Roots of terror

AS a country that was born in terrible violence, India has never lived too far from it. The first years, some of us will remember, were a fragile and tense time. The press never mentioned riots between Hindus and Muslims but referred to the con flict between two communities. And there were conflicts in those first years. One has painful memories of riots in 1963 in the city of Calcutta, as it was then called, after rumours spread of violence against Hindus in what was then East Pakistan.

There were other kinds of communal violence: the violence that came in the wake of the demand for a separate State of Andhra, and then many years later, the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the continued violence that crystallised into the demand for Khalistan. We saw violence when the Gorkhas first demanded a separate State and when the Bodos wanted a State.

A tumultuous and extremely varied federation like India will have much to keep it vibrant and integrated, but it will always have its internal disagreements, which all too often express themselves in mass violence. It is, perhaps, an essential characteristic of a federation as varied as ours is and something that will naturally cause anguish and distress but not much surprise.

Jawaharlal Nehru said as much in one of his speeches, quoted by S.D. Muni in his paper Ethnic conflict, federalism, and democracy in India (Ethnicity and Power in the Contemporary World edited by Kumar Rupesinghe and Valery A. Tishkov; United Nations University Press, 1996): When we talk loudly of our nationalism, each persons idea of nationalism is his own brand of nationalism. It may be Assamese nationalism, it may be Bengali, it may be Gujarati, Uttar Pradesh, Punjabi or Madrasi. Each one has his own particular brand in mind. He may use the word nationalism of India but in his mind, he is thinking of that nationalism in terms of his own brand of it. When two brands of nationalism come into conflict, there is trouble.

Muni himself comments, in the same paper:

The inconsistent and reversible processes of ethnic conflicts can be understood in the context of Indias developmental dynamics, which have been releasing simultaneously the impulses of both conflict formation and containment. Both the alienation and integration of ethnic groups have been going on side by side.

Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to try and understand the causes of conflict, and much thought has been given to how conflicts can be resolved. Institutions have been set up to study them and policies have been formulated and altered again and again. A group set up under the late P.N. Haksar noted, for example, that over the years the nature of Hindu-Muslim conflicts has changed from predominantly involving the killing of one another to looting and arson. This is a significant commentary on what the seeds of conflict have become over the years (except, of course, the deliberately organised pogrom in Gujarat, which was an essentially political act).

But observers will have noted that communal clashes have become fewer on the ground. In their place we have seen the growth of something more dangerous: the terror attack. Bombs and grenades explode in crowded localities, killing a large number of people and maiming and wounding many more. In Varanasi, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, on a number of occasions, bombs have ripped through the cities most crowded areas or on suburban trains taking office workers home. These attacks, unlike the riots of previous years, are carefully and cold-bloodedly planned to have what the perpetrators see as the optimal effect.

Sometimes, fortunately, the attacks go wrong, as had happened in Surat and, to some extent, in Ahmedabad and later in Delhi when bombs did not go off as planned. But they point, nonetheless, to the existence of groups bent on planning and executing murderous attacks on ordinary people going about their day-to-day work.

It has been remarkable that virtually none of them has resulted in what the perpetrators probably wanted: a violent outburst of communal rage resulting in bloody riots. It was all the more remarkable, and evident, in November 2008 in Mumbai when a well-trained terrorist group from Pakistan attacked two five-star hotels and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, killing over a hundred people and wounding many more. There were spontaneous acts of incredible bravery and courage, and that, more than anything else, defeated the purpose of the terrorists and also delivered one of them alive to the authorities. His interrogation has provided much valuable information and revealed the nature of the operation and who planned it.

Again, the point that one wants to make is that it caused no violent reaction. The extreme provocation resulted in anger but not against a community so much as against the government. That anger forced Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil and State Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and Home Minister R.R. Patil to resign. But there was no riot or retaliatory killing.

We seem to have come a long way from the tense 1960s, and communities now seem to be able to live together in relative peace though one hears that in Gujarat, after the anti-Muslim pogrom, there is a coldness and distance between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

What is of concern, though, is the difference in the reaction of the authorities to these events. The earlier attempts to understand the causes of conflict and anger between communities and try out different policies to lessen, if not eliminate, them have now gone. The reaction to the terror attacks that have grown in place of communal riots is exemplified in the decisions announced after the terrorist attack on Mumbai: a strengthening of the National Security Guard, provision of sophisticated weapons, communication and other devices to make it more effective and aircraft to transport its commandos to conflict areas as quickly as possible, and a number of other measures.

These are necessary, and the government is right in doing what should have been done long ago. But what seems to be missing is the setting up of a mechanism to analyse the reasons for the terror attacks and to explore ways in which some local youth can be weaned away from the inflammatory ideas with which they are being fed.

There is also a distressing tendency to link these attacks to one particular community, the Muslims, as if the attacks were a part of its religious beliefs. This is a ridiculous and dangerous attitude to have, particularly for the security agencies of the country. The late Edward Said wrote, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States:

What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to make itself felt. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so.

Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isnt a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations even though some of their adherents have futilely tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly (Islam and the West are inadequate banners, The Observer, September 16, 2001).

It is as important to be physically as well as mentally prepared for attacks, and we need to set up mechanisms and instruments that can analyse what lies beneath the alienation and come up with workable methods to counter it. One is not talking of a dialogue right now but a process of thinking things out. If this does not start quickly, all the weapons we give our forces will never be enough.