( excerpts from a much longer article ) This is a no nonsense view from the business sector of the US economy. Facts and nothing but facts, valuable information ===================================================== Far Eastern Economic Review Wall Street Journal December 2008 India’s Radical Islam Problem by Sadanand Dhume
Posted December 5, 2008 On the face of it, India, with its stable democratic institutions, vast middle class, and clutch of world-beating companies, appears an unlikely candidate for the company of such blighted lands as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, as recorded by the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington, between January 2004 and March 2007 the death toll from terrorist attacks in India was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq. Since then, bombs have gone off in Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Guwahati. In that sense, the Nov. 26-28 terrorist assault on Mumbai, though exceptional in its audacity and scope, is also part of a larger pattern. With Iraq experiencing a spell of relative calm, the world’s largest democracy now likely holds the dubious distinction of also being the one least able to safeguard its citizens’ lives. No country has been immune to the pendulum swing among Muslim populations over the past 35 years that have forced secular modernizers to cede political, intellectual and moral ground to radicals peddling a toxic version of their faith. In Pakistan, carved out of British India in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, India faces a viscerally hostile neighbor that also happens to be, along with Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading exporter of militant Sunni fervor. (The revolutionary regime in Iran plays a similar role among Shiites in the Middle East.) Bangladesh, known as East Pakistan until it gained independence in 1971, appears to be evolving into a somewhat tamer version of its fraternal twin. ...the threat to India’s pluralistic culture and open society from radical Islam—global in its reach, uncompromising in its ambition, often nihilistic in its tactics—is of a different order from anything else the country faces. If India is to prevail in this fight, it first has to acknowledge the extent of the problem. To begin with the formal leadership of India’s Muslims is almost uniformly fundamentalist in persuasion. The community, steeped in a culture of grievance mongering, fails to acknowledge the many opportunities offered by a secular and increasingly capitalist society, and refuses to look inward for explanations of Muslim backwardness. As in Europe, many Indian Muslims place a tribal loyalty to their faith above adherence to basic democratic values such as freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Most alarmingly, in recent years terrorist groups nurtured in Pakistan and Bangladesh have had little trouble attracting local accomplices. With a foundering counterterrorism policy, India typically loses more lives to terrorist violence in a year than most countries do in a decade. A rundown of relatively recent violence is instructive. In October 2005, on the eve of the Hindu festival of Diwali, bombs in crowded marketplaces and on a public bus in Delhi claimed 62 lives. In 2006, a series of blasts on commuter trains killed 209 in Bombay. Last August, 42 people died in attacks on a restaurant and open-air auditorium in Hyderabad. This year alone, terrorists have struck in six major cities including Mumbai. The toll: 365 dead and hundreds more wounded. Unlike their counterparts in the West, or in East Asia, India’s perpetually squabbling leaders have failed to put national security above partisan politics. The country’s antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Indeed, the reflexive Indian response to most every act of terrorism is to apportion blame rather than to seek a solution that will prevent, or at least minimize, its recurrence. A confused response to terrorism is in many ways the reflection of a flawed approach to secularism. Unlike in Western democracies, Muslims in India are permitted by law to be governed by Shariah in civil matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. A consequence of this autonomy has been the development of parallel societies in ghettoized enclaves of the sort that the Dutch, British, and French are scrambling to contain. Most of India’s Muslim middle class emigrated to Pakistan at partition 60 years ago. In much of the community that remained, cultural markers of backwardness like high birthrates and an aversion to educating girls have persisted. As a result, Muslim literacy rates and incomes lag behind the national average. The community has also given birth—via Deobandism, the subcontinental cousin of Wahhabism—to an outlook whose purest form is embodied in the Taliban. .......... In a survey of Indian Muslims conducted by the distinguished U.S.-based Pakistani scholar and diplomat Akbar Ahmed for his book Journey Into Islam, a majority picked as their contemporary role models Maududi, the 19th-century Muslim supremacist Sayyed Ahmad Khan, and an influential Mumbai-based cleric named Zakir Naik, who publicly praises Osama bin Laden and calls for all Indians to be governed by Shariah. For the mainstream Indian media, a frank discussion of such matters is out of bounds. Even if this were not the case, though, the configuration of Indian politics is a recipe for paralysis. Muslims are believed to vote as a bloc—a notion that, whether true or not, gives them enormous influence in a fragmented polity with a first-past-the-post electoral system where 35% of the vote often ensures victory. Since Muslims constitute upward of 20% of the electorate in about 80 parliamentary constituencies, and at least 15% in another 40 or so, a large turnout of Muslim voters is often decisive. The consequences can be seen in a number of incidents. In 2006, for example, a minister in the government of Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Yaqoob Qureshi, offered a reward of 510 million rupees for beheading the Danish cartoonists responsible for “disrespectful” drawings of the prophet Muhammad. In Hyderabad last year, three legislators of a local Islamic party roughed up Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author who has been critical of Islam’s treatment of women and minority Hindus. A leading Muslim politician in Kerala, Abdul Nasser Madani, is a self-declared Islamist who spent nine years in prison for his role in a 1998 terrorist attack that killed 46 people. In reality, India, beset by poor governance, guided by an interpretation of secularism that encourages Muslim separateness rather than integration, and pressed by neighbors that are unwilling or unable to act against terrorist groups that operate from their soil, is the major democracy most vulnerable to radical Islam. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic, a travelogue about radical Islam, and a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C.
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