Terrorists going for an Indian base

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

India’s leaders tiptoed around a dangerous political precipice after the late October highly effective, coordinated terrorist attack on holiday Hindu and Moslem shoppers in their nation’s capital. Indian Prime Minister Singh was quick to tell Pakistani President Gen. Musharraf “external links” [read Pakistan] were involved. That was after Musharraf condemned the attacks and offered cooperation — he has been the target of at least two near misses himself.

However much now enthralled in “a peace process”, it seems unlikely the two old enemies would really collaborate with whatever intelligence each has. One of the dozen terrorist bands fighting Indian control in Kashmir, Inquilab-e-Mahaz, now illegal in Pakistan but still active, claimed credit. In 1999, it hijacked an Indian aircraft to Kandahar, in then Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, negotiating the release of jailed terrorists.

True enough, as India charges, the terrorists operate, at least in part, by infiltrating from Pakistan-held areas despite Musharraf’s declarations and suppression. That they have kept up a steady and dramatic campaign, often to the heart of the once fabled tourist mecca, despite more than a half million Indian security forces, suggests local support and New Delhi’s incompetence.

The recent earthquake effecting some 10 million people, mostly in Pakistan’s northern tribal territories and its portion of Kashmir, has not stopped the attacks — more than 1,500 people have been killed this year But despite hemming and hawing, especially on Pakistan’s side, an exchange between the two Kashmirs now promises swifter aid to remote areas where 75,000 died, hundreds of thousands were wounded, and most face oncoming brutal Himalayan winter without housing. So, for the moment, “confidence building measures” will go on.

But the three bombs in Delhi, within 30 minutes, killed more than 60 people, put 200 in hospital and terrified the city’s 11 million people on the eve of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and Eid al-Fitr, ending the Moslem holy month of Ramadan. There has been Islamicist terrorism in New Delhi before. But new effectiveness suggests penetration of India’s own Moslem community, so far relatively untouched by the worldwide recruitment.

New Delhi, particularly in the December 2001 attack on India’s parliament which almost brought on a fourth Indo-Pak war, always plays down local participation. India, whose fundamental argument with Moslem Pakistan is its claim to a secular state, must now worry about its own more than 150 million Moslems — more than the population of Pakistan.

Conventional wisdom holds Indian Moslems are different, unaffected by currents sweeping the Moslem world. Politically oriented Moslems, it is argued, were largely drawn off to Pakistan in the bloody partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. Moslems who remained were, it‘s argued, either nonpolitical or “nationalists” supporting a secular India. In fact, Indian Moslems may be “disproportionately” represented in government [the president is a South Indian Moslem], in business [Wipro, the largest IT firm is headed by a Moslem], and certainly in the arts [Bollywood as well as Indian traditional music has more than its proportionate share of Moslem stars and producers].

Indian politicians have courted the Moslem “vote bank” — once chained to the Nehru family and the long-ruling Indian Congress Party’s patronage, now again heading the coalition government. This courtship included permitting Moslem family law even though the Indian constitution promised to eventually produce a common code. All this has led to what many reformers call “a ghetto mentality” with most Indian Moslems remaining at the bottom of the economic scale.

Yet since the beginnings of the Moslem conquest and conversion of large parts of northern India in the 10th and 11th centuries, Indian Moslems have had an enormous impact on Islamic philosophy and theology worldwide. Some would even argue Indian Islam — through its interchange with the vast body of ancient Hindu speculative discourse — created the “golden age” of Islam in Spain and Turkey. The origin of intolerant Saudi Wahabbi fanaticism from which Osama Bin Laden takes his cues, too, stems from one of the Indian Islamic schools.

This latest terrorism [and an earlier largely unnoticed well-coordinated nationwide attack in Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan] could well be an effort to bring Indian recruits into the worldwide terrorist networks. If so, it is not only a new danger to India with all its other domestic problems. But it could signal creation of new strength for the terrorists searching for recruits and sanctuaries from Casablanca to Zamboanga. That’s particularly worrying given the less than adequate Indian response.

Retiring Indian Chief Justice Lahoti said after the new attacks: “Has anyone thought why there has not been a single instance of terror in USA post-9/11 unlike India where such attacks occur almost every day? The difference lies in the desire to study the problem scientifically and take remedial measures. We do not have the political will to fight terrorism”, he said underlining the need for new legislation. “When new challenges come, new solutions also have to found.”