They Walk The Line

The attempt will fail, just as more than one such attempt in the past has also failed. In the ’80s, killer squads owing allegiance to the rebel Sikh preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale would leave the Golden Temple at Amritsar in the dark of the night to kill carefully selected Hindus in and around the city. They did this every night between the end of February and the middle of May 1984, but failed to destroy the ties that bound the Hindu and Sikh communities together in Punjab. The early years of militancy and proxy war in Kashmir saw a large number of such targeted killings of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir, and more than one attack on temples in Jammu. But they too failed to ignite a communal conflagration. It took the burning of a train at Godhra and the shock generated by its repeated depiction on television to spark a genuine communal conflagration in Gujarat. But even the grisly reprisal attack by some terrorists upon the Akshardham temple a few months later did not spark another riot. The truth is that in India people continue to see themselves as human beings first and Hindus, Muslims, Brahmins, Dalits, Sunnis or Shias second.

However, the attacks in Delhi and Varanasi highlight the razor’s edge on which communal peace is balanced today. India may not yet be a breeding ground for terrorists brandishing the flag of Islam, but as in the rest of the world, the Muslim community here is under multiple pressures that predispose it to regarding itself as a victim of concerted attack by non-Muslims. It is bitterly and justifiably angry with the US for its invasion of Iraq and the consequent deaths of more than a hundred thousand Iraqis. It is acutely aware of the way that the US and Europeans have ganged up on Iran and are pushing it relentlessly towards a confrontation that can only lead to war, more deaths and another spurt in international terrorism. It cannot have failed to notice that the very same countries that do not hesitate to spread democracy by the sword spurn it when it yields results, as in Palestine, that do not fit into their master plan for the universe. And they can hardly have failed to notice the broad current of anti-Islamism in Europe that was laid bare by the controversy over the Danish cartoons.

Regrettably, they have also noticed that the Congress-led government, for all of its secular pretensions, has kept an unusually low profile over all of these issues. With the possible exception of the former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh, not one leader has expressed distress or sympathy for the Iraqis in their present plight. India has joined the US and UK in putting pressure on Iran; and it has not said even a single word in opposition to the US-Israeli plan to starve Hamas out of power, let alone promised it any help.

It has, admittedly, expressed its reservations about several of these policies to the US and to Britain, France and Germany, in private. But India’s Muslims are not privy to those discussions. They are, however, acutely aware that India has not said a single word in public in support of Muslim nations or causes and is not, in any case, prepared to act upon the beliefs it may have expressed in private.

On the other hand, they do see Bush, whom they regard as the greatest terrorist of all time, getting a hero’s welcome in India. They see their fellow Muslims leading the demonstrations against Bush’s visit to Delhi, in Lucknow, Hyderabad and elsewhere, and they also note that all the three demonstrators whom the UP police gunned down in Lucknow were Muslims. Add to all this their inbred feeling of insecurity, the difficulties they experience in finding jobs, the higher-than-national-average rates of unemployment among Muslim youth, or their growing under-representation in India’s new middle class, and one cannot but wonder how much longer the peace will last.

The attacks in Delhi, Bangalore, Varanasi, and several others that have been foiled, show that the peace has begun to fray. Most are the work of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, but as two recent articles by Praveen Swami in the Hindu had shown, except for a few prime motivators, the cadres of the Lashkar are all Indian-born. So, were the two Lashkar leaders whom the police killed in the operations that were unconnected with the Varanasi blasts. Swami’s articles also showed that the Indian recruits were mainly from educated middle and lower middle classes. They were, in short, from a similar background as the 9/11 and the London July 7 suicide bombers.

All this leads to the conclusion that the attempts to provoke a communal backlash and turn India into another giant breeding ground for Islamic terrorism will continue. The police are doing a commendable job of cracking Lashkar cells, but repressive measures alone will not suffice to maintain peace. The government of the third-largest Muslim country in the world must do much more.