Photo: Sarah Ahmed: Indian. Pilot.
July 4, 1995 — America’s Independence Day — Islamist militants take six tourists hostage in Kashmir. They decapitate a Norwegian and kill the rest, including two Americans. There has been no letup in the orgy of violence since. But now Islamists — Sunni and Shia militants — are eliminating each other in West Asia. Glee that the “enemy” is disintegrating is inevitable in both Christian and Hindu right-wing camps. But as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly stated, albeit with scarce substantive effect, terror has no loyalties beyond the willingness to kill and maim.
The political economy of terror
Islamic terror, like terror anywhere, comes heavily loaded with political and economic objectives. The Taliban was created by the US to oust the Russians from Afghanistan in the 1980s. They and the Army are the only credible political actors in Pakistan today. Even China engages directly with them to protect its infrastructure investments and workers in Pakistan.
Saudi Arabia funds Sunni Iraqi militants to dominate the Shias of Southern Iraq and to undermine Syria’s Shia regime — all because Shias are perceived to be universally aligned with Saudi arch-rival Iran. Conversely, Russia and Iran support Shia militants in Iraq and the Shia regime in Syria. It is not inconceivable that in future Shia militants may be used to neutralise the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Ashraf Ghani — the technocratic President of Afghanistan — would probably welcome a dilution of Taliban power so that he can get on with implementing the development agenda.
Endemic warlordism and militant factionalism in North Africa and West Asia was constrained during the Cold War (1960-1990) by authoritarian regimes supported either by the US or the Soviets. Ironically both the democratic US and the Communist Soviet Union had no qualms about imposing authoritarian regimes as the norm in the region. It helped that till 1990, even the metric of development ignored politics as a factor and focused primarily on enhancing per capita income levels.
Democracy as a metric of development
The change came with the surprisingly sudden collapse of the seemingly well-off Soviet Union, a middle income country in 1990. Soviet unsustainability was ascribed to the absence of Western-style institutions — elective democracy, rule of law, small governments, markets, competition and choice.
Post 2001 (9/11), this development mantra acquired evangelical fervour, as an instrument to “civilise” the “arc of Islamic terror” stretching from Afghanistan in the east, through Egypt and Sudan to Mauritania in western Africa. The Arab Spring (2011) was hailed as the blossoming of democracy in time-warped North Africa. Once invincible, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia bit the dust and the people won. This was the expected upside.
The unintended consequences of Democracy: strengthening traditional fault lines
But two unanticipated downsides were less palatable. First, democracy became uncontainable — like a nuclear explosion. Democratic contagion travelled south and shook the gilded birdcage lives of the Sunni sheikhs of the Gulf states and deposed President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen via tribal bloodletting which rode on the aftershocks of the Tunisian “Jasmine Revolution”.
Second, democracy in Egypt empowered the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamic party pushed underground by Mr Mubarak. For the G7, “Islamists” ruling Egypt was a horrific replay of the deposition of the “modernist” Shah of Iran in 1979 and the subsequent rise of a “renegade” nuclear, Islamic Iran. The Egyptian “Brothers” — beneficiaries of Islamic democracy — were presented as role models for disenfranchised commoners across the region. This questioning of the elite order was not what the sheikhs or the G7 had bargained for, or desired.
The G7 were comfortable with a “managed democracy” — the bare-bones institutions of a democracy, never mind if the
democratic spirit was non-existent. What they got was an unruly explosion of the democratic spirit — a magnified version of rumbustious, Indian style democracy, where rights trump responsibilities.
Libya disintegrated into armed militias and cost the US the life of its young, well-liked ambassador Chris Stevens. Yemen remains a cauldron of tribal militias. This democratic disorder is much like the persistent clan and tribe-based militancy in Manipur and Nagaland in India’s Northeast, funded by the drugs and arms trade with “wink-nod” support from China.
The recent bomb blast in Tunisia, which killed several British tourists, is similar in intent to the blasts in Mumbai in 1993 and the terror attacks in 2008. The former, managed by smuggler and mafia don Dawood Ibrahim, rode on the back of Muslim anguish at the unlawful destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu right-wing groups. The 2008 strike is credited to the Inter-Services Intelligence — Pakistan’s dirty-tricks entity. Both aimed at hitting where it hurts the most — the economy.
Tackle Islamic terror with targeted incentives for peace and development
Can we really expect Indian Muslims to remain unmoved by the global trends in Islamist terror? A few misguided young men have already joined Islamist groups in Iraq and paid the final price. But most Indian Muslims look inwards to a domestic solution to break out of the downward spiral that events drag them into. This is where government intervention can help.
First, reducing poverty helps all marginalized groups. There is a broad congruence between Muslims and poverty in India even today. Focusing on poverty reduction more vigorously also reverses the marginalization of poor Muslims in Independent India.
Second, a more visible signal is also needed. Positive discrimination like reservations is unhealthy. It pits Muslims against the existing beneficiaries — dalits and backward castes by generating a scrabble for a fixed pie. Far better to instead to empower young Muslims to work productively in the modern economy. Modernizing the curricula of the madrasas is a long-term, sensitive but powerful option. Indian Muslims shine in private enterprises where success is meritocratic and not dependent on connections, networks or preferential access to education or progress at work. They are the core of Bollywood, handicrafts, the arts and our cricket team. Ashwini Kumar’s Inshallah, Football is a touching film about how a dedicated Brazilian coach uses football leagues to meet the needs of aspirational youth in strife-torn Kashmir. They must be directly supported to do be better prepared for private enterprise which, is in any case, is the growing sector. Indian Muslims must also be assured that being part of the modern economy does not and should not, mean having to abandon traditional beliefs or culture. India is not France. We are a plural society.
Third, politics must lead by example. Religion is deeply embedded in India. Politics must learn to live with religion as a political force rather than pretend to work within an a-religious framework. In this context, the new government in Jammu and Kashmir which federates the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party of Jammu with the Kashmiri Muslim’s People’s Democratic Party in the governance of the state, is a progressive model which explicitly recognises that religion, like caste, is a legitimate basis for political action. True secularism is recognizing the right of citizens to organize themselves politically on any basis which provides a legitimate common cause. Better to reflect traditional fault lines honestly rather than paper them over with the Band-Aid of pseudo-secular, socialist gibberish.
Fourth, women are the prime movers of social change, particularly in South Asia. Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Mayawati, the Dalit leader of Uttar Pradesh, and the young Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai are examples. Leveraging potential Malalas in India via expanded and targeted education and health is what the government should be doing, if one-third of our population — Muslims and Dalits — are to make common cause with the rest of India.
Adapted from the authors column in Asian Age July 2, 2015 http://www.asianage.com/columnists/terror-s-echoes-home-748
Opinion India 