The fiendish outrage in Mumbai this week will not dent India’s resilience one bit.
These terrorist attacks, horrifying to the victims and to be utterly condemned and resisted, are a tick’s bite on the magnificent pachyderm which is Indian democracy. India has lived with political violence since free India emerged. Among its early victims was the 20th century’s leading apostle of political non-violence, M K Gandhi. He was assassinated by the Hindu extremist Godse. The great man was killed for his opposition to the horrendous slaughter of both Hindus and Muslims as Pakistan and India separated.
For the last few years, every couple of months a bomb outrage is committed in an Indian city or on an Indian train. There was once recently a similar effort by gunmen made on the Indian parliament. The death toll from these events is at least sometimes comparable thus far in Mumbai. Deaths from terrorism associated with domestic or externally induced Islamic extremism can be counted in the tens. Deaths from communal violence, usually between Muslims and Hindus but bringing in Christians, Sikhs and occasionally caste concerns, can number in the thousands.
Indeed Prime Minister Singh is of the opinion, though this may change, that the major terrorist threat emanates from the near 40 year-old Maoist Naxalite campaign. That movement takes its name and its tactics from a peasant revolt against landlords in the district of Naxalbari. Unlike Al Qaeda, and the more frequent Kashmir related Islamic violence, the Naxalite campaign associates highly targeted terrorism with the classical techniques of insurgency. The Maoists seek control of population and territories, substituting their government for the constitutional authorities. From time to time, whole districts are within their thrall. Hence Singh’s concern.
Indian democracy has transcended all these political pathologies. Indian society and culture remains the vibrant, intellectual, chaotic, sometimes unjust, always fascinating and often joyful being it has always been. Its electoral politics has one oddity. The poor vote in much larger numbers than the rich and even the middle class. Their vote is one small piece of sovereignty they can claim for themselves. They trade their votes with a relish and sophistication that shades us.
Not a test then, of resilience. Congress Party President Sonja Gandhi was right to express confidence in it in her sorrowful reaction to this appalling event. It is, however, a test of Indian wisdom particularly in relation to its neighbour Pakistan, but also in domestic communal relations.
It will be a test first for Mumbai and Maharashtrian politicians. Mumbai spawned a virulently anti-Muslim force in a political party known as Shiv Sena. It is allied to various Hindu nationalist forces and one wonders what the spin off may be in regional communal politics, where there has been some appalling incidents recently in the area Britain used to administer as the Bombay Presidency.
That communal struggle has itself spawned among a tiny minority of India’s 150 million Muslims, an Islamic fundamentalist operation separate from the Pakistani initiated violence over that state’s claim to Kashmir. The previously unknown title ‘Deccan Mujahideen’ (a highly improbable geographic location) may be a front for the known group calling themselves Indian Mujahideen, who are in part a product of this process.
It will be a test of the wisdom of India’s counter-terrorist forces. They have not done well penetrating the various groups now implanted on their soil, boasting few arrests from the many bombings to date. No good thing has come from current events but they do at least have prisoners. They will provide some clear intelligence on tactics, methods, links and personnel including a picture of Al Qaeda collaboration.
Above all, it will be a test of the wisdom of the Indian and Pakistani governments and their oppositions. They have been making progress. It would be shattering if the terrorists were handed a massive political victory by that process of Indian and Pakistani discussions falling apart. One thing we do know now is that the new Pakistani government is as clearly in the terrorists’ gun sights as India, even if rogue elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services remain reasonably under suspicion.
Prime Minister Singh leads a coalition of secular and regional parties. He faces a poll next year against the BJP and allies who are heavily Hindu nationalist. Singh was very quick to claim external involvement and he may be right. He is almost certainly right if he means Al Qaeda influence. The extent of semi-official Pakistan involvement is murkier, and restraint is needed here. Al Qaeda is based in Pakistan. As the head of British counter terrorism has pointed out, at least half the people he has under surveillance in the UK received some training in Pakistan. Recognising they are a target too, the new Pakistani government is making some effort to root them out.
Indian Opposition Leader L K Advani faces a test here too. It would be very easy to hammer Pakistan and question the government’s seriousness and effectiveness. However, if he then emerges as Prime Minister, he risks a great deal in his international reputation. This could well spill into Indian prosperity if he has played a spoiler’s role. Advani’s political origins were as an ideologist for a more extreme Hindu nationalist party than the one he now leads and he will make those who wish India well, nervous.
Much of the trouble in West Asia stems from a school of Islamic thought which emerged from a madrassa founded in the town of Deoband, 100 miles north of Delhi in 1867. Preached there was a form of Islam which has since inspired Islamic extremism on the sub-continent and West Asia generally. A straight line can be drawn from the Deobandi movement to the Taliban via Pakistan. There was just a chance that recent Indo-Pakistani discussions could reverse the consequences of the Deobani development. If the crime in Mumbai, already damaging to the world view of India, were to disrupt that process, there will be hell to pay for all of us, Muslims included.
Kim Beazley, former Defence Minister, is now Professorial Fellow, Department of Political Science and International Relations, UWA.
Source: WA Today
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