By Syed Zeeshan Ahmed,
Rahul Gandhi’s comments that home-grown Hindu extremist groups are bigger threat to India than Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba and Muslim militants during his conversations with US Ambassador Timothy Roemer and leaked out by Wikileaks have provoked the Hindutva outfits and their sympathizers to accuse him of “dividing India again on communal lines” and “playing vote-bank politics.”
But those attacking him need to go into the depth of the remarks that young Gandhi has made. He and his family are themselves victims of religious and linguistic terror and hence who can understand the issue better than Rahul himself.
While his grandmother Indira Gandhi died to the bullets of a Sikh soldier influenced by Sikh religious militancy led by Sikh religious leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale, his father Rajiv Gandhi was killed in a suicide attack by a Tamil woman sympathetic to Tamil extremist movement led by LTTE in Sri Lanka.
So, Rahul is not wrong when he says that there is greater threat to India from local Hindutva extremist forces than foreign-based Muslim militants. We need to analyse the issue in its proper perspective because Rahul having been groomed up in India’s top political family seems to have studied the subject well. So, his statements need to be read between the lines.
We need not go far to study the issue. We just need to see what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We all know that religious militant groups were backed by the United States of America and Pakistan in order to drive away the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In fact, it was the necessity of Pakistan to force the Soviet Union to quit Afghanistan as Soviet presence on its borders was against its interests. Similarly, it was also against the geo-political interests of US to have USSR expanding its boundaries up to the Pakistan border. So, it was the common interest of both the countries to get united to push Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
Both the governments provoked religious sentiments among Muslims not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but all over the globe against heretic or Godless Soviets to drum up support from the community and get unending supply of motivated fighters. The strategy succeeded as Muslim youths from every corner of the world, barring India, joined the war against the Soviets. The joint US-Pakistan venture resulted in a number of armed groups like Al-Qaeda taking birth. Pakistan also saw a number of militant groups emerging within its boundaries during the period. Since it were primarily the unorganized Muslim groups, particularly from Afghanistan, Pakistan and some of the Arab countries, who took part in the Afghan war and succeeded in driving the highly trained Soviet forces out, it bolstered their morale and made them feel that they could succeed elsewhere as well.
Though the US and Pakistan tried to dismantle these militant groups but they could not succeed to eliminate them completely. While some of these groups hit the targets outside Pakistan, particularly in India, splinter elements from these groups are now targeting Pakistan itself. These groups are not targeting only military but civilians as well. Bomb explosions and killing have become the order of the day in Pakistan.
We need to take a lesson from it. Now it is an open secret that it were Hindutva groups who were involved in terror incidents like bomb attack at Ajmer Sharif dargah in Rajasthan, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, bomb explosion in Malegaon(Maharashtra) and Modasa (Gujarat), and Samjhauta Express carrying Indian and Pakistan passengers to Pakistan.
What has emerged as significant in the investigations conducted by various Indian investigative agencies is that the Hindu militants involved in these attacks were highly motivated by their religion and connected with religious groups, with direct and indirect support and sympathy from some unscrupulous elements of our Army. If such unscrupulous elements are not curbed immediately, we can well imagine the state of things to emerge in future in the country. With their pan-India presence and networking at grassroots level, they can do unimaginable damage and it will be very difficult task to check them if they are allowed to spread their tentacles like the terror outfits in Pakistan. This is what Rahul Gandhi wants to convey through his statements. As for threat from Pakistan-based militant outfits, they are operating from outside and it is easier to keep watch on them and their sympathizers in India. Moreover, while Lashkar-e-Toiba and other Pakistani outfits are mainly hitting the targets outside Pakistan, Hindutva outfits targeting their own countrymen though the activities of both the groups are anti-human.
We have already seen the horrors of the Hindutva groups inflicted in shape of the bulldozing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 and mass carnage of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. The entire operation is so devised by the Hindutva groups that the blame is placed on Muslims for the crimes committed by them, with the media coverage of such events giving a perception that Muslims are attacking fellow Muslims and that too at venerable places like Masjids and dargah. If such elements get an upper hand in India, the safety and security of minorities, particularly Muslims, will be at great risk.
This crisis, if unattended, can lead to a total alienation of Muslims from the country. Oddly this is exactly what Hindutva desires. But it could be disastrous for Muslims as well as for the country.
(The writer can be reached at [email protected]).
[Photo by thehindu.com]