NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTION 99
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

India and the Islamic threat

''I couldn't believe my ears: this man was the leader of Pakistan and he told me quite frankly, 'We cannot control Peshawar. We cannot prevent those people from running loose.' I asked him then if I should send my army to clean up the mess there.'' --- Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who has so far survived four assassination attempts by Islamic terrorists, speaking about a meeting with Nawaz Sharief in Bonn in 1993, to Mary Anne Weaver, author and journalist.

Mubarak, an American minion, as usual missed the point -- that Islamic militancy of the 1990s is a Frankenstein created by the United States, not unlike Saddam Hussein whom it used as a shield against the Iranian revolution only to demonise him later. Osama bin Ladin and Co are simply what in intelligence lingo is impersonally referred to as 'blowback' -- a catastrophe spawned by one's own actions.

The Americans, obsessed with winning the Cold War, bankrolled the Afghan jihad and managed to convert the frontier town of Peshawar into a Moscow Central where tribal Moros from the Philippines mingled with nomadic Moroccans and sundry Arabs to form a motley crew who were then handed over the latest hardware and herded past the Khyber Pass. After the Soviets withdrew the Americans washed their hands of the whole affair, their purpose having been achieved, and believing that the by then battle-hardened mujahideen would go back to sheep rearing or whatever it was they had left to come to the Hindukush.

Contrary to the reductionist view that the Western media often proffers, the mujahideen refused to obediently disperse not because they were smitten by the glory of a holy war or because of the booty that a career as mercenaries promised. The ordinary dynamics of any protracted armed struggle was in evidence in this case too: the mujahideen felt their original goal had not yet been realised. The Soviets had ostensibly been evicted but their stooge, Najibullah, was in their place. Equally important was the realisation that the Americans and the regimes in their own countries had used them as cannon fodder. No wonder, then, that Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan, all of whom had actively abetted the Afghan jihad, are now unable to cope with its aftermath.

It is necessary that the above background be taken into account as India, just out of the throes of the hijacking crisis and what is arguably its first real brush with international Islamic terrorism, wrestles to formulate a long term response to it.

There is already a widespread tendency to see the release of the jailed militants as a shameless surrender to the hijackers. Concomitantly, there is talk of the need for India to become a hard state, somewhat in the mould of Israel, to have a strategic alliance with the US and others ''to combat the menace of Islam'' etc.

The fact is that the government's response to the crisis was sober and level-headed, and given the limitations of our system and the odds involved, it did make the best out of the situation. There were failings of course, some very serious, and suggestions like the evolution of a Standard Operating Procedure to meet similar crises, of having sky marshals aboard all Indian Airlines and Air India flights henceforth and a total revamp of our intelligence networks need to be expeditiously implemented.

But on the basic question of countering the so-called ''threat of Islam'' there is need for the utmost caution. Militant Islam impinges on India only in the limited context of an insurgency in Kashmir and an unstable neighbour's desire to exploit it. Neither of which warrant a blanket reaction to the phenomenon as such.

It is necessary to draw this fine distinction, or else India will be sucked into a quagmire whose consequences for both our domestic polity and our international relations will be prohibitive, to put it mildly. Any attempt to equate militant Islam's threat to the US with that to India will be as politically puerile as it will be foolhardy --- foolhardy, because as a vernacular proverb describes it vividly, it will be like picking up a viper and putting it around one's neck.

Islam's anathema to the West, and particularly to America as its modern-day symbol, is rooted in history. It transcends mere politics or particular governments. For a vast numbers of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, their instinct in locating the West as the source of the cataclysmic changes that have diluted their traditional values and loyalties and robbed them of their aspirations, dignity and, increasingly, of their livelihoods, is not misplaced. Direct British or French hegemony of the colonial era has only given way to the more insidious -- and more dangerous -- tyranny of the markets and monopolies and with it the culture of MTV, Macintosh and McDonalds.

It is not that the majority of Muslims are opposed to modernisation per se. There is historical evidence that they, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, were among the first to be attracted by it and had sought to unconditionally emulate it, but that they have tried it and found it wanting. And that has happened principally due to the duplicity of the West -- its attitude of favouring elites instead of entire societies which in turn stems from that condescending attitude: ''the rest of the world can afford only a partial modernity because we [the West] have already wrung it dry'' as the political commentator Bernard Lewis has so succinctly put it.

India has no such conflict with Islam. It is prudent therefore to allow America to fight its own battles. If we try to be surrogates for them it is possible that we will feel cheated in the end.

There is an incident made famous by journalists who covered the Afghan jihad: how on a May evening in 1985 Sheikh Omar Abdullah Rehman, the blind Muslim cleric and one-time mentor of bin Laden, boarded a camouflaged truck at Peshawar to journey to a battle station near Jalalabad. Accompanying him among others was the chief Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They reached a sandbagged position on the crest of the hill fifty miles from Kabul at dawn. From below, in the valley, came the echo of crashing Soviet artillery. As Hekmatyar helped him with a flak jacket, Omar stood there on the crest weeping. After a few moments he turned towards Hekmatyar and said. "I have never asked Allah for anything, but I am under a great disadvantage now. If only Allah could give me eyes for a couple of years, or for a couple of hours, so that I could fight in this jihad!"

The American Central Intelligence Agency gave 75 per cent of the funds and arms it pumped into Afghanistan to the group led by Omar and Hekmatyar. They in turn drove out the Soviets. Today, the 62-year-old Omar is in an American prison, serving a 110-year sentence for ''waging urban war against the United States. What led to this -- American duplicity, with its track record of using people especially from the third world as pawns, or something atavistic and sinister that makes Islamic militants unpredictable? Maybe, as always the truth lies somewhere in between and both parties are culpable.

But before we Indians -- whether the educated public or the policy makers -- make allusions, even casually, to the 'danger of Islam', let us at least ponder over this and many such histories.

Anil Nair