The real challenge before India is to prevent jehadis from polluting young Muslim minds

When the Home Minister said that he was perturbed by the refusal of Pakistan to act against the masterminds of

26/11, he was probably echoing the sentiments of most Indians. Certainly, there is no doubt that without Pakistani encouragement and finance, terrorist activities directed

at India would significantly reduce.

 

   But I have a problem with those who believe that Pakistan is the long-term problem when it comes to jehadi violence directed against the Indian state and its citizens. Similarly, I am also unconvinced by those who claim that if Indian Muslims take to violence it will be a consequence of the discrimination they face in India.

 

   To understand the nature of modern terrorism, we need to consider the case of Umar Abdulmutallab. If that name does not ring a bell, then let me refresh your memory. Umar is the man who attempted to blow up North West Airline flight 253 when it was over Detroit a couple of weeks ago.

 

   Umar is not a Pakistani or an Afghan. He is not even an Arab. He is a Nigerian who took to violence while he was at school in Toga. He was further indoctrinated into the jehadi ideology in London. And he received his explosives from Yemen.

 

   What reason could a Nigerian have for seeking to blow up an American airliner and murder hundreds of innocent passengers? It isn’t as though Muslims are discriminated against in Nigeria – they are the ruling majority. Nor is there an American military presence that the local population deeply resents. And there is no border dispute of the kind that affects politics in the Middle East or even in South Asia.

 

   The closer one looks at Umar and others like him, the more one realizes that all the conventional arguments used to explain terrorism are bogus. A sympathetic view of terrorism – and jehadi terrorism in particular – is that it is the response of desperate people to great injustice. The Palestinians kill Israeli civilians because they are driven to desperation. Kashmiris bomb civilian targets because they are unhappy with Indian rule. The Afghans have turned fundamentalist as a protest against the presence of American forces. And so on.

 

   It is nobody’s case that many of the grievances so described do not exist: the Palestinians have reason to be unhappy, many Kashmiris resent being part of India (however difficult this is for us to understand) and the Afghans have always fought foreign invaders.

 

   But none of these grievances, by itself, is enough to explain why people turn to terrorism and kill innocent women and children. There is a difference between a guerilla who attacks official targets and a terrorist who kills unarmed civilians. One is a soldier. The other is a murderer.

 

   Besides, how do you explain people like Umar who are born to privilege and have none of the grievances that are usually used to explain terrorism? How do you explain the Islamic fundamentalists in Indonesia who bomb tourist locations in Bali? And how do you explain Pakistan’s home-grown terrorists who are happy to murder other Pakistanis?

 

   The truth is that the conventional explanations for jehadi terrorism are running out of steam. Yes, many Muslims have grievances. But many don’t. And yet if you look at modern terrorists, you will find as many without genuine grievances as you will find those with serious grievances.

 

"As England has discovered, it is difficult for a liberal society to act against preachers and educational institutions."

   The case of Umar is instructive because it demonstrates the extent to which global Islam has been hijacked by fundamentalists who twist the Quran to preach a deadly dogma in which the whole point of violence is the violence itself. The new jehadis no longer engage in violence to make a political point: an independent Palestine, new borders in Kashmir etc. They engage in violence because they are told that nearly everybody who is not like them is evil and deserves to die.

 

   It is instructive that the focus on jehadi violence has now moved from the Middle East to Africa and to such countries as Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudan. Terrorists are recruited from liberal societies such as Britain where Muslims face no special discrimination and are then trained in murder and mayhem in Yemen and other Muslim countries.

 

   In these circumstances, to continue to look at the problem of global terrorism through the prism of historical grievance (Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir etc) is foolish. These issues may crop up as rhetorical flourishes in terrorist communiqués but they are not the real provocation for the violence.

 

   The real provocation is the perversion of Islam by jehadi preachers who have succeeded in winning converts even among Muslims who have been born to privilege, brought up in liberal societies and are free from any kind of suffering.

 

   We would like to think that this sort of invitation to terrorism is alien to the Indian tradition. And it may well be true that the terrorism we face these days originates from across the border.

 

   But here’s my question: if Muslim youth are being radicalized all over the world – from Somalia to Indonesia – then how long can India which has the world’s second largest Muslim population remain immune to this trend?

 

   And once we begin to face the problem of home-grown jehadis who believe that murder is a mission in itself, how long can communal peace be maintained in India?

 

   So let’s blame Pakistan. Let’s hunt down the LeT terrorists. But let’s also accept that there is a greater threat that could arrive at our shores sooner rather than later.

 

   The way to fight that is not with violence but with firmness. We must crack down on madrasas that preach violence, we must refuse to tolerate preachers who advocate jehad, we must ban the evangelists who seek to separate the communities and we must do it all now – before it is too late.

 

   When terrorism becomes a law and order problem, the battle is already lost. The real challenge before the Indian state is to prevent the jehadis from polluting the minds of young Muslims. If we can win that battle, then we may escape the sort of global terrorism that is haunting the rest of the world.

 

   Of course, this is easier said than done. As England has discovered, it is difficult for a liberal society to act against preachers and educational institutions. And of course, there is vast potential for abuse and the needless targeting of innocents.

 

   But, at some stage, we’re going to have to bite the bullet. We must stop hatred now. And save lives forever.