Perspectives of the "War on Terror"

[Bogen]

A relatively new friend from Calcutta said something interesting to me the other day, I wanted to share it with this board.

 

We were taking about Muslims in India, and he said that many of his peers feel that muslims take advantage of the Indian's peaceful nature, using violence to try to enforce their own religion. The nature of this resentment runs so deep, he says, that the sentiment around the University he was attending in fall of 2001 was morbidly gleeful. As in, as my friend said, "those muslims are going to get their asses kicked now!"

 

Speaking for his friends and family back in India, they are quite satisfied with the results of the war on terror thus far.

 

I had a similar conversation with an Afghani ex-pat restaurant owner in Vancouver a couple years ago, who had nothing but happiness and gratitude in his heart for the western forces in his country of birth.

 

 

 

[prole]

From India’s Urban War: Through the Smoke.

The logic of “India’s war on terror” can be understood at two levels. First, the emergence of the Muslim “other” neatly fits the pre-existing Hindu nationalist discourse which historically locates Muslims as the “enemy within”. This narrative views Muslims primarily as invaders from west-central Asia who subjugated Hindu India; it may be factually dubious and contested but it is used frequently to tarnish Muslims as permanent outsiders whose allegiance to the nation is suspect. The logic can be extended to encompass Indian Christians as well as Muslims (see Jacob Ignatius, “India’s Christians: politics of violence in Orissa”, 1 September 2008); both are seen as converts disloyal to their “original” and native religion. This feeds the aggressive pursuit of “reconversion” to Hinduism in the form of ghar vapasi (homecoming).

Second, this logic moves transports the violence from a local to a global level where India is seen as one among many democratic societies battling Islamist terrorism. The implication is that the violence is disconnected both from India’s dysfunctional socio-political developments and its own historicity. Yet these factors are important: Indian Muslims constitute 13.8% of the total population (around 140 million), and rank low on almost every socio-economic measure in India. The official Rajinder Sachar commission report, for example, showed that Muslim representation in the public sector is 3%-7% even in states where Muslims compose nearly a third of the population. In the booming economy of “new’ India, Muslims hardly figure because much of the growth is in high-skilled sectors that few are trained for.

 

The Skewed Optic

The socio-economic marginalisation of Indian Muslims does not in itself explain the current wave of attacks. But alongside the modern history of violence in India - including anti-Muslim violence - it does help to put the phenomenon in context. The most notorious incident was in 1992, when a 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, central India - the Babri masjid - was demolished by Hindu nationalists in the face of peaceful Muslim protests. This instantly became a symbol of Hindu nationalist victory and Muslim humiliation (see Vidya Subrahmaniam, “Ayodhya: India’s endless curse”, 6 November 2003). A makeshift temple was quietly (and in violation of a court order) erected to consolidate the gain. The mosque demolition was followed by anti-Muslim violence in different parts of India. In 2002, an anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat took around 2,000 lives over several days, and thousands more were displaced from their homes and livelihoods (see Rajeev Bhargava, “Gujarat: shades of black”, 17 December 2002).

The connections between this anti-Muslim violence and the more recent terror attacks have seldom been explored properly. In fact, the email sent from the Indian Mujaheedin minutes after the Delhi blasts invoked the mosque demolition as well as the Gujarat pogrom as a motivation. This again suggests that despite the much-vaunted linkages with al-Qaida and Hamas, it is the local roots of terror that emerge more sharply even as the global optics bypass them.

The assimilation of India’s urban terror attacks into a global narrative of Islamist violence carries the danger that their domestic social and historical roots will be missed

Indeed, a comparative Indian dimension further illustrates the flaw in the globalising perspective. In the mid-1980s Delhi was terrorised by serial bomb-blasts in innocuous places - buses, teashops, marketplaces. The threat became known as the “transistor-radio bombs”, after the use of these devices in such low-intensity attacks. The assailants then were Sikh militants demanding a separate state of Khalistan; their ranks had spectacularly swelled when, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984, an anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi claimed at least 3,500 innocent lives and an Indian army assault had desecrated the Sikhs’ “golden-temple” shrine in Amritsar.

At the time, it was not unusual to see “wanted” posters around Delhi featuring glowering, bearded Sikh militants. People in the city were familiarised with police instructions to report suspicious objects and persons; the instinct to “see”, detect and report fearful things was already being honed. In the early 1990s, violent Sikh militancy was quelled, in part through concerted police action that had transformed Punjab into a state of exception. However, the return to peace was made possible not through violence but by addressing the widespread sense of alienation among Sikhs.

Now India reels under a new generation of terrorist attacks. This time it is Muslim terrorists who are the agents of violence, and Indian Muslims are the target of Hindu nationalist anathema as their Sikh compatriots were in the 1980s. The social and historical parallels between these two periods are a further caution against the instant recourse to the global. The new Indian discourse on the “war on terror” is unhistorical and distractive. India must look within - in search not of enemies but of causes, solutions, and alliances for peaceful change.

[Bogen]

That is pretty interesting. Indeed, my friend, though he claims he is not religiously motivated in any form, has said that Indian muslims are not "real" Indians.

 

I was under the impression that there is a large taliban and al-qaida presence in Pakistan, and this in turn must affect India. Is the taliban not interested in India?