Till the Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed—and Mohammed Haneef—drama unfolded two weeks ago, India gloated over the claim—made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005—that not one of the terrorists arrested since 9/11 was an Indian or Indian Muslim.
Hogwash, says Sunanda K. Datta Ray in today’s Telegraph.
“Every time I hear people boasting that the world’s third largest Muslim community has not produced a single terrorist, my thoughts fly to the butchery in Jammu and Kashmir, Bombay train explosions, attack on Parliament House and similar outrages all over the country…
“Kashmir secessionists are not the only killers. We have known Khalistani militants and rebels of many ethnicities in the North-east—Naga, Mizo, Bodo and the United Liberation Front of Asom. Now we have Maoist massacres. If they are not terrorists, who are?
“If truth be told, India has been foremost in producing terrorists. Their impact was not felt globally only because in murder as in manufacture, the home demand is so enormous that export loses its lure…
“Such sophistry shields and excuses criminals. It also exposes the callousness of those who should be the natural leaders of their community.”
Read the full story here: Beyond borders
Wait a second,
Are Sikhs, ulfa, naga, bod, naxals are also TERRORISTS? This is news to me, in India its always Muslim or rather “ISAMIC TERRORSITS”.
So what are these called sikhism terrorist, catholic terrorsits, hindu terrorist? wait a second……..or people who killl thousands in the guise of state support are not called terrorist? are they immune…….. or is it just revenge mob?
well ther you go……… state would decide who is who.
Dear All,
We can extrapolate on this who is a terrorist till the cows come home. But the singular honor of being blue-chip terrorists has been awarded to the peaceful community–rightly or wrongly.
SD Ray is known to write ‘deeply’ about many ‘burning’ issues. In fact, I would like to call him a keyboard terrorist:)
Dear All,
I can understand Zulfi’s pain…the best remedy would be to see how the same terrorists become freedom fighters in other countries. I am sure Z is a grown man and he can decide. By bombing trains in Bombay, one community is not exactly making a political statement right? The majority community covered itself in pro-active action after the Godhra incident–the result minority community suffered. There is no right or wrong in mob justice!
We can go on and on about this infinite series of riots and counter riots. But the purity of hatred by the minority community simply stands out.
DB, freedome fighters or terrorists, eh? before we won independence, even our freedome fighters were called terrorists by the british. the people we all celebrate were branded terrorists. it is a matter of perspective.
“purity of hatred”. interesting. what is the DB seal on “hatred by the minority community”? 100%, no no, 200% pure!
@DoddaBuddi,
You talk about hatred, You know the hatred when you read the comments … you decide whose hatred stand out.
This fits to the tee”
Hum aah bhi bharte hai to ho jate hai badnaam,
vho qatl bhi karte hai to charcha nahin hoti.
@Z,
The word islamic terror is becuase the jehadis quote the koran to legitimise their barbarism. All grisly beheading is justified by quoting some verse or the other of koran or sharia, as to how the kafirs deserved to die and how it was their holy duty to kill them just to free them of their abominable births(So a kafir who gets killed by a mohammadean is also blessed!)
None of the other mentioned,definitely terrorists, justify their acts with a religious scripture. Thats why ‘Islamic terrorism’
A piece in the Indian express today
——————————–
PM’s pride turned into shame
Saturday July 14 2007 08:45 IST
“I spent a sleepless night after watching on television the tearful parents of Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed,” says Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Kafeel and Sabeel are the suspects in the terror plot to blow up Glasgow airport and targets in London. Since Kafeel and Sabeel are Indians and Muslims, there is understandable reaction in the world against both India and Muslims. So, Singh rightly cautioned against dubbing any community or country as ‘terrorist’. He said “terrorists are terrorists. They have no particular religion or community.
Labels are best avoided.” This is now, in July 2007. No one can fault the PM’s view that, for the act of some, the community or the country cannot be branded. But even as he defended both India and Indian Muslims, the Prime Minister should be internally embarrassed, even shaken, because only a couple of years back he had asserted that the Indian Muslims were unlike their Islamic counterparts in the world of terror and were radically different.
This is what he said then. “I take pride in the fact that although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda or participated in the activities of Taliban.” That Indian Muslims are not vulnerable to the toxic Islam of Osama Bin Ladan is the assumption, now shattered, that made the PM proud of them in 2005. But, the logic of what the PM had said then raises this disturbing question: if the absence of Indian Muslims in Al-Qaeda is a matter of pride for India and Muslims, is their presence in Bin Ladan’s squad not a matter of shame for both? So far India was on the global atlas of the terror victims, but, thanks to Kafeel, it is now put on the global map of terror merchants.
How did the PM’s logic of pride turn into a reason for shame? In a recent article, KPS Gill, the only man in the world who took on terror and vanquished it, said “tremendous political and emotional capital has been invested in the asinine argument that there was something radically different about Indian Muslims that had prevented their engagement in any act of international terrorism.” Gill added that “the truth is that a number of Indian Muslims have engaged in acts of terrorism on Indian soil”, consequently it was only a matter of time before some of these individuals did, in fact, find the context and opportunity for participation in an act of terrorism abroad. He asserted that “we should recognise that Islamist terrorism is, and has for some time now been, a reality in India, and it is no use saying ‘don’t label Indians’. Indians have engaged in these actions and this reality must be confronted if we are to understand – and eventually neutralise – the dynamics that underlie these acts of terrorism.” That the Islamists in India are different, says Gill, is a myth has been exposed.
Why are the Indian Islamists no different? Islam, by definition, is global.
But, global Islam is an identity without an entity. This is the strength of Islam and Muslims and at once their weakness, and a deadly weakness. Islamic identity has not shown any appreciable potential to unite and develop the Muslims positively, but it has shown immense capacity unite and mobilise them against ‘others’.
Islamic identity, said the Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul, can easily and instantly set a multi-religious society ‘on the boil.’ Indian secularism as a concept and the pseudo-seculars who shaped it, ignored this centrifugal dynamics of Islam. The Islamic identity without entity turns global Islam into religious and social anarchy, subject to control by no thinking group or leadership. Ignoring this reality, when Islamic terror hit the world, our secularists had consistently held out that Indian Muslims are a different lot and unlike, say, Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere, a myth that Kafeel has shown it to be.
The seculars had sustained this myth as a reality too long by insisting, even when Islamic terror bled us in Kashmir, it was Kashmiriyat in action or otherwise it is just politics between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, advising India even to give up the valley! How inane this dismissive approach is clear from history that Pakistan itself was the product of a movement powered by Islamic identity insisting on Islamic separatism.
Once Islamic identity is the drive and rationalisation for Islamic exclusivism, it is at once the ground for Islamic extremism as well.
Islamic separation and extremism are deceptively local but their drive is global Islamic identity. The progress of Islamic separation from the rest of India as Pakistan and the final induction of Pakistan into the world of global terror through the Taliban and Al-Qaeda sequences how Islamic identity, which is necessarily global, extends into Islamic extremism which finally transforms into Islamic terror at the global level. That majority Muslims are not party to this deadly sequence is irrelevant as the majority, which has no philosophic model or the organisational sinews to defy this apocalyptic sequence, is reduced to being a silent follower of events. With the result the Muslims all nationalities including Indian Muslims are actually captives of global Islam.
When the PM tells the world not to label India and Indian Muslims it just is a matter of protocol. All politicians are protocol-bound. Gordon Brown the Prime Minister of Britain which barely escaped the efforts of Kafeel to blow off Glasgow airport too followed the same protocol. Commenting on this protocol-based approach of Brown, Irshad Manji, a commentator and incidentally a Muslim, wrote in New York Post (July 9, 2007) thus: “Last week two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion.” By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the real engine of our violence is ‘Islamic theology.’ What Irshad Manji refers to as ‘Islamic theology’ is Islamic world view expounded by jihadists, but as theirs is the only unchallenged version of Islam that is effectively the real Islamic theology! While this kind of open debate takes place in countries from whom our secularists borrowed the modern concept of secularism, here such a debate will be instantly blasphemous.
The protocol responses of the PM in India or in Britain are calculated to deal with the immediate situation. But Britain’s domestic response to Islamic terror is different. In the UK some 16000 Muslims are on ‘close watch’, the Madrasas are put under vigil, Mullas and their lectures in Mosques are being monitored. This is despite the fact that almost all well-known Muslims of Britain have come out against the terrorists and the Glasgow terror plot. See the contrast here.
Not only did the seculars or the so called moderate Islamists in India not condemn in one voice Islamist terror whether it was the Mumbai blast of 1993 or the Godhra train attack of 2003 or the regular terror at Kashmir, but they also attempted to explain that there were provocative reasons for the violent Islamist reaction thus virtually rationalising acts of terror against India. Even Afzal who was part of the conspiracy to bomb the Indian Parliament is today the beneficiary of mercy plea by secularists.
The seculars passed a resolution in Kerala Assembly pleading for parole for Abdul Madani whose terror strike killed and maimed over a hundred innocents in Coimbatore in 1998. The list of the terrorists sympathised and exonerated by the seculars is endless. This is how starting on wrong assumptions about Islamic exclusivism and extremism secular India finally ended up as apologist of terrorists! Now that Kafeel has blown off all their assumptions about local Islamist terror being different from the global Islamic terror, will our seculars rethink and introspect on the content of their secular world view?
Zulfi
Wah wah…I can understand your pain. You guys have painted yourself into a corner hating everything that is not from your religion. Play by the rules–others will respect you. Play by the Koranic verses, there will be blowback!
Zulfi saheb, yeh aapne kya “hum” or “woh” laga rakha hai.
We’re all one. Please don’t talk alien.
Rustyvagabond,
If you closely follow our own pre-1947 terrorists, they were solely targeting the British and their government apparatus. They were not after other Indians. Rusty, ponder deeply on what I have said and make a valid argument. Thanks,
Zulfi,
The World has “lost that loving feeling” with the ‘minority’ community! If this anger reaches its logical end, very soon I am sure we will see people with minority community off loaded from the planes, trains, and automobiles. Then I am sure the likes of V Malliah will change names to that of the ‘minority’ community in solidarity. Why do I call Mallya Malliah? It is one and the same thing:)
Naga, ULFA, LTTE are terrorists. Yes, they are. But they are not driven by religion.
The case of Islamic terrorism is completely different. They are driven by religion, and it has a political, economic, social, cultural goal.
Today’s Islamic terrorism has a distinct Indian root. Jinnah’s use of terror (Great Calcutta killings when 10s of 10000s of Hindus were killed at Calcutta and Eastern Bengal) was a starting point.
If you go further back to history, you will see figures like Wahi-Ullah and others in medieval India who preached Jihadi version of Islam. Its the same person who invited Abdali to establish Islamic rule in India.
Its this Wahi-Ullah’s version of Islam which founded Deobond as well as Aligarh Muslim University in 19th Century.
These facts are hidden by psuedos in India because they cannot face it. Its high time, the medieval period of India, specially Islamists and their ideologies are taught in the school.
Although we Indians keep harping it was Gandhi’s satyagraha antics that got us independence, most brits think otherwise. According to them, it was the increasing danger to innocent British lives from Indian “terrorists” in Britain that forced them to quit India.
Danny,
Let them think that way! Like in Chess, the threat of mate is more real than actual mate sometimes:)