| #135 |  | 1582 |  |
December 10, 2008 |  | By Avinash Godbole | ||
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The storm generated by the Mumbai terrorist attack will settle down eventually, hopefully with some positive outcomes, even as Mumbai and India will always live with the images of terror. Wherever the blame game may lead to and whatever the analysis it may generate, this event does stand out in more than one aspect, and one of them has to do with events preceding 26/11. Initial media coverage of the event in China and recent reports from the Pakistan media suggest that attempts have been made to attribute 26/11 to what has been called ‘Hindu Zionists’. What added fuel to the speculation was the death of ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other important officers in the initial stages of the attack, even though reports and the testimony of the sole arrested terrorist point out that Karkare and others were victims of circumstances, than of a plan. While the Chinese report in People’s Daily was an analysis in haste, reported within 24 hours of the beginning of the attack, the Pakistani media sought to clear their country’s name. The Chinese media later reported on the possible Islamist origins of this terror, but the first report appeared eager to project India as a country crippled with extremism, with a helpless and hapless State against the extremist majority as the report pointed to the possible religious armband “a red thread” that the photographed terrorist is shown wearing as a sign of his Hindu identity. One can only speculate if China would have showed this as a failure of the Indian democracy had Qasab not been arrested and spoken out, as he has since, giving details of his group’s origin and journey leading to 26/11. Thus, the aim might have been to project the superiority of the Chinese political system. The tone of the Chinese media changed only after Pakistani roots of the so-called ‘Deccan Mujahidin’ became clear and when it grasped the tone of other international opinion. However, this single instance is not insignificant given that Peoples Daily, where this article was published, represents the Communist Party of China. At the simplest level, the reason why Pakistan would project ‘Hindu Zionists’ as perpetrators of 26/11 is that it feels inferior to India and its fairly successful process of nation building. Secondly, the identity and survival of Pakistan is threatened by the extremist version of the root of its national identity, Islam, as against the strong roots of the Indian secularism. Pakistan is seriously trying to exploit the fault lines of India in this process. In the 1980s, they tried this with the idea of Khalistan, later on with Kashmir, the Mumbai underworld, the North-Eastern discontent, Naxalism, then Jihad and with various other forms of anti-India activities like infusion of fake currency and so on. The common thread in all these has been to exploit a dissatisfied minority community and incite it against the state. And within limits of caution, one can argue that a nation building process of this scale and complexity will throw up differences of this sort anywhere in the world.
However, the use of terrorism by any group drawn from the majority, and claiming to represent it, does project the failure of the state in nation-building. Alienation of minority is possible but if the religious majority is seen to be pitted, in an extremist fashion, against the secular state on any critical issue, then it can be counted as a failed state. This is precisely the point which the ‘experts’ in the Pakistani media establishment seem to be harping on as far as the events of 26/11 are concerned. They seem to be interested in projecting the failure of the secular Indian state. Some of these commentators even argue that “the terrorists did not look like Muslims but more like Hindus” whereas no one would be able to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims of South Asia based on their skin colour alone. What they seems to have forgotten is that even the killer of Mahatma Gandhi had failed to project himself as Muslim. Even other reports in the Pakistan media seem to have resorted to the same analogy as is clear from the quote of a popular blogger from Pakistan that “India has been relapsing into religious extremism and numerous separatist movements have mushroomed due to official patronage ...I see the Mumbai bombings as the desperate move of separatists who want to blame everything on Muslims” (emphasis added).
The alleged involvement of an Indian Army officer along with that of a religious figure in terror attacks on another community seems to have fulfilled the long held wish of Pakistan to exploit another problem in India and try to project India at par with Pakistan, not anywhere close to the projections of India becoming a global powerhouse. Whether Col Purohit and others are guilty will be proved by due course of law but a possibility of their involvement has given a fillip to the forces around India to project her as a weak State with a fragmented society amid deep-rooted contradictions.
The lesson to learn from this experience is that a secular state like India must remain vigilant against extremism of all forms, especially one arising out of a religious identity, something which is denied inside our eastern neighbour and forms the core of identity on the other side. If India’s fault lines are being exposed because of the use of terror methods by conflicting groups, then there will be forces across borders that could use the same logic in more than one ways to suit their not so benign ends.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views either of the Editorial Committee or the Centre for Land Warfare Studies)
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Avinash Godbole |
