Author: Sankrant Sanu
Publication: Chowk.com
Date: December 18, 2008
URL: http://www.chowk.com/articles/mumbai-terror-apologists-sankrant-sanu.htm
The attacks in Mumbai have brought forth a
parade of subtle and not-so-subtle denial
The sound of gunfire and the counting of the dead had not yet been finished
in Mumbai when the terror apologists had already explained it. Aryn Baker
writing in Time Magazine, spoke of how "the roots of Muslim rage run
deep in India." His article meandered over economic disparities faced
by Indian Muslims and the need for justice, else the people like the gunman
in the Oberoi Trident Hotel would "keep calling." Tariq Ali stated,
that India needs to look closer to home to Kashmir where "conditions
have been much worse than Tibet." Martha Nussbaum, writing in the Los
Angeles Times about the Mumbai attacks focused her entire article on the terrible
doings of the "Hindu Right." Arundhati Roy, asked us to "contextualize"
the Mumbai attacks as a choice for India to make between "justice and
civil war." And parts of the Pakistani blogosphere and Pakistan television
and sites like countercurrents.org were alive with murmuring of a conspiracy
by-who else?-Hindus, Jews and Americans, all to defame Muslims. Practically
all these Ostrich-like responses, burying their head in the sand with various
forms of denial and apologia, chose to ignore the elephant sitting in the
room-the reality of Pakistan-based Islam-enabled terrorism. Sacrificing this
elementary truth to the gods of politically correctness, helps no one-including
the many Muslims, among them Pakistanis, who are genuinely aghast at these
acts.
The first kind of apologia is denial. This
generally takes the form of elaborate conspiracy theories-such as the most
popular theory doing the rounds of the Muslim world after the 9/11 attacks,
"the Jews did it." For what? "To blame the Muslims" of
course. It appears that the entire world is engaged in the construction of
elaborate hoax plots to kill themselves simply to blame Muslims. The version
doing the rounds in the Mumbai terror attacks was that the attackers were
Hindu, evidenced by the fact that one of the photographs of a suave young
man, casually toting an AK-47 with a back-pack full of ammunition, showed
him wearing a thick red band on his arm. "Tying a red thread or cord
around the wrist is a Hindu practice" proclaims the blog, titled "Evidence
being deliberately ignored" perhaps not quite aware that the Hindu practice
involves a sacred thread or mauli, not a broad band, though at least one report
pointed out that they were specifically instructed to wear a red band to cause
confusion. And wearing a band is hardly clinching evidence versus the spate
of satellite, phone, ordnance-based and confessional evidence that is available.
Already this "clinching" evidence of the "Hindu band"
has been picked and quoted up by numerous people with Muslim names posting
comments on the news as incontrovertible proof of the conspiracy. But the
conspiracy theory proponents are not found only in the anonymous blogosphere.
It is broadcast as the explanation on mainstream Pakistani TV. No less than
Maulana Syed Nizamuddin, All India Muslim Personal Law Board general secretary,
has latched onto the ascription of the Mumbai attacks to Muslims as a conspiracy.
Abdul Rahman Antulay of the Congress, in remarks disowned by the party, has
come out with his own version of the conspiracy. So the arrest of the Pakistani
operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba; the selective targeting of Americans, Britons,
Hindus and Jews, the "Western powers" and Yehudi-Hindu "devils"
that form the backbone of the Islamist terror universe; the evidence of traced
satellite calls to Pakistan, is all rendered meaningless by this single red-band.
The explicit instructions they carried to "kill indiscriminately, particularly
white foreign tourists, and spare Muslims" that led them to spare the
Turkish Muslim couple at the Taj and massacre the 13-year old American girl
is of no consequence.
All this, say the conspiracy theorists, is
simply a grand plot to "defame Muslims."
Denial is an understandable emotion. There
are many Muslims in India and abroad, who go about their quiet lives, just
like everyone else. They are neither scholars nor historians delving deep
into their texts or constructing grand histories. Their lives revolve around
their close circles and their concerns for them. They have been told that
Islam is a religion of a peace, the greatest religion, and that is enough
for them. They cannot identify with these mass-killers and fear being associated
with them. They have seen good Muslims all around them, in their friends and
family. Denial, then is an understandable response at being told that the
killers are Muslim espousing Islamic causes.
The second form of apologia is the apologia
of "just cause." This form of apologia bandies about every imaginable
excuse-economic disparities, the pulling down of the structure of the Babri
Masjid, the situation in Kashmir, the riots in Gujarat, the alleged persecution
of "minorities" in India and so on and so forth as the reason for
terror. All this must apparently be fixed, we are told, before the terror
will go away. The choice as the doyen of selective apologia, Arundhati Roy,
herself informs us in an article about the Mumbai attacks that the choice
is between "justice" for all these things and "civil war"
in India. How that relates to Pakistan-based terror groups with a pan-Islamic
mission killing Jews in Mumbai is somehow lost in the fog of her own picturesque
prose. Yes, somehow, the persecution of the Hindu minorities in Pakistan and
Bangladesh to the point of elimination in Pakistan and to truly genocidal
proportions in Bangladesh, has yet to generate bands of Hindu terrorists turning
into random mass-murderers in those countries. By contrast, Muslims have increased,
both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms in independent India. These
are simply facts to be acknowledge. Severe genocidal persecution would show
up in census data. Ask the Tibetans. The Tibetan genocide by the Chinese,
a real genocide in an age of hyperbole, in which over 1 million Tibetans have
been killed, their monasteries have been destroyed and their identity and
culture under attack has continued for decades, have scarcely turned Tibetans
into taking AK-47's into their hands and blasting Chinese tourists in Mumbai.
The Ahmediyas, an unorthodox Muslim sect, are likewise a severely persecuted
minority in Pakistan who have not take recourse to terror. Nor did Buddhists
the world over start blowing people and declare Muslims as their enemies because
of the great injustice in the destruction of the magnificient Bamiyan Buddhas,
a marvel of far greater grandeur than the obscure and relatively insignificant
Babri Masjid, by the Taliban.
Who remembers the riot in India a few years
ago where a particular community was targeted and hundreds were killed and
over twenty thousand people were rendered homeless? This is not Gujarat 2002
but something that took place after that-Assam in 2003. Its victims were "Hindi-speaking"
Biharis living in Assam, some for generations. It is a riot that has virtually
vanished from history. No "Concerned Citizens" tribunal went to
do a probe. No Nussbaum's write about it. No campaigns will be launched to
deny the Chief Minister of the state at the time (anyone remember the name?)
a US Visa. No University Chairs will be created in its name. There is not
even an entry in Wikipedia. The Biharis are among the poorest and most underprivileged
groups in India, many of them facing discrimination as they seek employment
as migrant laborers across India. One wonders why the Biharis have not unleashed
a reign of terror across India, despite being the repeated target of attacks,
most recently in Mumbai itself. When Poverty, discrimination, even selective
targeting during riots and killings from Assam to Mumbai is amply available
to Biharis as a justifying "context."
The final apologia is the apologia of mitigating
circumstances-that of poverty and lack of education. Among its recent proponents-none
other than the good doctor Chopra, amiably turning Larry King's questions
on the Mumbai attacks into the "root causes" of "poverty",
"education" and lest we forget, "fundamentalist Hindus."
In the bliss generated by the chanting of mantras and the counting of dollars,
while carefully distancing himself from Hinduism to skillfully market himself
to the broader American public, Dr. Chopra also distanced himself from reasoned
analysis. If poverty and lack of education were the root causes, it is strange
that most of the 9/11 suicide-attackers were both well-to-do and educated
as is Osama Bin Laden himself. The "Indian Mujahideen" that claimed
responsibility for recent bomb blasts included well-educated and well-off
software engineers and college students. Of course all these arrests have
already been dismissed by the apologists as part of the unending conspiracy
against Muslims. The Versace T-shirt wearing Lashkar-a-Toiba attacker in Mumbai
who gleefully shot down bystanders and police officers alike may have been
poor, but it was not poverty that turned him into a lethal killer. That required
something else. The trained Mumbai attackers had little problem using the
GPS or Google Earth to carry out their blood-soaked plots. Neither poverty
nor lack of education is the "root cause" propelling these cold-blooded
and merciless killers.
This is not to say that innocents, Muslims
and others, are not targeted by the Indian State or that the Indian police
is not often sloppy, venal and corrupt. The problems with the Indian state
are manifold and are the subject of other writings. However, the Indian state
is by- and-large an equal-opportunity oppressor in addition to being blissfully
incompetent. But its acts alone do not yield clues into the phenomenon of
terrorism by Islamic groups in India.
By their choice of targets, and by the causes
they espoused, there is sufficient cause to conjecture that the Mumbai attackers
were Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, fighting for what they considered as Islamic
causes. They were specifically indoctrinated using Islamic concepts and the
promise of Islam-justified heavenly rewards. And, in this case, they were
specifically the product of the terror apparatus from Pakistan. Now whether
Islam is properly or improperly used and how deeply the Pakistan state is
implicated are reasonable follow-up research questions.
But we can ask these questions properly once
we go past the three forms of apologia. Whether or not other Muslims agree
with their actions, the first step is to admit the existence of Islam-inspired
terror groups. Denial and apologia, both by Muslims and by others on their
behalf, is much more damaging to Muslims. This is because, even when the thought
censors of political correctness refuse to look at this inconvenient truth,
it doesn't go away-it simply becomes part of private conversation rather that
open public discourse. And it is these private conversations, about anti-Muslim
conspirators on the one hand and all-guilty Muslims on the other, which are
far more dangerous to the future of a harmonious India.
On the other hand, once we plainly admit of
Pakistan-based Islam-inspired terror without pretending it away, we are able
to examine it in the light and come up with possible solutions. This will
be the subject of the next article.
Sankrant Sanu is an independent writer based
in Seattle.