‘ulama who sided with rulers interpreted Qur’an and hadith in a way acceptable to rulers but never became popular among ordinary Muslims and their views were rejected. But those who developed Islamic laws or constructed Islamic theology independently became acceptable and popular among people but they too carried stamp of their time on their legal and theological systems.
Entire legal and theological system was formulated in a situation in which Muslims were an overwhelming majority and also the time frame and the period in which they worked had its own logic which could not be avoided. Though the Qur’an repeatedly stressed that all previous religions were also true and brought by prophets sent by Allah the view that Islam was superior could not be avoided and Muslims became more privileged than others.
The entire legal and theological system carried stamp of this thinking and is fully validated even today. Muslims belonged to the ruling majority and non-Muslims, even those described as people of the Book faced the same fate though they were fully protected and their lives guaranteed. Yet they were non-equal. I think according to the values of the time it was the best bargain for them as among other religious communities Muslims or people of other religions, other than those belonging to non-ruling religious communities, they were treated in a much worse manner.
But the world of Sufis was very different. Their lives were completely devoted to spiritual practices and there was no question of any discrimination. The Muslim Sufis, Christian mystics and Jewish Cabala parishioners met and indulged in spiritual practices on equal terms. The Sufis were devoted to values and not only rituals. The virtues promoted by Qur’an – compassion, patience, humility and quest for truth were practiced in their real spirit.
The Sufis were not drawn towards grandeurs of this world. They preferred utter simplicity and were content with basic needs. One can practice values in their true spirit only when one resists desires and greed. We find striking examples of compassion and forgiveness among these Sufis. They could not bear suffering of others and were moved to remove suffering.
A Sufi saint called Junaid once saw an ant crawling in his room. He thought he would unconsciously trample upon it and it is likely to be killed and this thought made him very restless. He began thinking of ways and means to save the ant. He saw a vessel containing wheat flour and he gently lifted the ant and left it inside the vessel so that it can feed on it and also be saved.
They never wanted to possess anything beyond their basic needs and would give away the rest in the way of Allah. They used to receive offerings from their followers and they would spend all that by running kitchen called langar where all those hungry could eat whenever they liked. Langar was free for all. Even if they had little they would share with those needier.
Once a poor man came to Nizamuddin Awliya, a great sufi saint of thirteenth century India. He wanted few tankas (currency unit of the time) but Nizamuddin had none. He thought for a while and gave him his worn out shoe. The man was surprised as to how this is going to solve his problem. But he had no other way and took it and went out. On the way he met a man and inquired about the worn out shoe. He said it was given to him by Nizamuddin.
He said how much do you need and the poor man told him how much he needed. He gave him twice as much and took away the shoe as some thing highly precious. Then the man understood why Nizamuddin gave him his worn out shoe. These Sufis would help all suffering souls in whatever way they could. They tried to control their desire and interpreted the word jihad, unlike the ruling classes as war against ones own desires rather than war against eternal enemy. For them greatest enemy was ones own desire as this desire actually leads to war for grabbing others territory, others possessions. They called fighting against own desire as jihad-e-akbar i.e. the greatest jihad.
On their scale of values compassion and forgiveness and reducing others suffering stood much higher than fighting against external enemies. They considered themselves as followers of those of Prophet’s companions who were poor and had no worldly ambition and were ever ready to sacrifice everything they had. It is these Sufis who attracted non-Muslims to Islam by being role model.
Today in our contemporary world consumerism and greed are our great enemies. Without resisting undue desire for luxury and comforts at the cost of others we cannot avoid wars. Gandhiji, the saint of modern India observed that there is enough on this earth to fulfill our desires but not enough to satisfy the greed of one. Only those devoid of compassion and blinded by naked desire are responsible for war and destruction in our age also.
Islam’s basic emphasis is also on compassion, human dignity and justice and peace. Islam as a religion spread fast among people because of these values, not because of sword. Sword was wielded by rulers and they frightened rather than attracted whereas Sufis attracted rather than frightened because of their emphasis on values. Those misguided terrorists need to coolly reflect on these values.
Unfortunately they hardly take into account Islamic values of forgiveness, compassion for human suffering and upholding sanctity of human life. This is possible only when you separate religion and religious conduct from power. Powerfulness and religiosity can never go together. Power and arrogance go together. Any individual or nation drunk with power becomes arrogant.
Maulana Rum, a great sufi of his time chided his disciples when they started beating a drunkard when he fell down on them saying he is not in his senses but you are real drunkard as you are drunk with power on helpless person and he is drunk with wine not with power. We cannot be compassionate if we are too drunk with power. I would like to conclude with a quotation from Maulana Rum who represents real spirit of Islam. He said ‘come come to me if you are a Jew or Christian or a Muslim or even if you are a sinner as you are all human beings. Allah is compassionate and forgives sinners, if they repent sincerely. Compassion and forgiveness, not power and arrogance, will make us better Muslims’.
Islam is generally associated with Jihad popularly interpreted as war. But the fact is that a careful understanding of the Qur’an in its totality clearly establishes that mercy, compassion and peace are the predominant values. There are few verses in Qur’an on war and killing. These verses have been given more importance both by some Muslims as well as antagonistic non-Muslims.
Muslims, because they wanted to justify war for territorial conquests and non-Muslims as they wanted to prove Islam is a religion of war and violence. Both these Muslim’s as well as non-Muslims, have strong vested interests in understanding the Qur’an in their own ways so as to promote their interests. However, those who have no such interests, would like to understand Qur’an in its real spirit.]
Before we proceed further I would like to emphasize that Islam is a religion, not a political system or ideology, as some Muslims and non-Muslims would like to project it. It is also not true that in Islam politics cannot be divorced from religion. If we examine Islamic history, it would be abundantly clear that Islam as a religion had always been twisted to suit political ends. It is politics which always reined supreme subordinating religion to its interest.
Religion represents human beings’ inner, spiritual need and always stresses spiritual values and practices designed to realize these spiritual values. Spiritual values can be realized only when there are conditions of peace both inner and outer. Inner peace is necessary for outer peace and similarly peace out there reinforces peace within. No religion thus will promote war and destruction.
It is only rulers and conquerors who resort to war and often use religion or certain aspects of religion for the justification of territorial war. But a truly religious person who takes spiritual aspects of religion seriously, would not only shun war but oppose it, whatever justification by the rulers.
The Prophet of Islam was intensely spiritual person and hence Qur’an describes him as Rahmatun lil alamin (Mercy of the worlds). Had he been in pursuit of power he would not be described as such. The whole biography of the Prophet (PBUH) shows he never went out in pursuit of power. He never raised an army for that purpose. He remained committed to peace.
However, there were occasions in his life when he had to fight, fight in defence of himself and fledgling community of Muslims as unbelievers of Mecca never left him in peace. He had to migrate from Mecca when oppression by Meccan unbelievers became intolerable. It speaks volumes for the Prophet (PBUH) that he never prayed against them even during worst of the situations he faced.
When he entered Mecca during last years of his life he never sought revenge from anyone.[1] He showed compassion to worst of his enemies like Hinda who had chewed liver of his Uncle Hamza. The tribal law of Arabia required that she be killed and her liver also be chewed. However, Prophet (PBUH) being highly spiritual man, resorted to compassion rather than qisas (retaliation in equal measure).
The Prophet never declared war against any nation, nor against any tribe. But when attacked he fought for his defense. All such verses in Qur’an about war pertain to such situations Prophet faced. In many cases the tribes with which Prophet had entered into peace treaty broke it and treacherously attacked Muslims. It was only then that Qur’an ordered him to fight in self defence.
We would like to quote some such verses so that we can understand its context. In this context the chapter 9 known as Surah Bara’ or chapter on Immunity. This chapter mainly deals with the problem of some tribes breaking their treaty with Muslims repeatedly and advises Muslims to declare immunity (bara’) from such treaty as these tribes were not observing terms and conditions of the treaty.
Maulana Muhammad Ali, a noted commentator on the Qur’an observed in the opening statement to this chapter, “The title of this chapter is taken from the opening statement, which contains declaration of immunity from obligations with such of the idolatrous tribes as had repeatedly broken their engagements. This declaration is one of the most important events in the history of Islam, for hitherto the Muslims had constantly suffered from the hostility of the unscrupulous idolatrous tribes who had no regard for their treaties, dealing a blow at the Muslims wherever they had an opportunity of doing so.”
Thus it should be remembered that in this chapter there are verses asking Muslims to fight and kill wherever they find members of the tribe who had broken the treaty and dealt heavy blow to Muslim’s. Taken out of this context the verses will surprise any reader of these verses as to how a compassionate and just God could order such killings. But these verses must be read in the context in which they were revealed and utter adversity which Muslims were facing in that society where violence was very way of life.
Thus this chapter opens with these words, ” A Declaration of immunity from Allah and His Messenger to those of the idolaters with whom you made an agreement.” (9:1) Now this statement right at the outset of the chapter 9 explains why Muslims were allowed to fight against idolatrous tribes. The fact that Muslims had entered into treaty with these tribes clearly show that they wanted to co-exist with these idolaters provided they reciprocated. Peaceful co-existence was the main objective.
But when these tribes broke their promise the Qur’an said to Muslims, “Will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and aimed at the expulsion of the Messenger, and they attacked you first. Do you fear them? But Allah has more right that you should fear Him, if you are believers.” (9:13)
Thus this verse clearly states that Muslims have been attacked first and hence they should defend themselves and fight back fearing only Allah and not the enemy. It is well known principle of the civilized world to defend oneself if attacked. How can then one say that Qur’an promotes war and bloodshed and requires believers to kill kafirs. The verses in isolation may seem to mean that way but one must understand significance of these verses only in totality of the Qur’anic verses including value-giving or normative verses. They cannot be taken in isolation.
What is often quoted is the following verse which is apparently shocking, if read in isolation, not only of the historical context but also of normative Qur’anic verses. The verse reads, “Fight those who believe not in Allah, not in the last Day, nor forbid that which Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the Religion of Truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” (9:29)
Obviously this verse refers to Christians and not idolaters as it uses the words ‘those who have been given the Book’. The Qur’an validates the religions brought by previous prophets from Adam to Christ and calls their followers as people of the Book. And hence there is no reason to declare war against them on the grounds of idolatry. The only reason to declare war against them was determination of Roman Empire which was Christian to uproot Islam and hence Qur’an wanted Muslims to fight to finish with them.
There are other verses in the Qur’an which clearly say that Jews and Christians are also believers and Allah has sent His prophets with truth to them and Muslims must respect them. The Prophet of Islam extended hand of friendship to the Christians of Najran and met their delegation inside his mosque and insisted that they (Christians) pray inside the mosque. He also signed a treaty with them guaranteeing them freedom of their religion and protection of their churches.
Also there are verses in Qur’an which guarantees paradise to Jews and Christians if they do good deeds. Thus in verse 2:62 we read, “Surely who believe, and those who are Jews, and Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the last Day and does good, they have their reward with their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve,” if the above verse clearly states that those Jews and Christians who believe in Allah and the Last Day and do good deeds they shall have their reward with their Lord then why Quran ask Muslims to fight until the followers of the Book are defeated unless they are trying to wipe out Muslims and uproot Islam as the Roman Empire wanted to?
The Qur’an in fact is book of guidance, not of war and encourages Muslims to live in peace and harmony and coexist with all people be they unbelievers or Jews or Christians or of any other persuasion whatsoever. It is thus highly necessary that we understand Qur’an and its purpose for which it was revealed. Thorough Meccan period Qur’an kept on advising Muslims to bear all problems with patience and steadfastness and not to retaliate. The Muslims bore all oppression with greatest patience.
In fact the great virtues Qur’an stresses are compassion (rahmah), forgiveness (’afw) and patience (sabr). The Qur’an opens with four words Bism Allah al-Rahman Al-Rahim i.e. I begin in the name of Allah who is Merciful and Compassionate. Thus mercy and compassion are among Allah’s names, among others. And Muslims begin all their work with these words i.e. I begin in the name of Allah who is Merciful and Compassionate. This is so to make Muslims aware of importance of mercy and compassion.
I can say without any hesitation that peace, mercy and compassion are very central to Islam not fighting with non-believers, as one finds in the theology developed during medieval ages. We must thus explore why mercy, compassion, steadfastness, justice and benevolence so central to Qur’anic teachings lost their importance compared to ‘jihad’. In the contemporary world also, some misguided youth who commit acts of terrorism continue to draw from this theology.
As for theology and religious laws called shari’ah were human product in as much as human beings formulated them on selective readings of Qur’an and hadith (Prophet’s sayings. There is definite difference between Qur’anic pronouncements and theological or Shari’ah formulations.
As to this difference we must bear in mind that a religion is practiced at various levels, by people of first generation who live and work with the founder, by ordinary people who convert to that religion for their own reasons, or conviction, by ruling classes to suit their own interests and by those who completely identify themselves with its spirit and renounce their worldly interests.
Among those who were of first generation and lived and worked with the Prophet (PBUH) there were those who imbibed true spirit of Islam and practiced its values and virtues given above. Then there were those who developed political ambitions and interpreted religion in their own way, yet tried also to follow its spirit to a limited extent. Also, Islam kept on spreading outside Arabia and people of non-Arab origin embraced it for their own reasons.
Thus various groups developed in Islam apart from the ruling class Muslims. Many ‘ulama sided with the ruling class and did what was desired by the rulers and some ‘ulama resisted temptations to side with rulers and ruling classes to adhere to the spirit of Islam. Many Muslims withdrew from this struggle and began to live life in isolation from public view in khanqah (hospices).
Those ‘ulama who sided with rulers interpreted Qur’an and hadith in a way acceptable to rulers but never became popular among ordinary Muslims and their views were rejected. But those who developed Islamic laws or constructed Islamic theology independently became acceptable and popular among people but they too carried stamp of their time on their legal and theological systems.
Entire legal and theological system was formulated in a situation in which Muslims were an overwhelming majority and also the time frame and the period in which they worked had its own logic which could not be avoided. Though the Qur’an repeatedly stressed that all previous religions were also true and brought by prophets sent by Allah the view that Islam was superior could not be avoided and Muslims became more privileged than others.
The entire legal and theological system carried stamp of this thinking and is fully validated even today. Muslims belonged to the ruling majority and non-Muslims, even those described as people of the Book faced the same fate though they were fully protected and their lives guaranteed. Yet they were non-equal. I think according to the values of the time it was the best bargain for them as among other religious communities Muslims or people of other religions, other than those belonging to non-ruling religious communities, they were treated in a much worse manner.
But the world of Sufis was very different. Their lives were completely devoted to spiritual practices and there was no question of any discrimination. The Muslim Sufis, Christian mystics and Jewish Cabala parishioners met and indulged in spiritual practices on equal terms. The Sufis were devoted to values and not only rituals. The virtues promoted by Qur’an – compassion, patience, humility and quest for truth were practiced in their real spirit.
The Sufis were not drawn towards grandeurs of this world. They preferred utter simplicity and were content with basic needs. One can practice values in their true spirit only when one resists desires and greed. We find striking examples of compassion and forgiveness among these Sufis. They could not bear suffering of others and were moved to remove suffering.
A Sufi saint called Junaid once saw an ant crawling in his room. He thought he would unconsciously trample upon it and it is likely to be killed and this thought made him very restless. He began thinking of ways and means to save the ant. He saw a vessel containing wheat flour and he gently lifted the ant and left it inside the vessel so that it can feed on it and also be saved.
They never wanted to possess anything beyond their basic needs and would give away the rest in the way of Allah. They used to receive offerings from their followers and they would spend all that by running kitchen called langar where all those hungry could eat whenever they liked. Langar was free for all. Even if they had little they would share with those needier.
Once a poor man came to Nizamuddin Awliya, a great sufi saint of thirteenth century India. He wanted few tankas (currency unit of the time) but Nizamuddin had none. He thought for a while and gave him his worn out shoe. The man was surprised as to how this is going to solve his problem. But he had no other way and took it and went out. On the way he met a man and inquired about the worn out shoe. He said it was given to him by Nizamuddin.
He said how much do you need and the poor man told him how much he needed. He gave him twice as much and took away the shoe as some thing highly precious. Then the man understood why Nizamuddin gave him his worn out shoe. These Sufis would help all suffering souls in whatever way they could. They tried to control their desire and interpreted the word jihad, unlike the ruling classes as war against ones own desires rather than war against eternal enemy. For them greatest enemy was ones own desire as this desire actually leads to war for grabbing others territory, others possessions. They called fighting against own desire as jihad-e-akbar i.e. the greatest jihad.
On their scale of values compassion and forgiveness and reducing others suffering stood much higher than fighting against external enemies. They considered themselves as followers of those of Prophet’s companions who were poor and had no worldly ambition and were ever ready to sacrifice everything they had. It is these Sufis who attracted non-Muslims to Islam by being role model.
Today in our contemporary world consumerism and greed are our great enemies. Without resisting undue desire for luxury and comforts at the cost of others we cannot avoid wars. Gandhiji, the saint of modern India observed that there is enough on this earth to fulfill our desires but not enough to satisfy the greed of one. Only those devoid of compassion and blinded by naked desire are responsible for war and destruction in our age also.
Islam’s basic emphasis is also on compassion, human dignity and justice and peace. Islam as a religion spread fast among people because of these values, not because of sword. Sword was wielded by rulers and they frightened rather than attracted whereas Sufis attracted rather than frightened because of their emphasis on values. Those misguided terrorists need to coolly reflect on these values.
Unfortunately they hardly take into account Islamic values of forgiveness, compassion for human suffering and upholding sanctity of human life. This is possible only when you separate religion and religious conduct from power. Powerfulness and religiosity can never go together. Power and arrogance go together. Any individual or nation drunk with power becomes arrogant.
Maulana Rum, a great sufi of his time chided his disciples when they started beating a drunkard when he fell down on them saying he is not in his senses but you are real drunkard as you are drunk with power on helpless person and he is drunk with wine not with power. We cannot be compassionate if we are too drunk with power. I would like to conclude with a quotation from Maulana Rum who represents real spirit of Islam. He said ‘come come to me if you are a Jew or Christian or a Muslim or even if you are a sinner as you are all human beings. Allah is compassionate and forgives sinners, if they repent sincerely. Compassion and forgiveness, not power and arrogance, will make us better Muslims’.
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