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The truth is at last beginning to dawn on Americans, but only so.
In the early days of terrorism in Punjab perpetrated by Khalistani separatists during the early 1980s, India cautioned the western democracies, especially the United States of America, about the rapid transformation of Pakistan into a state sponsor of terrorism. But that caution, backed by extensive documentation, fell on deaf ears; the Americans were busy funding a jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan's military dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was a close ally against whose arming of subversives in India no charges were to be countenanced.
By the early-1990s, after the Khalistani separatist movement had been put down (Gen Zia-ul-Haq died, along with the American Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, in a mysterious air crash on August 17, 1988), and Afghanistan had been converted into a wasteland ruled first by the mujahideen groups and then the benighted Taliban, the dragon's teeth sown during the Zia years of "Islamic revolution" began to yield their harvest of Islamist jihadis and terrorists who trained their guns on Jammu & Kashmir.
Once again India cautioned the US and European governments that unless checked and destroyed root and branch, the jihadis, by now an elaborate terror apparatus pay-rolled and controlled by Pakistan, would one day turn against the west and bite the hand that had fed them till now. India's concerns over cross-border terrorism were met with disdain and worse; Pakistan continued to be mollycoddled.
Then came 9/11 and suddenly the world woke up to the reality of jihadi terror. The Taliban regime was literally bombed out of Kabul, a global war on terror was launched and India's concerns were no longer ignored. It is another matter that Pakistan, now ruled by Pervez Musharraf, another khaki general who heads both that country's Army and Government, continues to be Washington's blue-eyed boy.
Seen against this backdrop, many western democracies, including the US, have not wasted too much time in realising that India's concern over the rising tide of Islamist activity and its attendant violence in Bangladesh are more than worthy of note. Increasingly, Bangladesh is becoming the focus of attention as a host and hub of jihadis.
Canada has prepared an extensive document on the subversion of Bangladesh's nascent democracy by Islamists aided and armed by jihadi organisations and states at large. The UK has had a taste of Islamist violence with one of its senior diplomats posted in Bangladesh barely surviving a bombing. Now America has begun to voice its views.
Soon after the assassination attempt on Awami League leader and former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed on August 21 last year, the US had not minced words in expressing its disquiet, as had most European governments. The FBI got into the act of determining the culprits behind the attack; there were veiled threats of holding up western aid that just about keeps Bangladesh ticking.
But all that has had little dampening effect on the Islamist organisations, many of them with established linkages with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, and the Islamist political parties, the most dominant of which, Jamaat-e-Islami (a gathering of razakars who fought against the liberation of Bangladesh) is now a partner in the ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and her Bangladesh National Party. However, non-state institutions in the US are now waking up to the reality in Bangladesh and it is likely that their views will contribute to the hardening of the neo-cons' perception of how to deal with this rogue-state-in-the-making.
The New York Times, in a recent investigative report headlined 'The Next Islamist Revolution?' has exposed the not-so-pretty Islamist underbelly of Bangladesh for its readers in America. It vividly shows how 'Bangla Bhai', perhaps the most high profile indigenous Islamist in Bangladesh, and his brigands have been terrorising men into embracing fundamentalist, Deobandi Islam (which had inspired the Taliban) and women into discarding traditional Bangali dress and wearing 'burkas'.
This "talibanisation" of Bangladeshi society, as the New York Times puts it, is "all rather new to the area, which was religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai's group is called (the name means Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent and seemed to have enough lightly armed adherents to make its rule stick." And it is happening in areas along Bangladesh's border with India, the implications of which cannot be over stressed.
Officially, Khaleda Zia's government has issued an arrest warrant against Bangla Bhai. But he remains free because the local administration and police are either incapable of handling the Islamists or are complicit participants in this Islamist depredation of society and culture. According to the New York Times, "The Bangladeshi government's arrest warrant doesn't seem to have made much difference... The government is far away in Dhaka, and is in any case divided on precisely this question of how much Islam and politics should mix."
The New York Times quotes Zachary Abuza, author of Militant Islam in Southeast Asia and a professor of political science at Simmons College in Boston, on how Bangladesh is fast becoming the host and hub of Islamists and jihadis affiliated to Al Qaeda or motivated by its blood-soaked ideology of hate. "Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important to groups like Al Qaeda because it's been off everyone's radar screen," says Abuza, "Al Qaeda is going to have to figure out where they can regroup, where they have the physical capability to assemble and train, and Bangladesh is one of these key places."
Explaining the extent to which the Islamist groups have pervaded Bangladeshi politics, the New York Times says, "The most important of these has been the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), which has been associated with Fazlul Rahman, who signed Osama bin Laden's famous declaration in 1998 endorsing international, coordinated jihad - the document that introduced Al Qaeda to the larger world. But Bangla Bhai's group and others have since emerged and are making their bids for power."
The rapidity with which Bangladeshi civil society is being coerced into submission by the Islamists, the manner in which Begum Zia's Government is willingly yielding space to fundamentalist forces and the active legitimisation of violence against moderate Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and sects like the Ahmediyas, however, cannot remain off the radar screen for too long. Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank which regularly provides input for policy-making by the US Administration, has released a report, 'Bangladesh: Trouble Below the Radar Screen'.
The CSIS report, which seeks to put this new theatre of violent political Islam firmly on the radar screen of American policy-makers, bluntly states the obvious: "Confrontational politics and weak governance have stalled Bangladesh's economic and social progress. More recently, fundamentalist Islam has begun to make its presence felt. The combination could prove dangerous for Bangladesh and the surrounding region."
As in Pakistan and elsewhere, the nurseries that nourish Islamists and jihadis in Bangladesh, are its madarsas or Islamic seminaries, a whopping 64,000 of them across the country. The CSIS report, commenting on the role played by these madarsas, says: "Funded mostly by proselytising Arab charities, most madarsas do not fall under government control." The report adds that "control over these madarsas" gives power and clout to Islamic parties like Islami Oikya Jote.
The emerging American perception of the volatile situation in Bangladesh has at last begun to reflect India's concerns. But only partly so: the American view, while touching on the truth, meanders into reasons that have little to do with the reality in Bangladesh. For instance, both New York Times and CSIS peg the emergence of Islamist and jihadi forces in Bangladesh to that country's poverty.
Americans would do well to remember that the 'Islamist revolution' is not fuelled by lack of wealth. Iran, the first stop of Islamism, was not a poor country; Saudi Arabia's jihadis who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 were not impoverished Arabs; Osama bin Laden's personal wealth runs into billions of dollars; and, in Bangladesh, neither the Jamaatis nor their allies are short of cash.
Indeed, Bangladesh, and earlier
East Pakistan, and even before that 'East Bengal', was never a wealthy
part of South Asia or the sub-continent. But it had - and in many ways
still continues to have - a rich, diverse culture and a liberal, democratic,
open society. That is the reason why Islamists have zeroed in on Bangladesh.
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