Showing posts with label jihad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jihad. Show all posts
Wednesday 19 December 2018
Thursday 30 November 2017
Let Hadiya take charge of her life
Brinda Karat in The Hindu
The Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday as it heard the Hadiya case. The counsel for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) supported by the legal counsel of the Central government made out a case of indoctrination and brainwashing in a conspiracy of ‘love jehad’ which they claimed rendered Hadiya incapacitated and invalidated her consent. The NIA wanted the court to study the documents it claimed it had as evidence before they heard Hadiya. For one and a half hours, this young woman stood in open court hearing arguments about herself, against herself and her chosen partner. It was shameful, humiliating and set an unfortunate precedent. If the court was not clear that it wanted to hear her, why did they call her at all? She should never have been subjected to that kind of indignity. She is not a criminal but she was treated like one for that period of time.
The right to speak
The court remained undecided even in the face of the compelling argument by lawyers Kapil Sibal and Indira Jaising representing Hadiya’s husband Shafin Jahan that the most critical issue was that of the right of an adult woman to make her own choice. The court almost adjourned for the day when the Kerala State Women’s Commission lawyer, P. V. Dinesh, raised a voice of outrage that after all the accusations against Hadiya in the open court if the court did not hear her, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice. In khap panchayats, the woman accused of breaking the so-called honour code is never allowed to speak. Her sentence begins with her enforced silence and ends with whatever dreadful punishment is meted out to her by the khap. Fortunately the Supreme Court pulled itself back from the brink and agreed to give Hadiya an opportunity to speak.
There was no ambiguity about what she said. It was the courage of her conviction that stood out. She wanted to be treated as a human being. She wanted her faith to be respected. She wanted to study. She wanted to be with her husband. And most importantly, she wanted her freedom.
The court listened, but did it hear?
Both sides claim they are happy with the order. Hadiya and her husband feel vindicated because the court has ended her enforced custody by her father. She has got an opportunity to resume her studies. Lawyers representing the couple’s interests have explained that the first and main legal strategy was to ensure her liberty from custody which has been achieved. They say that the order places no restrictions on Hadiya meeting anyone she chooses to, including her husband. It is a state of interim relief.
Her father claims victory because the court did not accept Hadiya’s request to leave the court with her husband. Instead the court directed that she go straight to a hostel in Salem to continue her studies. He asserted this will ensure that she is not with her husband who he has termed a terrorist.
The next court hearing is in January and the way the court order is implemented will be clear by then.
The case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.
One of the most disturbing fallouts is that the term ‘love jehad’ used by Hindutva zealots to target inter-faith marriages has been given legal recognition and respectability by the highest courts. An agency whose proclaimed mandate is to investigate offences related to terrorism has now expanded its mandate by order of the Supreme Court to unearth so-called conspiracies of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and forcibly converting them with the aim of joining the Islamic State. The underlying assumption is that Hindu women who marry Muslims have no minds of their own. If they convert to Islam, that itself is proof enough of a conspiracy.
This was clearly reflected in the regressive order of the Kerala High Court in May this year which annulled Hadiya’s marriage. Among other most objectionable comments it held that a woman of 24 is “weak and vulnerable”, that as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” Equally shocking, it ordered that nobody could meet her except her parents in whose custody she was placed.
Not a good precedent
Courts in this country are expected to uphold the right of an adult woman to her choice of a partner. Women’s autonomy and equal citizenship rights flow from the constitutional framework, not from religious authority or tradition. The Kerala High Court judgement should be struck down by the apex court. We cannot afford to have such a judgment as legal precedent.
The case also bring into focus the right to practice and propagate the religion of one’s choice under the Constitution. In Hadiya’s case she has made it clear time and again that she converted because of her belief in Islam. It is not a forcible conversion. Moreover she converted at least a year before her marriage. So the issue of ‘love jehad’ in any case is irrelevant and the court cannot interfere with her right to convert.
As far as the NIA investigation is concerned, the Supreme Court has ordered that it should continue. The Kerala government gave an additional affidavit in October stating that “the investigation conducted so far by the Kerala police has not revealed any incident relating to commission of any scheduled offences to make a report to the Central government under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act of 2008.” The State government said the police investigation was on when the Supreme Court directed the NIA to conduct an investigation into the case. It thus opposed the handing over of the case to the NIA. In the light of this clear stand of the Kerala government, it is inexplicable why its counsel in the Supreme Court should take a contrary stand in the hearing — this should be rectified at the earliest.
Vigilantism by another name
The NIA is on a fishing expedition having already interrogated 89 such couples in Kerala. Instead of inter-caste and inter-community marriages being celebrated as symbols of India’s open and liberal approach, they are being treated as suspect.
Now, every inter-faith couple will be vulnerable to attacks by gangs equivalent to the notorious gau rakshaks. This is not just applicable to cases where a Hindu woman marries a Muslim. There are bigots and fanatics in all communities. When a Muslim woman marries a Hindu, Muslim fundamentalist organisations like the Popular Front of India use violent means to prevent such marriages. Sworn enemies, such as those who belong to fundamentalist organisations in the name of this or that religion, have more in common with each other than they would care to admit.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will act in a way which strengthens women’s rights unencumbered by subjective interpretations of tradition and communal readings of what constitutes national interest.
The Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday as it heard the Hadiya case. The counsel for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) supported by the legal counsel of the Central government made out a case of indoctrination and brainwashing in a conspiracy of ‘love jehad’ which they claimed rendered Hadiya incapacitated and invalidated her consent. The NIA wanted the court to study the documents it claimed it had as evidence before they heard Hadiya. For one and a half hours, this young woman stood in open court hearing arguments about herself, against herself and her chosen partner. It was shameful, humiliating and set an unfortunate precedent. If the court was not clear that it wanted to hear her, why did they call her at all? She should never have been subjected to that kind of indignity. She is not a criminal but she was treated like one for that period of time.
The right to speak
The court remained undecided even in the face of the compelling argument by lawyers Kapil Sibal and Indira Jaising representing Hadiya’s husband Shafin Jahan that the most critical issue was that of the right of an adult woman to make her own choice. The court almost adjourned for the day when the Kerala State Women’s Commission lawyer, P. V. Dinesh, raised a voice of outrage that after all the accusations against Hadiya in the open court if the court did not hear her, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice. In khap panchayats, the woman accused of breaking the so-called honour code is never allowed to speak. Her sentence begins with her enforced silence and ends with whatever dreadful punishment is meted out to her by the khap. Fortunately the Supreme Court pulled itself back from the brink and agreed to give Hadiya an opportunity to speak.
There was no ambiguity about what she said. It was the courage of her conviction that stood out. She wanted to be treated as a human being. She wanted her faith to be respected. She wanted to study. She wanted to be with her husband. And most importantly, she wanted her freedom.
The court listened, but did it hear?
Both sides claim they are happy with the order. Hadiya and her husband feel vindicated because the court has ended her enforced custody by her father. She has got an opportunity to resume her studies. Lawyers representing the couple’s interests have explained that the first and main legal strategy was to ensure her liberty from custody which has been achieved. They say that the order places no restrictions on Hadiya meeting anyone she chooses to, including her husband. It is a state of interim relief.
Her father claims victory because the court did not accept Hadiya’s request to leave the court with her husband. Instead the court directed that she go straight to a hostel in Salem to continue her studies. He asserted this will ensure that she is not with her husband who he has termed a terrorist.
The next court hearing is in January and the way the court order is implemented will be clear by then.
The case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.
One of the most disturbing fallouts is that the term ‘love jehad’ used by Hindutva zealots to target inter-faith marriages has been given legal recognition and respectability by the highest courts. An agency whose proclaimed mandate is to investigate offences related to terrorism has now expanded its mandate by order of the Supreme Court to unearth so-called conspiracies of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and forcibly converting them with the aim of joining the Islamic State. The underlying assumption is that Hindu women who marry Muslims have no minds of their own. If they convert to Islam, that itself is proof enough of a conspiracy.
This was clearly reflected in the regressive order of the Kerala High Court in May this year which annulled Hadiya’s marriage. Among other most objectionable comments it held that a woman of 24 is “weak and vulnerable”, that as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” Equally shocking, it ordered that nobody could meet her except her parents in whose custody she was placed.
Not a good precedent
Courts in this country are expected to uphold the right of an adult woman to her choice of a partner. Women’s autonomy and equal citizenship rights flow from the constitutional framework, not from religious authority or tradition. The Kerala High Court judgement should be struck down by the apex court. We cannot afford to have such a judgment as legal precedent.
The case also bring into focus the right to practice and propagate the religion of one’s choice under the Constitution. In Hadiya’s case she has made it clear time and again that she converted because of her belief in Islam. It is not a forcible conversion. Moreover she converted at least a year before her marriage. So the issue of ‘love jehad’ in any case is irrelevant and the court cannot interfere with her right to convert.
As far as the NIA investigation is concerned, the Supreme Court has ordered that it should continue. The Kerala government gave an additional affidavit in October stating that “the investigation conducted so far by the Kerala police has not revealed any incident relating to commission of any scheduled offences to make a report to the Central government under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act of 2008.” The State government said the police investigation was on when the Supreme Court directed the NIA to conduct an investigation into the case. It thus opposed the handing over of the case to the NIA. In the light of this clear stand of the Kerala government, it is inexplicable why its counsel in the Supreme Court should take a contrary stand in the hearing — this should be rectified at the earliest.
Vigilantism by another name
The NIA is on a fishing expedition having already interrogated 89 such couples in Kerala. Instead of inter-caste and inter-community marriages being celebrated as symbols of India’s open and liberal approach, they are being treated as suspect.
Now, every inter-faith couple will be vulnerable to attacks by gangs equivalent to the notorious gau rakshaks. This is not just applicable to cases where a Hindu woman marries a Muslim. There are bigots and fanatics in all communities. When a Muslim woman marries a Hindu, Muslim fundamentalist organisations like the Popular Front of India use violent means to prevent such marriages. Sworn enemies, such as those who belong to fundamentalist organisations in the name of this or that religion, have more in common with each other than they would care to admit.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will act in a way which strengthens women’s rights unencumbered by subjective interpretations of tradition and communal readings of what constitutes national interest.
Saturday 11 November 2017
Saudi crown prince’s revolution is the real Arab spring
Zev Chafets in The Dawn
WHEN Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia rounded up 500-head of royals and billionaires last weekend and tossed them into luxury confinement, it was more than just a power grab by a young man in a hurry. It was a revolution. But of what kind?
Faisal Abbas, editor of Arab News, the English-language daily that normally speaks for the government, provided an answer of sorts from the Saudi perspective.
“With all due respect to the pundits out there, ‘experts’ analysing Saudi Arabia in previous decades had it too easy,” he wrote on Tuesday. “We need to understand that the days when things took too long to happen — if they happened at all — are forever gone. The exciting part is that thanks to the ambitious reforms being implemented … we are finally living in a country where anything can happen.”
Muhammed, known as MBS, is 32. He looks like a storybook Arabian prince and he talks like a progressive. He says he plans to liberalise and modernise his sclerotic society, expand the civil rights of women, reduce the economic power of the Saudi fossil fuel industry, and loosen the grip of the 5,000-member royal cousins club that has bled the country dry for generations.
Not only that: the prince also promises to transform Saudi Islam into a more tolerant brand of religion that does not fund extremist mosques in the West or underwrite jihadists in the Middle East.
Isn’t this the Arab leader we have been waiting for?
Yet so far, there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in world capitals. With the exception of US President Donald Trump, who has tweeted his support, events in Riyadh have elicited mostly silence.
This is understandable. Sometimes bright young Arab revolutionaries turn out to be Anwar Sadat, whose radical vision brought peace between Egypt and Israel. More often, they are tyrannical like Gamal Abdul Nasser or murderous like Osama Bin Laden or hapless like the Egyptian yuppies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2010. Let’s hope the dismal outcomes of that so-called Arab Spring have taught gullible Westerners not to engage in wishful thinking.
Still, you have to admire the boldness of the young prince. He has made enemies of the Saudi aristocracy, its billionaire class and their foreign business partners, who will eventually be looking for revenge. He has also locked up some senior clerics. The Saud family has historically derived its status as the Protector of Makkah from its alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam. The kingdom is full of young disciples who will not take kindly to the silencing of their jihadist preachers. (It’s true, however, that the prince has shown a less enlightened penchant, cracking down on human-rights advocates and academics as well.)
The prince also faces a threat from Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani warned that a Saudi alliance with the US and “Zionist regime” of Israel would be a “strategic mistake”. Since the US has been allied with the Saudis for decades, this sounded like a redundant warning.
It was not. Adding “Zionists” to the equation made it a death threat. Open collaboration with Israel by Arab heads of state is life-threatening. In the early 1950s, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem for allegedly talking peace. In 1981, after signing the deal with Israel, Sadat was shot to death by Islamic extremists at a military parade in Cairo. The next year, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was blown to bits in Beirut, presumably by Syrian agents.
Like MBS, Gemayel was the scion of an aristocratic family, one that publicly allied himself with Israel. The Saudi crown prince is too young to remember Gemayel, but Saad Hariri — who resigned as Lebanese prime minister over the weekend and is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia (or a nearby Gulf state) from Hezbollah assassins — can fill him in on what happens to Arab leaders who get accused of philo-Semitism.
This dynamic, by the way, explains Israel’s silence over MBS’s manoeuvrings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted by the emergence of a new Arab leader who shares his view of Iran. The last thing Bibi wants to do is get him shot.
Let’s be optimistic. Suppose Prince Mohammed survives hitmen, the wrath of his cousins and the fiery opposition of jihadist clerics — that he rises to the throne and moves to implement his domestic reforms. Granting women equal civil rights, permitting theatres and cinemas to open, tamping down the more inflammatory mosques, diversifying the economy — it is, as Abbas writes, an exciting prospect.
But there remains the question of his wider ambitions. He has made it clear that he considers Iran a mortal enemy. It is equally clear that he wants to lead a Sunni Arab coalition that can take on Tehran and end its regional aggression. This is a worthy goal, but not realistic.
The crown prince is the commander-in-chief of the army. He knows that it is a third-rate fighting force, unable to defeat even Houthi militia bands in Yemen, let alone Iran and its allies. His father and previous kings have been elderly rulers, cautious and focused on self-preservation. The most impressive fighting force in the kingdom is the National Guard, whose main role is guarding the royal family. The Saudi style of warfare has been funding proxy armies, while the US defends its borders.
Will MBS follow prudently in the footsteps of his predecessors? Or will he be seduced by dreams of restoring his family’s ancient warrior tradition and imposing Sunni primacy in the Muslim Middle East? I vote for option No 1.
An energetic, liberalising young king in Saudi Arabia would be a very good thing for the Middle East. He could be an important ally in the international war against terror, and a fine role model for other aspiring Arab revolutionaries. It would be a shame to waste this potential on half-baked military adventures. He needs to bring the Gulf into the modern world, not get bogged down in an Iranian Bay of Pigs.
WHEN Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia rounded up 500-head of royals and billionaires last weekend and tossed them into luxury confinement, it was more than just a power grab by a young man in a hurry. It was a revolution. But of what kind?
Faisal Abbas, editor of Arab News, the English-language daily that normally speaks for the government, provided an answer of sorts from the Saudi perspective.
“With all due respect to the pundits out there, ‘experts’ analysing Saudi Arabia in previous decades had it too easy,” he wrote on Tuesday. “We need to understand that the days when things took too long to happen — if they happened at all — are forever gone. The exciting part is that thanks to the ambitious reforms being implemented … we are finally living in a country where anything can happen.”
Muhammed, known as MBS, is 32. He looks like a storybook Arabian prince and he talks like a progressive. He says he plans to liberalise and modernise his sclerotic society, expand the civil rights of women, reduce the economic power of the Saudi fossil fuel industry, and loosen the grip of the 5,000-member royal cousins club that has bled the country dry for generations.
Not only that: the prince also promises to transform Saudi Islam into a more tolerant brand of religion that does not fund extremist mosques in the West or underwrite jihadists in the Middle East.
Isn’t this the Arab leader we have been waiting for?
Yet so far, there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in world capitals. With the exception of US President Donald Trump, who has tweeted his support, events in Riyadh have elicited mostly silence.
This is understandable. Sometimes bright young Arab revolutionaries turn out to be Anwar Sadat, whose radical vision brought peace between Egypt and Israel. More often, they are tyrannical like Gamal Abdul Nasser or murderous like Osama Bin Laden or hapless like the Egyptian yuppies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2010. Let’s hope the dismal outcomes of that so-called Arab Spring have taught gullible Westerners not to engage in wishful thinking.
Still, you have to admire the boldness of the young prince. He has made enemies of the Saudi aristocracy, its billionaire class and their foreign business partners, who will eventually be looking for revenge. He has also locked up some senior clerics. The Saud family has historically derived its status as the Protector of Makkah from its alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam. The kingdom is full of young disciples who will not take kindly to the silencing of their jihadist preachers. (It’s true, however, that the prince has shown a less enlightened penchant, cracking down on human-rights advocates and academics as well.)
The prince also faces a threat from Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani warned that a Saudi alliance with the US and “Zionist regime” of Israel would be a “strategic mistake”. Since the US has been allied with the Saudis for decades, this sounded like a redundant warning.
It was not. Adding “Zionists” to the equation made it a death threat. Open collaboration with Israel by Arab heads of state is life-threatening. In the early 1950s, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem for allegedly talking peace. In 1981, after signing the deal with Israel, Sadat was shot to death by Islamic extremists at a military parade in Cairo. The next year, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was blown to bits in Beirut, presumably by Syrian agents.
Like MBS, Gemayel was the scion of an aristocratic family, one that publicly allied himself with Israel. The Saudi crown prince is too young to remember Gemayel, but Saad Hariri — who resigned as Lebanese prime minister over the weekend and is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia (or a nearby Gulf state) from Hezbollah assassins — can fill him in on what happens to Arab leaders who get accused of philo-Semitism.
This dynamic, by the way, explains Israel’s silence over MBS’s manoeuvrings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted by the emergence of a new Arab leader who shares his view of Iran. The last thing Bibi wants to do is get him shot.
Let’s be optimistic. Suppose Prince Mohammed survives hitmen, the wrath of his cousins and the fiery opposition of jihadist clerics — that he rises to the throne and moves to implement his domestic reforms. Granting women equal civil rights, permitting theatres and cinemas to open, tamping down the more inflammatory mosques, diversifying the economy — it is, as Abbas writes, an exciting prospect.
But there remains the question of his wider ambitions. He has made it clear that he considers Iran a mortal enemy. It is equally clear that he wants to lead a Sunni Arab coalition that can take on Tehran and end its regional aggression. This is a worthy goal, but not realistic.
The crown prince is the commander-in-chief of the army. He knows that it is a third-rate fighting force, unable to defeat even Houthi militia bands in Yemen, let alone Iran and its allies. His father and previous kings have been elderly rulers, cautious and focused on self-preservation. The most impressive fighting force in the kingdom is the National Guard, whose main role is guarding the royal family. The Saudi style of warfare has been funding proxy armies, while the US defends its borders.
Will MBS follow prudently in the footsteps of his predecessors? Or will he be seduced by dreams of restoring his family’s ancient warrior tradition and imposing Sunni primacy in the Muslim Middle East? I vote for option No 1.
An energetic, liberalising young king in Saudi Arabia would be a very good thing for the Middle East. He could be an important ally in the international war against terror, and a fine role model for other aspiring Arab revolutionaries. It would be a shame to waste this potential on half-baked military adventures. He needs to bring the Gulf into the modern world, not get bogged down in an Iranian Bay of Pigs.
Wednesday 1 November 2017
Saturday 20 May 2017
Kashmir: hard choices only
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
I RECENTLY received an extraordinary email from a troubled young Kashmiri in Srinagar. Days before the Indian authorities turned off the internet, Saif (not his real name) had watched on YouTube the 45-minute video documentary Crossing the Lines — Kashmir, Pakistan, India that I had helped make in 2004 and mostly agreed with its non-partisan narrative. A nationalist boy turned stone thrower, Saif is outraged by the brutality of Indian occupation. He is fortunate, he says. His 14-year-old second cousin lost his left eye to pellets.
Saif continues to fight India but is worried. Protesters of his father’s generation were largely nationalist, but today’s are a mixed bunch. IS and Pakistani flags are often unfurled after Friday prayers, azadi demonstrations resound with calls for an Islamic state in Kashmir, and Nasim Hijazi’s cartoon history of Muslim rule in India Aur Talwar Toot Gayee is serialised by local Urdu papers. Significantly, Burhan Wani was laid in the grave by a crowd of thousands, wrapped in a Pakistani flag, and celebrated as a martyr rather than Kashmiri freedom fighter.
Why this change? The present government — Narendra Modi’s — surely stands guilty. By reducing space for democratic discourse, it promotes radicalisation. Unlike Vajpayee’s accommodative politics, India offers little beyond the iron fist and draconian laws such as AFSPA. The BJP-PDP alliance — shaky to start with — is almost over as each blames the other for the two per cent voter turnout in last month’s by-elections. Hindutva’s religiosity is displacing Nehru’s secularism all across India, and Indian democracy is yielding to Hindu majoritarian rule.
But blaming Modi is half an explanation, perhaps even less. In Palestine, after decades of struggle against Israeli occupation, the secular PLO lost out to the religious radicalism of Hamas. In Arab countries, young Muslims dream of fighting infidels and dying as martyrs. In Pakistan, the celebrated army operations Raddul Fasaad and Zarb-i-Azb target armed militants fighting for a Sharia state. Last week, the Higher Education Commission showed its concern by convening a meeting of 60 university vice chancellors in Islamabad on rising extremism in Pakistani campuses.
Extremism has further complicated an already complicated Kashmir situation. What now? For long, Kashmiris, Pakistanis, and Indians have wagged fingers at the other for the 100,000 lives lost over three decades. Where lies the future? Does any solution exist?
A short retreat into mathematics: some equations indeed have solutions even if they need much effort. But other equations can logically be shown to have no solution – nothing will ever work for them. There is still a third type: that where solutions are possible but only under very specific conditions.
Kashmir is not of the first category. Everything has been tried. Delhi and Islamabad have created clients among the Valley’s leaders and political parties, and subversion is a widely used instrument. But they too have turned out to be useless. Elections and inducements have also failed to produce a decisive outcome, as have three Pakistan-India wars. A fourth war would likely be nuclear.
All parties stand guilty. India, under various Congress governments, had once projected itself as a secularist democracy distinct from an Islamic, military-dominated Pakistan. It appeared for that reason to be preferable, but in practice its unconscionable manipulation of Kashmiri politics led to the 1989 popular uprising, sparking an insurgency lasting into the early 2000s. When it ended 90,000 civilians, militants, police, and soldiers had been killed. Remembered by Kashmiri Muslims for his role in the 1990 Gawkadal bridge massacre, Governor Jagmohan received the Padma Vibhushan last year.
Pakistan tried to translate India’s losses into its gains but failed. It soon hijacked the indigenous uprising but the excesses committed by Pakistan-based mujahideen eclipsed those of Indian security forces. The massacres of Kashmiri Pandits, targeting of civilians accused of collaborating with India, destruction of cinema houses and liquor shops, forcing of women into the veil, and revival of Shia-Sunni disputes, severely undermined the legitimacy of the Kashmiri freedom movement.
Pakistan’s ‘bleed India with a thousand cuts’ policy is in a shambles today and jihad is an ugly word in the world’s political lexicon. Say what you will about ‘Dawn Leaks’, but Pakistani diplomats who represent Pakistan’s position in the world’s capitals know the world doesn’t care about Kashmir. How else to explain Prime Minister Modi receiving Saudi Arabia’s highest civilian award from King Salman bin Abdul Aziz?
If Kashmir is ever to have a solution — ie belong to the third type of math problem — then all three contenders will need to rethink their present positions.
Thoughtful Indians must understand that cooling Kashmir lies in India’s hands, not Pakistan’s. By formally acknowledging Kashmir as a problem that needs a political solution, using humane methods of crowd control, and releasing political prisoners from Kashmiri jails, India could move sensibly towards a lessening of internal tensions. Surely, if India considers Kashmiris to be its citizens then it must treat them as such, not as traitors deserving bullets. Else it should hand Kashmir over to Kashmiris — or Pakistan.
Thoughtful Pakistanis must realise that their country’s Kashmir-first policy has brought nothing but misery all around. Using proxies has proven disastrous. A partial realisation has led to detaining of LeT and JeM leaders, but Pakistan’s army must crack down upon all Kashmir-oriented militant groups that still have a presence on Pakistani soil. Such groups are a menace to Pakistan’s society and armed forces, apart from taking legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule.
Thoughtful Kashmiri nationalists — like Saif — must recognise the grave dangers of giving more space to religious extremists. Their struggle should be for some form of pluralistic entity – whether independent or under nominal Indian or Pakistani control. That entity must assure personal and religious freedoms. An ISIS type state with its cruel practices makes mockery of the very idea of azadi and would pave the way for Kashmir’s descent into hell.
Such rethinking would clear the road to peace through negotiations which, though narrowed, still remains open. Every conflict in history, no matter how bitter, has ultimately been resolved. In Kashmir’s case whether this happens peacefully, or after some apocalypse, cannot be predicted.
I RECENTLY received an extraordinary email from a troubled young Kashmiri in Srinagar. Days before the Indian authorities turned off the internet, Saif (not his real name) had watched on YouTube the 45-minute video documentary Crossing the Lines — Kashmir, Pakistan, India that I had helped make in 2004 and mostly agreed with its non-partisan narrative. A nationalist boy turned stone thrower, Saif is outraged by the brutality of Indian occupation. He is fortunate, he says. His 14-year-old second cousin lost his left eye to pellets.
Saif continues to fight India but is worried. Protesters of his father’s generation were largely nationalist, but today’s are a mixed bunch. IS and Pakistani flags are often unfurled after Friday prayers, azadi demonstrations resound with calls for an Islamic state in Kashmir, and Nasim Hijazi’s cartoon history of Muslim rule in India Aur Talwar Toot Gayee is serialised by local Urdu papers. Significantly, Burhan Wani was laid in the grave by a crowd of thousands, wrapped in a Pakistani flag, and celebrated as a martyr rather than Kashmiri freedom fighter.
Why this change? The present government — Narendra Modi’s — surely stands guilty. By reducing space for democratic discourse, it promotes radicalisation. Unlike Vajpayee’s accommodative politics, India offers little beyond the iron fist and draconian laws such as AFSPA. The BJP-PDP alliance — shaky to start with — is almost over as each blames the other for the two per cent voter turnout in last month’s by-elections. Hindutva’s religiosity is displacing Nehru’s secularism all across India, and Indian democracy is yielding to Hindu majoritarian rule.
Kashmiri nationalists must realise the grave dangers of giving more space to religious extremists.
But blaming Modi is half an explanation, perhaps even less. In Palestine, after decades of struggle against Israeli occupation, the secular PLO lost out to the religious radicalism of Hamas. In Arab countries, young Muslims dream of fighting infidels and dying as martyrs. In Pakistan, the celebrated army operations Raddul Fasaad and Zarb-i-Azb target armed militants fighting for a Sharia state. Last week, the Higher Education Commission showed its concern by convening a meeting of 60 university vice chancellors in Islamabad on rising extremism in Pakistani campuses.
Extremism has further complicated an already complicated Kashmir situation. What now? For long, Kashmiris, Pakistanis, and Indians have wagged fingers at the other for the 100,000 lives lost over three decades. Where lies the future? Does any solution exist?
A short retreat into mathematics: some equations indeed have solutions even if they need much effort. But other equations can logically be shown to have no solution – nothing will ever work for them. There is still a third type: that where solutions are possible but only under very specific conditions.
Kashmir is not of the first category. Everything has been tried. Delhi and Islamabad have created clients among the Valley’s leaders and political parties, and subversion is a widely used instrument. But they too have turned out to be useless. Elections and inducements have also failed to produce a decisive outcome, as have three Pakistan-India wars. A fourth war would likely be nuclear.
All parties stand guilty. India, under various Congress governments, had once projected itself as a secularist democracy distinct from an Islamic, military-dominated Pakistan. It appeared for that reason to be preferable, but in practice its unconscionable manipulation of Kashmiri politics led to the 1989 popular uprising, sparking an insurgency lasting into the early 2000s. When it ended 90,000 civilians, militants, police, and soldiers had been killed. Remembered by Kashmiri Muslims for his role in the 1990 Gawkadal bridge massacre, Governor Jagmohan received the Padma Vibhushan last year.
Pakistan tried to translate India’s losses into its gains but failed. It soon hijacked the indigenous uprising but the excesses committed by Pakistan-based mujahideen eclipsed those of Indian security forces. The massacres of Kashmiri Pandits, targeting of civilians accused of collaborating with India, destruction of cinema houses and liquor shops, forcing of women into the veil, and revival of Shia-Sunni disputes, severely undermined the legitimacy of the Kashmiri freedom movement.
Pakistan’s ‘bleed India with a thousand cuts’ policy is in a shambles today and jihad is an ugly word in the world’s political lexicon. Say what you will about ‘Dawn Leaks’, but Pakistani diplomats who represent Pakistan’s position in the world’s capitals know the world doesn’t care about Kashmir. How else to explain Prime Minister Modi receiving Saudi Arabia’s highest civilian award from King Salman bin Abdul Aziz?
If Kashmir is ever to have a solution — ie belong to the third type of math problem — then all three contenders will need to rethink their present positions.
Thoughtful Indians must understand that cooling Kashmir lies in India’s hands, not Pakistan’s. By formally acknowledging Kashmir as a problem that needs a political solution, using humane methods of crowd control, and releasing political prisoners from Kashmiri jails, India could move sensibly towards a lessening of internal tensions. Surely, if India considers Kashmiris to be its citizens then it must treat them as such, not as traitors deserving bullets. Else it should hand Kashmir over to Kashmiris — or Pakistan.
Thoughtful Pakistanis must realise that their country’s Kashmir-first policy has brought nothing but misery all around. Using proxies has proven disastrous. A partial realisation has led to detaining of LeT and JeM leaders, but Pakistan’s army must crack down upon all Kashmir-oriented militant groups that still have a presence on Pakistani soil. Such groups are a menace to Pakistan’s society and armed forces, apart from taking legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule.
Thoughtful Kashmiri nationalists — like Saif — must recognise the grave dangers of giving more space to religious extremists. Their struggle should be for some form of pluralistic entity – whether independent or under nominal Indian or Pakistani control. That entity must assure personal and religious freedoms. An ISIS type state with its cruel practices makes mockery of the very idea of azadi and would pave the way for Kashmir’s descent into hell.
Such rethinking would clear the road to peace through negotiations which, though narrowed, still remains open. Every conflict in history, no matter how bitter, has ultimately been resolved. In Kashmir’s case whether this happens peacefully, or after some apocalypse, cannot be predicted.
Sunday 7 May 2017
Thursday 9 March 2017
Friday 24 February 2017
Pakistan and Radd-ul-Fasaad
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.
The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.
If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.
In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.
But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.
The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.
These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.
The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.
The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.
If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.
In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.
But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.
The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.
These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.
Saturday 18 February 2017
The fight Pakistan must wage within
Hussain Haqqani in The Hindu
The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan is not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.
Jihadi justification
The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.
Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.
In all four provinces
Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.
But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.
The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.
For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”
More about image
For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.
In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.
Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.
For ‘strategic advantage’
In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.
In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.
As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.
The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan is not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.
Jihadi justification
The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.
Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.
In all four provinces
Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.
But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.
The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.
For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”
More about image
For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.
In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.
Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.
For ‘strategic advantage’
In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.
In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.
As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.
Saturday 12 November 2016
The Pakistan Establishment's Dilemma
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
THE oligarchy which runs Pakistan, often called the establishment, is in a quandary. The problem is that whatever it says through its diplomats abroad — and with however much energy — the world insists on perceiving Pakistan as an ideological state wedded to exporting jihad. This is undesirable, but so also is the idea of changing course.
Writing in this newspaper, Ambassador Munir Akram admits that Pakistan has “few friends and many enemies” in Washington. Indeed, Trump’s victory can only worsen matters. But Europe, Russia, and Japan also see things similarly. Few there would be impressed by Akram’s frank admission that, “Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed participated in the legitimate post-1989 Kashmiri freedom struggle”, do not attack Pakistan, and “enjoy a degree of popular support” — or with his suggestion that no action be taken against such groups until things improve in Kashmir.
Akram’s views likely reflect the current thinking of a powerful section of the establishment. But what precisely is the establishment? Who can belong to it, and what does it want?
From Pakistan’s birth onwards, the establishment has set Pakistan’s international and domestic postures, policies, and priorities. Today it rules on the extent and means by which India and America are to be confronted, and how China and Saudi Arabia are to be wooed. It sanctions, as well as limits, militant proxy forces for use across borders; closely controls what may or may not be discussed in the public media; and determines whether Balochistan or Sindh is to be handled with a velvet glove or banged with an iron fist.
Establishment members are serving and retired generals, politicians in office and some in the opposition, ex-ambassadors and diplomats, civil servants, and selected businessmen. The boundaries are fluid — as some move in, others move out. In earlier days English was the preferred language of communication but this morphed into Urdu as the elite indigenised, became less cosmopolitan, and developed firmer religious roots.
Arguably, most forms of government anywhere are reducible to the rule of a few. In Pakistan’s case how few is few? In 1996 Mushahid Husain, long an establishment insider and currently a senator, had sized the establishment at around 500 persons plus a list of wannabes many times this number.
Stephen Cohen, an astute observer of Pakistani politics over the decades, remarks that establishment membership is not assured even for those occupying the highest posts of office unless they have demonstrated loyalty to a set of “core values”. That India is Pakistan’s archenemy — perhaps in perpetuity — is central. As a corollary, nuclear weapons are to be considered Pakistan’s greatest asset and extra-state actors an important, yet deniable, means of equalising military imbalances. These, and other, assumptions inform Pakistan’s ‘national interest’.
National interest means differently in different countries. For example the post-War American establishment considered the export of American values — particularly free trade — as America’s national interest. Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China competed to implant their respective brands of communist ideology overseas. On the other hand today’s China is purely pragmatic. So is India. Not being ideological states, they are not mission-driven. They just want to be modern, rich, powerful, and assertive.
Let’s compare Pakistan’s national interest with the above. Just what is it in the eyes of its establishment? In search of an answer, I recently browsed through theses and articles in various departments of universities, including the National Defence University in Islamabad.
What I found was unsurprising. National interest is defined exclusively in relation to India. This means resolving Kashmir on Pakistan’s terms, ensuring strategic depth against India via a Talibanised Afghanistan, nurturing the Pakistan-China relationship to neutralise Indian power, etc. To “borrow” power through military alliances against India is seen as natural. Hence, switching from America’s protection to China’s happened effortlessly.
Missing from the establishment’s perception of national interest is a positive vision for Pakistan’s future. I could not find any enthusiastic call for Pakistan to explore space, become a world leader in science, have excellent universities, develop literature and the arts, deal with critical environmental issues, achieve high standards of justice and financial integrity, and create a poverty-free society embodying egalitarian principles.
This lopsided view has distorted Pakistan’s priorities away from being a normal state to one that lives mentally under perpetual siege. To its credit, Nawaz Sharif’s government attempted — albeit only feebly — to make a break and concentrate on development. It knows that the use of covert jihad as an instrument of state policy has isolated Pakistan from the world community of nations, including its neighbours. Diplomats tasked to improve the national image are rendered powerless by the force of facts.
Keeping things under wraps has become terribly hard these days. For example, Pakistan denies any involvement in the Uri attack. But, to commemorate the dead attackers, Gujranwala city was plastered with Jamaatud Dawa posters inviting the public to funeral prayers, to be led by supremo Hafiz Saeed on Oct 25, for the martyred jihadists who had “killed 177 Hindu soldiers”. I did not see any Pakistani TV channel mention this episode. The posters were somehow quickly removed but not before someone snapped and uploaded them on the internet.
To conclude: while the rise of the hardline anti-Muslim Hindu right and India’s obduracy in Kashmir is deeply deplorable, it must be handled politically. One cannot use it to rationalise the existence of non-state militant groups. Such groups have taken legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. They have also turned out to be a menace to Pakistan’s society and armed forces.
Today’s crisis of the establishment can lead to positive change provided gut nationalism is subordinated to introspection and reflection. It is a welcome sign that a significant part of the establishment — the Nawaz Sharif government — is at least aware of the need for Pakistan to reintegrate itself with the world. Concentrating on our actual needs is healthier than worrying about matters across our borders. One can only hope that other parts of the establishment will also see this logic.
THE oligarchy which runs Pakistan, often called the establishment, is in a quandary. The problem is that whatever it says through its diplomats abroad — and with however much energy — the world insists on perceiving Pakistan as an ideological state wedded to exporting jihad. This is undesirable, but so also is the idea of changing course.
Writing in this newspaper, Ambassador Munir Akram admits that Pakistan has “few friends and many enemies” in Washington. Indeed, Trump’s victory can only worsen matters. But Europe, Russia, and Japan also see things similarly. Few there would be impressed by Akram’s frank admission that, “Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed participated in the legitimate post-1989 Kashmiri freedom struggle”, do not attack Pakistan, and “enjoy a degree of popular support” — or with his suggestion that no action be taken against such groups until things improve in Kashmir.
Akram’s views likely reflect the current thinking of a powerful section of the establishment. But what precisely is the establishment? Who can belong to it, and what does it want?
From Pakistan’s birth onwards, the establishment has set Pakistan’s international and domestic postures, policies, and priorities. Today it rules on the extent and means by which India and America are to be confronted, and how China and Saudi Arabia are to be wooed. It sanctions, as well as limits, militant proxy forces for use across borders; closely controls what may or may not be discussed in the public media; and determines whether Balochistan or Sindh is to be handled with a velvet glove or banged with an iron fist.
Establishment members are serving and retired generals, politicians in office and some in the opposition, ex-ambassadors and diplomats, civil servants, and selected businessmen. The boundaries are fluid — as some move in, others move out. In earlier days English was the preferred language of communication but this morphed into Urdu as the elite indigenised, became less cosmopolitan, and developed firmer religious roots.
Arguably, most forms of government anywhere are reducible to the rule of a few. In Pakistan’s case how few is few? In 1996 Mushahid Husain, long an establishment insider and currently a senator, had sized the establishment at around 500 persons plus a list of wannabes many times this number.
Stephen Cohen, an astute observer of Pakistani politics over the decades, remarks that establishment membership is not assured even for those occupying the highest posts of office unless they have demonstrated loyalty to a set of “core values”. That India is Pakistan’s archenemy — perhaps in perpetuity — is central. As a corollary, nuclear weapons are to be considered Pakistan’s greatest asset and extra-state actors an important, yet deniable, means of equalising military imbalances. These, and other, assumptions inform Pakistan’s ‘national interest’.
National interest means differently in different countries. For example the post-War American establishment considered the export of American values — particularly free trade — as America’s national interest. Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China competed to implant their respective brands of communist ideology overseas. On the other hand today’s China is purely pragmatic. So is India. Not being ideological states, they are not mission-driven. They just want to be modern, rich, powerful, and assertive.
Let’s compare Pakistan’s national interest with the above. Just what is it in the eyes of its establishment? In search of an answer, I recently browsed through theses and articles in various departments of universities, including the National Defence University in Islamabad.
What I found was unsurprising. National interest is defined exclusively in relation to India. This means resolving Kashmir on Pakistan’s terms, ensuring strategic depth against India via a Talibanised Afghanistan, nurturing the Pakistan-China relationship to neutralise Indian power, etc. To “borrow” power through military alliances against India is seen as natural. Hence, switching from America’s protection to China’s happened effortlessly.
Missing from the establishment’s perception of national interest is a positive vision for Pakistan’s future. I could not find any enthusiastic call for Pakistan to explore space, become a world leader in science, have excellent universities, develop literature and the arts, deal with critical environmental issues, achieve high standards of justice and financial integrity, and create a poverty-free society embodying egalitarian principles.
This lopsided view has distorted Pakistan’s priorities away from being a normal state to one that lives mentally under perpetual siege. To its credit, Nawaz Sharif’s government attempted — albeit only feebly — to make a break and concentrate on development. It knows that the use of covert jihad as an instrument of state policy has isolated Pakistan from the world community of nations, including its neighbours. Diplomats tasked to improve the national image are rendered powerless by the force of facts.
Keeping things under wraps has become terribly hard these days. For example, Pakistan denies any involvement in the Uri attack. But, to commemorate the dead attackers, Gujranwala city was plastered with Jamaatud Dawa posters inviting the public to funeral prayers, to be led by supremo Hafiz Saeed on Oct 25, for the martyred jihadists who had “killed 177 Hindu soldiers”. I did not see any Pakistani TV channel mention this episode. The posters were somehow quickly removed but not before someone snapped and uploaded them on the internet.
To conclude: while the rise of the hardline anti-Muslim Hindu right and India’s obduracy in Kashmir is deeply deplorable, it must be handled politically. One cannot use it to rationalise the existence of non-state militant groups. Such groups have taken legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. They have also turned out to be a menace to Pakistan’s society and armed forces.
Today’s crisis of the establishment can lead to positive change provided gut nationalism is subordinated to introspection and reflection. It is a welcome sign that a significant part of the establishment — the Nawaz Sharif government — is at least aware of the need for Pakistan to reintegrate itself with the world. Concentrating on our actual needs is healthier than worrying about matters across our borders. One can only hope that other parts of the establishment will also see this logic.
Saturday 26 March 2016
Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism.
On Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism. (Video is in Urdu)
Monday 8 June 2015
The Muslim Ummah have abandoned the Rohingyas
by Girish Menon
While the Rohingyas starve, live in fenced in camps or are
on boats in high seas with no country willing to accommodate them the Islamic
organisations are loudly quiet in their response while western human rights
organisations as well as Jewish holocaust survivors espouse their cause. So
what happened to the universal brotherhood of Islam? Why don't they offer refuge
to their fellow brethren?
The Rohingyas were used by the British during the second world
war as a fifth column to defeat the Japanese in Burma . Towards this end they were resettled
in the Arakan area of Burma ,
given arms, money and training by the Allied forces. After the British withdrew
from the area and new countries like East Pakistan was created, the Arakan
province was to become a part of Burma . At this time the Rohingyas
started a jihad against the Burmese government to get their territories to be a
part of Jinnah's East Pakistan . Many Islamist
organisations were active in this jihad.
----Also watch
-----
At the time the Rohingyas used the 'dar-ul-harb' concept to refuse to integrate with the Burmese
population where they were in a minority. Like their Muslim brethren in the northern
plains of India
they did not wish to live in a country where they were in a minority. They were
actively supported in this jihad by Islamic organisations in Pakistan .
The Burmese, unlike the Indians, when they defined their
citizenship laws were unwilling to accommodate this group with a separatist and
jihadist motive and the Rohingyas were deemed stateless. So, from then on the
only way out for the Rohingyas was to pay smugglers to get them out of the
Arakan province into countries where they could lead a decent life.
So why are the Islamist countries not going the extra mile
to help their brethren? Why is Pakistan
(The holy land for the pure) not inviting these Rohingyas to resettle them in
their lands? Why is the Islamic State not taking them to Iraq or Syria nor the al Qaeda making
attempts to rescue them? Can we say that NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) supersedes
the Islamic Brotherhood?
Friday 29 May 2015
The Rohingyas - The forsaken people
Natasha Shahid in The Friday Times
Who are the Rohingya people and why does everyone disown them? Natasha Shahid attempts to answer these questions
Outsiders in their own country
“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas
Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled
History of the Rohingya People
The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.
Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.
One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor
What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.
During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.
Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.
This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.
Another abandoned boat
The Rohingya’s Current Status
After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.
The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.
It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.
Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.
Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”
Exodus
With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.
“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas
Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled
History of the Rohingya People
The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.
Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.
One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor
What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.
During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.
Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.
This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.
Another abandoned boat
The Rohingya’s Current Status
After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.
The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.
It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.
Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.
Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”
Exodus
With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.
Monday 20 April 2015
Head to Head What is wrong with Islam today?
Irshad Manji makes a good case for Ijtehad
------Also watch
Is the Veil (Burqa/Hijab) a sign of Islamic fundamentalism?
Saturday 21 March 2015
As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values
Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian
‘In 1899 Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now.’ Illustration by Noma Bar
It could be a millenarian crisis or a delayed reaction to decades of bad history, but millions of Muslims seem to have turned inwards, hankering for an imagined golden age. They are contemptuous of modernity’s bendable, ductile values. Some are drawn to reactionary dogma, and preachers while a good number have thrown themselves into political Islam to resist and combat western hegemonies – or so the story goes.
As a practising (though flawed) Shia Muslim, I watch the new puritans with apprehension. So too other Muslims worldwide, the silent many, watch and tremble. From the eighth to the early 20th century, Muslims strove for a broad education (as commanded in the Qur’an), questioned doctrines, and were passionate about scientific advancements, political and social ideals and art. Not even humiliating colonial rule deterred them from the march forward. Now the marchers are walking backwards. The hijab, jilbab, burqa and niqab are visible signs of this retreat from progressive values.
This article will divide people. Women I respect and like wear hijabs and jilbabs to articulate their faith and identity. Others do so to follow their dreams, to go into higher education or jobs. And an increasing number are making a political statement. I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history. Their choice, even if independently made, may not be fully examined.
Muslim feminists of the past critiqued and repudiated the veil. One of them was a man, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian judge and philosopher, who in 1899 wrote The Liberation of Women.He was the John Stuart Mill of the Arab world. Huda Shaarawi set up the Egyptian women’s union in the early 1920s. One day in 1923, as she disembarked from a train in Cairo, she threw off her veil and claimed her right to be visible. Educated Iranian women started feminist magazines and campaigned against the veil around the same time. These pioneers have been written out of history or are dismissed as western stooges by some contemporary Muslim intellectuals.
After the transformative 60s, Muslim feminists resumed the fight for equality. European rule was over. It was time. The Moroccan academic Fatema Mernissi, Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan all argued for female emancipation. They rightly saw the veil as a a tool and symbol of oppression and subservience. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil ( 1975) is a classic text. So too El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve (1975). But more conservative Islamic tenets have taken over lands, communities, families, heads and hearts.
The promise of this version is a return to certainties and “purity” of belief, a mission backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Deobandi revivalists, funded by Arab money, now run more mosques in Britain than any other Muslim subgroup. Women are told not to travel without male relatives, not to work, to be subservient, to veil. This movement began as a reaction against the Indian raj and mutated into a fundamentalist creed. Today their pushback against “cultural imperialism” appeals to many alienated young Muslims. And, in part, it explains the growing popularity of the hijab, jilbab and full veil .
But in the Qur’an, the veil is mostly used metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and nonbelievers. In two verses, women are told to lower their gaze, and to cover their private parts and bosoms. Men are also instructed to lower their gaze, and to dress modestly. One verse commands the women in the prophet’s family to fully veil, partly to protect them from enemies and supplicants.
Sahar Amer, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has studied these sacred injunctions: “[Nowhere] is the hijab used to describe, let alone prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading those passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover? Just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes?”
Veils, in truth, predate Islam. Zoroastrian and Byzantine upper-class ladies wore them to keep aloof from the hoi polloi. When Islam’s armies first reached Persia, they were shocked at this snobbery; then they adopted the custom they loathed; the control of women was hard-wired into their psyches.
All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young Muslim women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualises females. That argument is appealing; but if credible, why would so many hijabis dress in tight jeans and clinging tops, and why would so many Muslim women flock to have liposuction or breast enhancements?
It is complicated: veils for me represent both religious arrogance and subjugation; they both desexualise and fervidly sexualise. Women are primarily seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception. I have been at graduation ceremonies where shrouded female students have refused to shake the hand of the chancellor. Veiled women have provoked confrontations over their right to wear veils, in courts, at schools and in colleges and workplaces. But I regard their victories as a rejection of social compromise.
Of even more concern are young Muslim lives. Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos.
Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness. A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort. She had a baby girl in a pushchair. Her young son was running around. Will the girl be put into a hijab, then a jilbab? Will the son expect that of his sister and wife one day? To never have the sun warm your face, the breeze through your hair – is that what God wants? Whatever happened to sisterhood?
But do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the west, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice – it can’t be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.
Liberalism is being tested by the new Islamic ardency. A French-style ban would be unwise and unjust. But institutions can apply dress codes. A bank worker cannot dress like a stripper; a child cannot wear a boob tube to school. Have rules and stick to them, within reason. In 1899, Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now, and few dare to speak up for its values.
Tuesday 3 March 2015
Love Jihad - 'Attractive jihadists can lure UK girls to extremism'
Ref BBC 3 March 2015
Ayesha - a false name to protect her identity - told BBC Newsnight she was taught to see the UK as "our enemy".
She now rejects that ideology, but said her ex-allies would regard the militant known as "Jihadi John" as an "idol".
Three schoolgirls recently left the UK, apparently to join militants in Syria - leading to questions over why British girls would make that choice.
Ayesha, from the Midlands, is now in her early 20s and said she was first contacted by extremists when she was a student aged 16 or 17.
She said a man sent her a Facebook message saying she was "very attractive" and telling her: "Now's the time to cover that beauty because you're so precious."
Ayesha said the message was "bordering on harassment" but it was the "best way I could have been targeted" because it played on her religious beliefs and told her she would "end up in hell" if she did not obey.
'Exciting'
And she said there was glamour as well as fear in what she saw.
"As a teenager I wanted to get my piece of eye candy and I'd take a good look, and all the YouTube videos, for some reason, they [the militants] were all really, really attractive.
"It was glamorous in the sense it was like 'oh wow, I can get someone who practises the same religion as me, who's not necessarily from my ethnicity and that's exciting'."
Ayesha was attracted by groups including Somalian militants al-Shabab
She added: "It was like, get with him before he dies.
"And then when he dies as a martyr you'll join him in heaven."
Ayesha was radicalised before the rise of Islamic State (IS), which has taken control of parts of Iraq and Syria, and was attracted by al-Qaeda and al-Shabab.
'Don't trust Britain'
"In some of the sermons we were encouraged that we shouldn't identify ourselves as British," she said.
Ayesha said she was told to view Britain as a "kuffar [non-Muslim] nation" that had killed many Muslims and was "our enemy".
"You don't trust the state, you don't trust the police, you don't send your children to state schools," she said.
She said she was told to view British women as "disgusting" and "practically like men".
But Ayesha said she eventually rejected these ideas.
She said the two main things which drove her away from the ideology was that it did "no justice to women" and it said followers "have to go and kill someone that's non-Muslim".
Ayesha said her old associates would praise Mohammed Emwazi - known as "Jihadi John" - the British IS militant who has apparently featured in videos showing the beheading of several Western hostages.
"They'd definitely consider him a role model," she said.
"He is someone they would be really proud of."
Tuesday 24 February 2015
The jihadi girls are just part of a long line attracted to mad, bad men
Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent
As I write this,
the three Muslim teenage girls from
East London are still missing. Shamima Begum,
15, Kadiza Sultana, 16 and an unnamed 15-year-old are believed to have gone off
to join Isis . Their friend, another
15-year-old, took off in December and seems to have “inspired” them to do the
same. In their photographs they are dressed like average British
teenagers. These are academically gifted girls, whose parents are bewildered
and distraught.
I
used to teach English to young Bangladeshi and Somali mothers in this area.
Denied education themselves when they were young, what they all wanted was for
their daughters to become doctors, businesswomen and teachers, grab life
chances, reach the top.
One
of them, Razia, gave me her purse to look after. It contained her savings and
cash she had got after selling some of her wedding jewellery. She was building
up a fund so her daughter could go to college one day. Her husband was a boor
and bully but she somehow kept her hopes and dreams alive for her children.
When she finished the course, the purse contained almost £1,200. I rang her to
ask how she felt about these East End girl
jihadis. “My daughter became a teacher. She can’t understand. Allah, what is happening
to them? The devil must have got into their heads. Or maybe they want to shock
their parents. To be bad, not good.” Wise words.
Hundreds
of impressionable young Muslim girls from around the world have been enticed to
join Isis . Some have taken up arms, others
have handed themselves over to some of the most violent men in the world today.
A study by the Institute of Strategic
Dialogue Isis ’s hardline code of conduct and want to submit to
brute male power.
This
phenomenon is widespread and not confined to fanatic Islam. Women and girls
throughout history have been fatally attracted to fascists, communists,
revolutionary armies and serial killers. Sometimes it is the cause that
consumes them. I have just returned from Vietnam
In
Cuba
Then
there are those who are drawn to monstrous men and extreme politics. Messianic
fervour, millenarianism and magnetism can whip up female hormones alarmingly.
In one of Sylvia Plath’s last poems, “Daddy”, she delves into her complicated
relationship with her German father. “Every woman adores a fascist/The boot in
the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you.”
In
the Thirties, fascist Oswald Moseley was one of Britain
Mussolini
had a limitless supply of nubile mistresses, many of whom described with pride
the pain he inflicted on them. Teenage girls were recruited into Piccole
Italiane, a training camp for Italian fascists. In Germany Isis
handmaidens.
In
the dark web of the female psyche lie these desires for pain, self destruction
and annihilation. And cravings too for notoriety, the thrill of transgression,
of doing something seriously wrong. Those who court danger don’t all go join
armies and cults. Some, for example, choose to befriend and even marry callous
murderers. It is the ultimate romantic adventure.
Denise
Knowles, the Relate counsellor, believes: “These women crave recognition that
comes from being attached to a gangster or dangerous criminal.” Sometimes it is
an extension of teenage rebellion. Women who have had a sheltered upbringing
are most prone to these liaisons. Within this spectrum, I would also include
women who go for abusive partners and never break from the pattern.
The
female Isis jihadis are no different from all
those women who seem to go for men and messages outside the civilised norms. It
may be madly exciting but for most, anguish will surely follow and then death
or desolation without end.
Thursday 29 January 2015
‘Love jihad’ in India and one man’s quest to prevent it
Vijaykant Chauhan believes that, all over India, gangs of Muslims are seducing Hindu women and forcing them to convert to Islam – and he’s made it his mission to stop them. Aman Sethi reports on India’s rising religious tensions
Aman Sethi in The Guardian
Every few days, Vijaykant Chauhan WhatsApps me a photograph of himself. The photographs are invariably scenes of crowds gathered on a north Indiastreet corner. Chauhan is right in front: a thickset, mustachioed man in his late 30s, in faux-army fatigues, a camouflage-print baseball cap and sunglasses. He stands with his fists tightly bunched, arms upraised. Occasionally the police make an appearance – their faces creased by patient smiles, their hands held close to their chests, palms facing outwards, in gestures of pacification.
These are photographs of protests, celebrations, rallies and, most often, “cultural programmes”: neighbourhood events usually organised under the patronage of the local political representative to promote good values in society. Onlookers peer out from the margins, their faces inscrutable amid all the posing and scuffling, shouting and jostling.
Last week, I received a photograph of Chauhan posed beside a scooter laden with slabs of raw meat.
“What’s up, Chauhan-ji?” I asked, when I called him up that afternoon. “Why is a crowd gathered around a hunk of meat?”
Anyone who attacks the four pillars of Hindustan deserves to be put to death
“We found that meat secreted under the scooter’s seat,” Chauhan said. “Proof that cow flesh is still freely traded in these parts.” Beef, Chauhan reminded me, was an affront to Hindus. “Our strength, Aman-ji, comes from four pillars: our cows, our temples, our ancient culture and our girls. Anyone who attacks any one of these pillars should be put to death.”
* * *
I chanced upon Chauhan while on assignment for my newspaper, the Business Standard, in Saharanpur, a trading town in western Uttar Pradesh. In the summer of 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, had swept the general elections in a campaign that addressed the two presumed weaknesses of the ruling Indian National Congress – the faltering national economy, and the Congress’s alleged appeasement of minorities in the garb of secularism.
All summer long, Modi had dismissed accusations of orchestrating a communal riot that left more than a thousand dead in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. He said he was saddened by the loss of life, in the manner of a passenger involved in a traffic accident. “Someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,” he said. “Even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is.” He deflected attention away from the topic with rousing speeches about the need for jobs, progress and development. In the meantime, his lieutenants reached out to men like Chauhan to stage rallies, mobilise crowds and organise cultural events to consolidate the diverse Hindu spectrum against their Muslim neighbours.
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. China, India, the US, Indonesia and then Uttar Pradesh, on a par with Brazil and some way above Pakistan, Russia and Japan. More than 200 million people live here, a fifth of whom are Muslim. The rest are mostly Hindu, and divided broadly between three mutually antagonistic caste groups: the upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs; the lower-caste Dalits; and the “other backward classes” such as the Yadavs. While castes were once divided by hereditary occupations such as priests, warriors, traders, animal herders and manual scavengers, years of lower-caste political mobilisation and emancipation have blurred these hierarchies.
For the last two decades, Uttar Pradesh’s regional parties have formed state governments by promising state patronage to unusual social coalitions. As a primarily upper-caste Hindu party, the BJP has historically struggled to build broad alliances in Uttar Pradesh, but in 2014 the party saw an opportunity. In 2013, another communal riot had caused an outbreak of violence throughout the region, and the ruling Samajwadi party had failed to contain it. Most accounts suggest the state administration played one community against the other – leaving the Hindus alienated and the Muslims fearful.
A photograph sent to the author by Vijaykant Chauhan on WhatsApp of one of the numerous rallies he holds to promote Hindu values. Photograph: Vijaykant Chauhan
A year later, with elections round the corner, Amit Shah – Modi’s most trusted lieutenant – toured the riot-affected areas in the company of local BJP leaders accused of inciting rioters. Shah himself stands accused of ordering extrajudicial killings in his time as home minister of Gujarat. “This is an election for honour and revenge,” he announced at one point of his whistle-stop campaign tour. “A man can live without food or sleep … but when he is insulted, he cannot live. We have to take revenge for this insult.”
The strategy paid off; the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 282 of 543 seats across the country. While the politicians were transparently opportunistic in their utterances and their aims, I was interested in the motivations of their followers. Who were these men? What were the lives they returned to when the elections ended?
* * *
“Cut my own throat if I’m lying, but I swear to you: around us, right now, all around us, are Hindu women held captive by Muslim husbands,” Vijaykant Chauhan said on our first meeting. “Islamic terrorists are using the sacred land of Hindustan, the wealth of Hindustan and Hindustan’s daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into more terrorists who want to destroy India.”
We had been discussing the Uttar Pradesh state elections scheduled for 2017. The BJP leadership had found a new issue to rally their Hindu voters. They called it “love jihad”.
“I coined the phrase. Everyone called me crazy,” Chauhan told me. “Now they listen to me. I have it all on record. I estimate over 20,000 Hindu women are abducted by Muslims each year, but their parents are too frightened to tell anyone.”
Chauhan describes himself as a foot soldier in the battle to save Hinduism from its enemies. His job, broadly, is to “spread awareness” of the evil designs of Hinduism’s many enemies. He said he had no ties to any political party, but offered “issue-based support” to formations that supported his causes. He said love jihad, or the practice of Muslims seducing Hindu girls with the aim of converting them to Islam, was an existential threat to India. “They want to make us into a Muslim-majority nation.”
They are using our daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into terrorists
Three months after the general elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a rightwing organisation with affiliations to the BJP, put love jihad on the covers of Organiser and Panchjanya, its English- and Hindi-language magazines. Love Jihad: Reality or Rhetoric?, the Organiser cover wondered; the article decided on the side of reality. Panchjanya went with a caricature of a clean-shaven man wearing a keffiyeh and sunglasses with red hearts stuck on the lenses: Pyaar andha ya dhanda? (Is love blind, or a business?) “It’s a big business, there are cash rewards.” Chauhan fiddled with his smartphone to pull up a pamphlet his friends had been WhatsApping each other. The image, purportedly made by unknown Muslim love jihadis, called on all followers to take Hindu wives.
“You are ordered and requested to bring more and more non-Muslim girls to our great faith Islam,” it read. “Here is the cash reward list.”
I noted that the author had a particular taste for upper-caste Hindus: bagging a Gujarati Brahmin girl could win a lucky jihadi six lakh rupees (£6,480), while a Buddhist girl was worth a mere 1.5 lakhs (£1,600).
“We have not made it ourselves, if that is what you are implying,” Chauhan said, putting the phone away. “I’ll WhatsApp it to you and you can read it at your leisure.”
* * *
Vijaykant Chauhan was born to a family of Punjabi artisans who crossed over from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to settle in a refugee camp in Saharanpur. In Rawalpindi, his grandfather had made ghungroo, tiny metallic ankle bells worn by subcontinental dancers, and in Saharanpur, his father learned the craft and set up a small business.
In his telling, Chauhan’s father was an impoverished and occasionally violent man, and so young Vijaykant spent a lot of time with his grandparents, particularly his maternal grandmother. “My nani told me stories about the partition, and how entire neighbourhoods butchered each other. When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market. That is how she escaped.”
Vijaykant claims he was an extraordinary student – “I was perfect” – but was forced out of school in grade seven on an administrative technicality. “My parents tried to reason with the school, but what did they have? No connections, no money – and so my father put me to work at the shop.”
When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market
Vijaykant Chauhan
Vijaykant hated it. He escaped to religious functions organised by the RSS and joined the Bajrang Dal, a particularly violent RSS affiliate implicated in everything from attacking young unmarried couples for holding hands to organising riots and building bombs. The RSS and its many affiliates work on what a friend of mine once called the “life insurance model”: the RSS puts out a policy – it could be an agitation against cow slaughter, or the need for a new temple in the place of an old mosque – and leaves it to individual agents to take the initiative, spread the word and find followers who buy into the policy.
“I began my career as a particularly aggressive enforcer for the RSS,” Chauhan said. “When the Bajrang Dal demanded that the markets close in solidarity with their causes, I made sure all shops downed their shutters immediately.” On the side, he did odd jobs; he worked briefly as an electrician and he helped out at his father’s shop. Still, there was always a tiny voice that said, “I don’t have a school degree, my family has no resources, but God has made me for a special purpose.”
In 2004, that purpose was made manifest. Rashid Masood, an influential Muslim politician from Saharanpur, publicly declared that he would not say Vande Mataram, as saying a prayer to a deity like Bharat Mata was against his religion.
Chauhan was incensed. Bharat Mata, or Mother India, is the personification of the Indian nation as a female, sari-clad, Hindu deity. She made one of her earliest appearances in Anandamath, an 1882 novel in which a group of Hindu sages rise up against Muslim overlords loyal to the British empire.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows off his tattoo which says ‘Vande matram’ or ‘Hail thee Mother’ . He has the same tattooed on his arms and back. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
Chauhan is obsessed with Bharat Mata – she is a frequent subject of his WhatsApp messages. Vande Mataram, or Hail Thee Mother, a poem from Anandamath, was a rallying cry for the independence movement and has the status of India’s national song, separate from the national anthem. Chauhan has Vande Mataram tattooed on his chest, arms and back.
The morning after Masood’s refusal, Chauhan launched Mission Vande Mataram – the aim of which was to get as many people to say the words “Vande Mataram” as often as possible.
The following year, Chauhan organised a cultural programme to commemorate his Vande Mataram movement. When the programme sponsors pulled out at the last minute, he sold his house to pay for the arrangements.
“The programme was a super-duper success. We did a play about Bhagat Singh’s sacrifices to the nation,” he said. “Thousands of people came up to me to thank me for reminding them of their sacred duties as patriots. I asked myself, why do I need a house? Why do I need a job? All I need is two rotis a day, which God shall provide. I decided to devote myself to the nation.”
These days, Chauhan lives in a large open cow shelter in Saharanpur. He sleeps on a string cot and spends his time looking after stray cattle and fighting love jihad.
* * *
One day I visited Chauhan to watch him at work. The shelter is a large airy space with a temple at one end and a feeding pen at the other. A shipping container, sawn in half, serves as his living space, where, Chauhan said, a veterinary surgeon sometimes examines sick cows.
People dropped by in ones and twos; some brought fodder for the cows, and others put some money in the collection box. Reverentially they fed the assorted cows – healthy, injured and infirm – while their children gaped at two caged white rabbits. A middle-aged man walked up to Chauhan towing along a young girl dressed in a pink shalwar kameez. He shouted, “Vande Mataram”; Chauhan replied in kind.
“She was standing around the market as if she was waiting for someone,” the man said, pointing to the nervous young girl. “She won’t tell me why she’s out in the market on a Sunday afternoon.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan poses for a visitor’s photograph at his shelter for abandoned cows. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
“Muslim boys keep buzzing up and down this street on their motorcycles, looking for precisely such girls,” Chauhan said. “Hello, hello, what’s your name, girl? Does your father know you have come out to the market?”
The girl looked down at her feet.
“See, Aman-ji, she’s clearly waiting for a Muslim. This town is full of girls who claim they are going to school, and then go off to service Muslim businessmen who give them money and drop them back in time to catch the school bus home.”
“But she hasn’t said a word since you brought her here. How do you know?”
“I have studied this in great detail. Notice she can’t look me in the eye. She’s been brainwashed.”
Love jihad made its first appearance in Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s. “In June 1924, in Meerut, handbills and meetings claimed that various Hindu women were being lured and their pure bodies being violated by lustful and sexually charged Muslim men,” writes historian Charu Gupta in an article titled Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions, describing a time of intense communal tensions in pre-independence India. Since then, the idea has periodically regained currency when purveyors such as Chauhan are granted a fleeting moment of relevance.
My conversations with Chauhan suggested that, for him, love jihad is a game of deception that had to be countered by the same coin. After all, why would a Hindu girl willingly fall in love with a Muslim? In the past, Chauhan has stormed district courts to prevent Hindu girls from marrying their Muslim fiances. In one instance, he claimed he was already married to the girl and produced false papers to stake his claim. “It is true the papers were false, but the scriptures allow the righteous to adopt falsehood to do good.”
Most Muslim love jihadis, Chauhan insisted, disguise themselves as Hindus. A pamphlet doing the rounds in Saharanpur offers an insight into their methods: when girls go to recharge the talk time on their mobile phones, some stores pass on their numbers to love jihadis who seduce them via text messages. If that doesn’t work, the jihadis pose as electricians, car mechanics and vegetable vendors to gain access to middle-class Hindu homes and seduce their daughters.
The young girl before us at the cow shelter didn’t seem brainwashed; she just looked very scared. “Let’s drop her home,” Chauhan said. “Come along.”
We piled into a battered Hyundai piloted by one of his friends. “Me? I’m a farmer; actually I’m a farmer turned businessman. Make that a farmer turned real estate agent,” said the driver when I asked him what he did for a living. “But most importantly, I am a Hindu. I am an admirer of Vijaykant-ji and support him whenever I can.”
The ride takes about 15 minutes. The girl sits silently in the back seat, occasionally giving directions. We turn into an alley and stop before a woman sleeping in the doorway of a brick hut. “This your daughter?” Chauhan asked, awakening the woman. “Do you know where she was? She was waiting for her Muslim boyfriend.”
“I have a fever,” the woman replied.
“I will return in the evening to speak with her father.”
The girl ran to her mother; we got into the car and drove off. As we made our way back to the city I asked Chauhan if he wanted to enter mainstream politics.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You need money, you need connections. I don’t even have a house any more. But I live on the love and support of the people. I am happy.”
Does he wish his life had panned out differently?
“When I was younger, I thought: If I hadn’t been thrown out of school I could have become a police officer, or joined the army, or risen to a position where I could serve my people better. But now I feel that God has always had a plan for me; he wants me to fulfil a special purpose.”
* * *
“The problem with Chauhan is that he will go back in the evening and speak with the girl’s father. And who knows what he will say,” said Shandar Ghufran, pulling on a cigarette. Ghufran, a boyish 40-year-old schoolteacher and activist, has been monitoring the communal polarisation in western Uttar Pradesh for some time now. “This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric.”
The campaign has imbued all contact between the two communities with the possibility of tragic consequences. In the city of Meerut, for instance, the police had to be called in to confront a mob of rightwing Hindus when a 15-year-old Muslim boy had run away with his 14-year-old Hindu classmate.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows photographs of his Hindu rallies to friends. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
The two children were found in Jaipur, en route to Mumbai to become Bollywood singers. The boy, the son of a carpenter, told his friend of his plan to make it big in Mumbai, and she decided to go along with him. By the time the police brought them home, two Muslim-owned shops had been vandalised and a Muslim home was attacked. In Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, a Hindu woman insisted that the state’s women’s commission order a medical examination of her Hindu husband to ensure the foreskin of his penis was intact, when she learned that he had a Muslim lover.
Such incidents, Ghufran said, will continue until the 2017 state elections. Each party will consolidate its base at the cost of the others, ratcheting up the tension in a region primed for conflict. “Things appear peaceful, but I fear that any single incident could trigger a riot,” he said. “There is, of course, a history to this.”
* * *
In August 2013, three young men – one Muslim and two Hindus – were killed in the course of an altercation in Kawal, a village on the outskirts of the town of Muzaffarnagar. Some say the Hindu boys killed the Muslim in an argument that began as a traffic accident, and others say the argument began over the harassment of a Hindu girl, but all agree that the incident came at a time of rising communal tension.
In the weeks that followed, both the BJP and the Samajwadi party, then Uttar Pradesh’s ruling party, did their best to keep tensions alive by sending their representatives to deliver inflammatory speeches before angry crowds. In the course of the riots that swept the western Uttar Pradesh countryside through the end of September, at least 62 people had died, several women were raped and over 50,000 mostly Muslim villagers were displaced from their homes. A year later, the riot relief camps still dot the villages around Muzaffarnagar.
This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric
Shandar Ghufran
“We left our village the moment we heard news that a riot had broken out. That was the mistake we made,” recounted Mohammed Aslam, as he sat hunched on a string cot beside a tent. “We should have waited for someone to get killed first.”
The government, Aslam said, does not consider his village to be riot-affected and hence he is ineligible for the riot compensation of 500,000 rupees (about £5,000) per family. So far, 768 families have been granted compensation, and the supreme court has ordered the state government to compensate another 203 people. Yet the administration is in a bind: it needs a framework to distribute the compensation, without which it could be accused of distributing state money in return for political support. In a state as poor as Uttar Pradesh, living in the putrid environs of a riot relief camp is not sufficient grounds for state-sanctioned relief.
Most of those who received support have sold their homes in their villages and have purchased lands in Muslim-majority settlements. The countryside is slowly reordering itself into Hindu- and Muslim-dominated pockets. Those with nothing are stranded where they stopped running.
Before the riots, Aslam said, he sold plastic crockery from the back of his bicycle. In the late 1980s, his father had gone to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer and had returned with enough money to build a house, a portion of which was inherited by Aslam.
Four years ago, the household was hit by crisis: two of his daughters, aged seven and four, fell sick when they drank contaminated water from a village drain. Aslam sold his house to pay for their treatment, but both girls died within hours of each other. After that, the family was kept afloat by a monthly loan from a Hindu neighbour, paid back at 5% a month or 60% a year. When the riots rippled through western Uttar Pradesh, Aslam and his family fled to this camp, leaving behind a trail of possessions and IOUs. It’s been a year since Aslam worked, let alone considered paying his dues. “I’m too scared to go back home and I have no money to buy a house anywhere else,” said Aslam. “I really don’t know what to do.”
* * *
The retired schoolmaster sat with his head propped up on his palms, his elbows balanced on his knees, his radio by his side. “It’s a year today, isn’t it?” he said. “No one has returned.”
We sat on plastic chairs in his tiny yard at the edge of the Hindu quarter in Lissad, a village in Muzaffarnagar district, and looked out at the abandoned homes around us. At least 13 Muslims were killed here and several homes torched in the course of the 2013 riots.
“This was once a very busy neighbourhood,” he said. “That building over there, that was my son’s school. He is Hindu, but all his students were Muslims. It’s shut now. There are no Muslims in this village.”
“Why haven’t they returned?” I asked.
“I don’t know, things have changed, I suppose, times have changed,” he replied, as a young man in a tracksuit came to sit beside us. “I hear some people from the village went to call the Muslims back, but they refused to return.”
Did he miss them?
“What is there to miss?” asked the young man. “They kept to themselves, we kept to ourselves.”
“You lived together for many years before the riot,” I said. “What changed?”
The old man stayed silent – I sensed there was something he wanted to say, an explanation he wanted to offer. Perhaps he too was trying to understand why his village had suddenly turned on its neighbours, or how a schoolteacher and his students could be pulled into opposing camps.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning his back to me. “My heart doesn’t accept it.”
His young companion looked up. “Ask the Muslims what changed. We are still here.”
I left the old man to his radio and walked down into the abandoned settlement. The homes had been stripped clean, doors ripped off their frameworks, cupboards broken open. The roofs had caved in in many places, but the walls were mostly intact; some bore telltale signs of fire.
Down an alley of broken homes, I spotted a group of four young Hindu men. “Come sit, sit, sit,” said one, as he cleaned out a stalk of marijuana and mixed it with tobacco. “Do you work for a television channel?”
“A newspaper. And what do you do?”
“We?” he said. “We get high.”
So here’s the real issue, they said, between bouts of hysterical laughter. “Think about it, here we all are, sitting around. And them? They’ve got five lakhs compensation per house. Do any of these homes look like they are worth five lakhs?”
“Some families? They claimed their sons were living separately. Five sons, 25 lakhs.” “They could buy themselves a BMW with that money.” More laughter.
“They’ve given our names to the police, though,” said another, a well-built boy in a striped shirt. “I knew the Muslim boy who did it. I said why have you put my name on the list of rioters? I paid him 30,000 rupees to strike my name off the report. He said the cops took 20,000 to do it.”
“My name is still in the police files,” said a third young man whose thick spectacles magnified his slightly dilated pupils. “The cops asked for a lakh to strike my name. I don’t have a lakh, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter for him, because he’s not applying for a government job, you know,” said a boy who looked about 19. “We all want government jobs. You can’t get a government job if you have a pending case. He hasn’t gone to college. But wait, you came first in school, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” The boy with the spectacles frowned. “Yes, you could say that.”
The afternoon sun dipped and a mild, early-evening melancholia set in. I sat with them for a while, listening as they ribbed each other, but the fun seemed to have slipped away with the sunshine and everyone seemed preoccupied by the thought of going home to face their parents.
* * *
For years, the Muslim film-maker nursed the possibility that he would – one day – marry his Hindu girlfriend. We met at a dinner organised by a friend in Muzaffarnagar. When I mentioned my work, he called me over for tea the next day. Our conversation had prompted a recollection of love and riots at another time and place. “I saw her on a train,” he recalled. “She was travelling from Dehradun to Ahmedabad, where she lived, while I was going to Mumbai to try to break into the film industry.”
She gave him her phone number, and asked for his. “But I didn’t have a number,” he said. “I was living out of a cheap hotel room in Mumbai’s red-light district.”
So he decided he would visit Ahmedabad every few weeks to see her. “I would take the overnight train and wait for her at the temple outside her office. She would sneak out at lunchtime, and then again after work.”
They’d talk until she left for home and he’d take the train back to Mumbai. But when her sister found out, she wasn’t pleased. Loving a Muslim, the sister said, was a path to schizophrenia. “Their mother had schizophrenia – so her sister’s remarks hit home. The logic was that marrying someone outside the Hindu fold would cause some sort of psychic schism.”
In February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat was set alight, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people, most of whom were Muslim, were killed in the riots that ensued.
“She said it was too dangerous for me to come to Ahmedabad after the riots,” the film-maker said. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. “We continued to meet, but it wasn’t the same.” Sometimes he is tempted to look back at the whole episode as a shared, youthful folly. “But it was love,” he said. “For what it was, for as long as it lasted, it was love.”
I once asked Vijaykant Chauhan if he thought it was possible for a Hindu and a Muslim, with complete knowledge of each other’s beliefs, to be in love. My fear, I told him, was that his campaign was fostering suspicion and fear rather than amity and understanding.
“We are not against love, Aman-ji. We are against deception and forcible conversion,” he said. He referred to Muslim Bollywood superstars with Hindu wives. “In most cases, the women are brainwashed and converted. Like Indira Gandhi.”
“Indira Gandhi?”
“Yes, she was married to Feroze Gandhi – but he was actually Feroze Khan, a Muslim. She was the first victim of love jihad.”
“But Feroze Gandhi was Parsi.”
“That’s what you think, Aman-ji, that’s just what you think. Everyone knows Feroze Gandhi Khan was a Muslim. It’s all over the internet.”
Aman Sethi in The Guardian
Every few days, Vijaykant Chauhan WhatsApps me a photograph of himself. The photographs are invariably scenes of crowds gathered on a north Indiastreet corner. Chauhan is right in front: a thickset, mustachioed man in his late 30s, in faux-army fatigues, a camouflage-print baseball cap and sunglasses. He stands with his fists tightly bunched, arms upraised. Occasionally the police make an appearance – their faces creased by patient smiles, their hands held close to their chests, palms facing outwards, in gestures of pacification.
These are photographs of protests, celebrations, rallies and, most often, “cultural programmes”: neighbourhood events usually organised under the patronage of the local political representative to promote good values in society. Onlookers peer out from the margins, their faces inscrutable amid all the posing and scuffling, shouting and jostling.
Last week, I received a photograph of Chauhan posed beside a scooter laden with slabs of raw meat.
“What’s up, Chauhan-ji?” I asked, when I called him up that afternoon. “Why is a crowd gathered around a hunk of meat?”
Anyone who attacks the four pillars of Hindustan deserves to be put to death
“We found that meat secreted under the scooter’s seat,” Chauhan said. “Proof that cow flesh is still freely traded in these parts.” Beef, Chauhan reminded me, was an affront to Hindus. “Our strength, Aman-ji, comes from four pillars: our cows, our temples, our ancient culture and our girls. Anyone who attacks any one of these pillars should be put to death.”
* * *
I chanced upon Chauhan while on assignment for my newspaper, the Business Standard, in Saharanpur, a trading town in western Uttar Pradesh. In the summer of 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, had swept the general elections in a campaign that addressed the two presumed weaknesses of the ruling Indian National Congress – the faltering national economy, and the Congress’s alleged appeasement of minorities in the garb of secularism.
All summer long, Modi had dismissed accusations of orchestrating a communal riot that left more than a thousand dead in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. He said he was saddened by the loss of life, in the manner of a passenger involved in a traffic accident. “Someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,” he said. “Even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is.” He deflected attention away from the topic with rousing speeches about the need for jobs, progress and development. In the meantime, his lieutenants reached out to men like Chauhan to stage rallies, mobilise crowds and organise cultural events to consolidate the diverse Hindu spectrum against their Muslim neighbours.
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. China, India, the US, Indonesia and then Uttar Pradesh, on a par with Brazil and some way above Pakistan, Russia and Japan. More than 200 million people live here, a fifth of whom are Muslim. The rest are mostly Hindu, and divided broadly between three mutually antagonistic caste groups: the upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs; the lower-caste Dalits; and the “other backward classes” such as the Yadavs. While castes were once divided by hereditary occupations such as priests, warriors, traders, animal herders and manual scavengers, years of lower-caste political mobilisation and emancipation have blurred these hierarchies.
For the last two decades, Uttar Pradesh’s regional parties have formed state governments by promising state patronage to unusual social coalitions. As a primarily upper-caste Hindu party, the BJP has historically struggled to build broad alliances in Uttar Pradesh, but in 2014 the party saw an opportunity. In 2013, another communal riot had caused an outbreak of violence throughout the region, and the ruling Samajwadi party had failed to contain it. Most accounts suggest the state administration played one community against the other – leaving the Hindus alienated and the Muslims fearful.
A photograph sent to the author by Vijaykant Chauhan on WhatsApp of one of the numerous rallies he holds to promote Hindu values. Photograph: Vijaykant ChauhanA year later, with elections round the corner, Amit Shah – Modi’s most trusted lieutenant – toured the riot-affected areas in the company of local BJP leaders accused of inciting rioters. Shah himself stands accused of ordering extrajudicial killings in his time as home minister of Gujarat. “This is an election for honour and revenge,” he announced at one point of his whistle-stop campaign tour. “A man can live without food or sleep … but when he is insulted, he cannot live. We have to take revenge for this insult.”
The strategy paid off; the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 282 of 543 seats across the country. While the politicians were transparently opportunistic in their utterances and their aims, I was interested in the motivations of their followers. Who were these men? What were the lives they returned to when the elections ended?
* * *
“Cut my own throat if I’m lying, but I swear to you: around us, right now, all around us, are Hindu women held captive by Muslim husbands,” Vijaykant Chauhan said on our first meeting. “Islamic terrorists are using the sacred land of Hindustan, the wealth of Hindustan and Hindustan’s daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into more terrorists who want to destroy India.”
We had been discussing the Uttar Pradesh state elections scheduled for 2017. The BJP leadership had found a new issue to rally their Hindu voters. They called it “love jihad”.
“I coined the phrase. Everyone called me crazy,” Chauhan told me. “Now they listen to me. I have it all on record. I estimate over 20,000 Hindu women are abducted by Muslims each year, but their parents are too frightened to tell anyone.”
Chauhan describes himself as a foot soldier in the battle to save Hinduism from its enemies. His job, broadly, is to “spread awareness” of the evil designs of Hinduism’s many enemies. He said he had no ties to any political party, but offered “issue-based support” to formations that supported his causes. He said love jihad, or the practice of Muslims seducing Hindu girls with the aim of converting them to Islam, was an existential threat to India. “They want to make us into a Muslim-majority nation.”
They are using our daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into terrorists
Three months after the general elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a rightwing organisation with affiliations to the BJP, put love jihad on the covers of Organiser and Panchjanya, its English- and Hindi-language magazines. Love Jihad: Reality or Rhetoric?, the Organiser cover wondered; the article decided on the side of reality. Panchjanya went with a caricature of a clean-shaven man wearing a keffiyeh and sunglasses with red hearts stuck on the lenses: Pyaar andha ya dhanda? (Is love blind, or a business?) “It’s a big business, there are cash rewards.” Chauhan fiddled with his smartphone to pull up a pamphlet his friends had been WhatsApping each other. The image, purportedly made by unknown Muslim love jihadis, called on all followers to take Hindu wives.
“You are ordered and requested to bring more and more non-Muslim girls to our great faith Islam,” it read. “Here is the cash reward list.”
I noted that the author had a particular taste for upper-caste Hindus: bagging a Gujarati Brahmin girl could win a lucky jihadi six lakh rupees (£6,480), while a Buddhist girl was worth a mere 1.5 lakhs (£1,600).
“We have not made it ourselves, if that is what you are implying,” Chauhan said, putting the phone away. “I’ll WhatsApp it to you and you can read it at your leisure.”
* * *
Vijaykant Chauhan was born to a family of Punjabi artisans who crossed over from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to settle in a refugee camp in Saharanpur. In Rawalpindi, his grandfather had made ghungroo, tiny metallic ankle bells worn by subcontinental dancers, and in Saharanpur, his father learned the craft and set up a small business.
In his telling, Chauhan’s father was an impoverished and occasionally violent man, and so young Vijaykant spent a lot of time with his grandparents, particularly his maternal grandmother. “My nani told me stories about the partition, and how entire neighbourhoods butchered each other. When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market. That is how she escaped.”
Vijaykant claims he was an extraordinary student – “I was perfect” – but was forced out of school in grade seven on an administrative technicality. “My parents tried to reason with the school, but what did they have? No connections, no money – and so my father put me to work at the shop.”
When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market
Vijaykant Chauhan
Vijaykant hated it. He escaped to religious functions organised by the RSS and joined the Bajrang Dal, a particularly violent RSS affiliate implicated in everything from attacking young unmarried couples for holding hands to organising riots and building bombs. The RSS and its many affiliates work on what a friend of mine once called the “life insurance model”: the RSS puts out a policy – it could be an agitation against cow slaughter, or the need for a new temple in the place of an old mosque – and leaves it to individual agents to take the initiative, spread the word and find followers who buy into the policy.
“I began my career as a particularly aggressive enforcer for the RSS,” Chauhan said. “When the Bajrang Dal demanded that the markets close in solidarity with their causes, I made sure all shops downed their shutters immediately.” On the side, he did odd jobs; he worked briefly as an electrician and he helped out at his father’s shop. Still, there was always a tiny voice that said, “I don’t have a school degree, my family has no resources, but God has made me for a special purpose.”
In 2004, that purpose was made manifest. Rashid Masood, an influential Muslim politician from Saharanpur, publicly declared that he would not say Vande Mataram, as saying a prayer to a deity like Bharat Mata was against his religion.
Chauhan was incensed. Bharat Mata, or Mother India, is the personification of the Indian nation as a female, sari-clad, Hindu deity. She made one of her earliest appearances in Anandamath, an 1882 novel in which a group of Hindu sages rise up against Muslim overlords loyal to the British empire.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows off his tattoo which says ‘Vande matram’ or ‘Hail thee Mother’ . He has the same tattooed on his arms and back. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
Chauhan is obsessed with Bharat Mata – she is a frequent subject of his WhatsApp messages. Vande Mataram, or Hail Thee Mother, a poem from Anandamath, was a rallying cry for the independence movement and has the status of India’s national song, separate from the national anthem. Chauhan has Vande Mataram tattooed on his chest, arms and back.
The morning after Masood’s refusal, Chauhan launched Mission Vande Mataram – the aim of which was to get as many people to say the words “Vande Mataram” as often as possible.
The following year, Chauhan organised a cultural programme to commemorate his Vande Mataram movement. When the programme sponsors pulled out at the last minute, he sold his house to pay for the arrangements.
“The programme was a super-duper success. We did a play about Bhagat Singh’s sacrifices to the nation,” he said. “Thousands of people came up to me to thank me for reminding them of their sacred duties as patriots. I asked myself, why do I need a house? Why do I need a job? All I need is two rotis a day, which God shall provide. I decided to devote myself to the nation.”
These days, Chauhan lives in a large open cow shelter in Saharanpur. He sleeps on a string cot and spends his time looking after stray cattle and fighting love jihad.
* * *
One day I visited Chauhan to watch him at work. The shelter is a large airy space with a temple at one end and a feeding pen at the other. A shipping container, sawn in half, serves as his living space, where, Chauhan said, a veterinary surgeon sometimes examines sick cows.
People dropped by in ones and twos; some brought fodder for the cows, and others put some money in the collection box. Reverentially they fed the assorted cows – healthy, injured and infirm – while their children gaped at two caged white rabbits. A middle-aged man walked up to Chauhan towing along a young girl dressed in a pink shalwar kameez. He shouted, “Vande Mataram”; Chauhan replied in kind.
“She was standing around the market as if she was waiting for someone,” the man said, pointing to the nervous young girl. “She won’t tell me why she’s out in the market on a Sunday afternoon.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan poses for a visitor’s photograph at his shelter for abandoned cows. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
“Muslim boys keep buzzing up and down this street on their motorcycles, looking for precisely such girls,” Chauhan said. “Hello, hello, what’s your name, girl? Does your father know you have come out to the market?”
The girl looked down at her feet.
“See, Aman-ji, she’s clearly waiting for a Muslim. This town is full of girls who claim they are going to school, and then go off to service Muslim businessmen who give them money and drop them back in time to catch the school bus home.”
“But she hasn’t said a word since you brought her here. How do you know?”
“I have studied this in great detail. Notice she can’t look me in the eye. She’s been brainwashed.”
Love jihad made its first appearance in Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s. “In June 1924, in Meerut, handbills and meetings claimed that various Hindu women were being lured and their pure bodies being violated by lustful and sexually charged Muslim men,” writes historian Charu Gupta in an article titled Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions, describing a time of intense communal tensions in pre-independence India. Since then, the idea has periodically regained currency when purveyors such as Chauhan are granted a fleeting moment of relevance.
My conversations with Chauhan suggested that, for him, love jihad is a game of deception that had to be countered by the same coin. After all, why would a Hindu girl willingly fall in love with a Muslim? In the past, Chauhan has stormed district courts to prevent Hindu girls from marrying their Muslim fiances. In one instance, he claimed he was already married to the girl and produced false papers to stake his claim. “It is true the papers were false, but the scriptures allow the righteous to adopt falsehood to do good.”
Most Muslim love jihadis, Chauhan insisted, disguise themselves as Hindus. A pamphlet doing the rounds in Saharanpur offers an insight into their methods: when girls go to recharge the talk time on their mobile phones, some stores pass on their numbers to love jihadis who seduce them via text messages. If that doesn’t work, the jihadis pose as electricians, car mechanics and vegetable vendors to gain access to middle-class Hindu homes and seduce their daughters.
The young girl before us at the cow shelter didn’t seem brainwashed; she just looked very scared. “Let’s drop her home,” Chauhan said. “Come along.”
We piled into a battered Hyundai piloted by one of his friends. “Me? I’m a farmer; actually I’m a farmer turned businessman. Make that a farmer turned real estate agent,” said the driver when I asked him what he did for a living. “But most importantly, I am a Hindu. I am an admirer of Vijaykant-ji and support him whenever I can.”
The ride takes about 15 minutes. The girl sits silently in the back seat, occasionally giving directions. We turn into an alley and stop before a woman sleeping in the doorway of a brick hut. “This your daughter?” Chauhan asked, awakening the woman. “Do you know where she was? She was waiting for her Muslim boyfriend.”
“I have a fever,” the woman replied.
“I will return in the evening to speak with her father.”
The girl ran to her mother; we got into the car and drove off. As we made our way back to the city I asked Chauhan if he wanted to enter mainstream politics.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You need money, you need connections. I don’t even have a house any more. But I live on the love and support of the people. I am happy.”
Does he wish his life had panned out differently?
“When I was younger, I thought: If I hadn’t been thrown out of school I could have become a police officer, or joined the army, or risen to a position where I could serve my people better. But now I feel that God has always had a plan for me; he wants me to fulfil a special purpose.”
* * *
“The problem with Chauhan is that he will go back in the evening and speak with the girl’s father. And who knows what he will say,” said Shandar Ghufran, pulling on a cigarette. Ghufran, a boyish 40-year-old schoolteacher and activist, has been monitoring the communal polarisation in western Uttar Pradesh for some time now. “This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric.”
The campaign has imbued all contact between the two communities with the possibility of tragic consequences. In the city of Meerut, for instance, the police had to be called in to confront a mob of rightwing Hindus when a 15-year-old Muslim boy had run away with his 14-year-old Hindu classmate.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows photographs of his Hindu rallies to friends. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
The two children were found in Jaipur, en route to Mumbai to become Bollywood singers. The boy, the son of a carpenter, told his friend of his plan to make it big in Mumbai, and she decided to go along with him. By the time the police brought them home, two Muslim-owned shops had been vandalised and a Muslim home was attacked. In Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, a Hindu woman insisted that the state’s women’s commission order a medical examination of her Hindu husband to ensure the foreskin of his penis was intact, when she learned that he had a Muslim lover.
Such incidents, Ghufran said, will continue until the 2017 state elections. Each party will consolidate its base at the cost of the others, ratcheting up the tension in a region primed for conflict. “Things appear peaceful, but I fear that any single incident could trigger a riot,” he said. “There is, of course, a history to this.”
* * *
In August 2013, three young men – one Muslim and two Hindus – were killed in the course of an altercation in Kawal, a village on the outskirts of the town of Muzaffarnagar. Some say the Hindu boys killed the Muslim in an argument that began as a traffic accident, and others say the argument began over the harassment of a Hindu girl, but all agree that the incident came at a time of rising communal tension.
In the weeks that followed, both the BJP and the Samajwadi party, then Uttar Pradesh’s ruling party, did their best to keep tensions alive by sending their representatives to deliver inflammatory speeches before angry crowds. In the course of the riots that swept the western Uttar Pradesh countryside through the end of September, at least 62 people had died, several women were raped and over 50,000 mostly Muslim villagers were displaced from their homes. A year later, the riot relief camps still dot the villages around Muzaffarnagar.
This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric
Shandar Ghufran
“We left our village the moment we heard news that a riot had broken out. That was the mistake we made,” recounted Mohammed Aslam, as he sat hunched on a string cot beside a tent. “We should have waited for someone to get killed first.”
The government, Aslam said, does not consider his village to be riot-affected and hence he is ineligible for the riot compensation of 500,000 rupees (about £5,000) per family. So far, 768 families have been granted compensation, and the supreme court has ordered the state government to compensate another 203 people. Yet the administration is in a bind: it needs a framework to distribute the compensation, without which it could be accused of distributing state money in return for political support. In a state as poor as Uttar Pradesh, living in the putrid environs of a riot relief camp is not sufficient grounds for state-sanctioned relief.
Most of those who received support have sold their homes in their villages and have purchased lands in Muslim-majority settlements. The countryside is slowly reordering itself into Hindu- and Muslim-dominated pockets. Those with nothing are stranded where they stopped running.
Before the riots, Aslam said, he sold plastic crockery from the back of his bicycle. In the late 1980s, his father had gone to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer and had returned with enough money to build a house, a portion of which was inherited by Aslam.
Four years ago, the household was hit by crisis: two of his daughters, aged seven and four, fell sick when they drank contaminated water from a village drain. Aslam sold his house to pay for their treatment, but both girls died within hours of each other. After that, the family was kept afloat by a monthly loan from a Hindu neighbour, paid back at 5% a month or 60% a year. When the riots rippled through western Uttar Pradesh, Aslam and his family fled to this camp, leaving behind a trail of possessions and IOUs. It’s been a year since Aslam worked, let alone considered paying his dues. “I’m too scared to go back home and I have no money to buy a house anywhere else,” said Aslam. “I really don’t know what to do.”
* * *
The retired schoolmaster sat with his head propped up on his palms, his elbows balanced on his knees, his radio by his side. “It’s a year today, isn’t it?” he said. “No one has returned.”
We sat on plastic chairs in his tiny yard at the edge of the Hindu quarter in Lissad, a village in Muzaffarnagar district, and looked out at the abandoned homes around us. At least 13 Muslims were killed here and several homes torched in the course of the 2013 riots.
“This was once a very busy neighbourhood,” he said. “That building over there, that was my son’s school. He is Hindu, but all his students were Muslims. It’s shut now. There are no Muslims in this village.”
“Why haven’t they returned?” I asked.
“I don’t know, things have changed, I suppose, times have changed,” he replied, as a young man in a tracksuit came to sit beside us. “I hear some people from the village went to call the Muslims back, but they refused to return.”
Did he miss them?
“What is there to miss?” asked the young man. “They kept to themselves, we kept to ourselves.”
“You lived together for many years before the riot,” I said. “What changed?”
The old man stayed silent – I sensed there was something he wanted to say, an explanation he wanted to offer. Perhaps he too was trying to understand why his village had suddenly turned on its neighbours, or how a schoolteacher and his students could be pulled into opposing camps.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning his back to me. “My heart doesn’t accept it.”
His young companion looked up. “Ask the Muslims what changed. We are still here.”
I left the old man to his radio and walked down into the abandoned settlement. The homes had been stripped clean, doors ripped off their frameworks, cupboards broken open. The roofs had caved in in many places, but the walls were mostly intact; some bore telltale signs of fire.
Down an alley of broken homes, I spotted a group of four young Hindu men. “Come sit, sit, sit,” said one, as he cleaned out a stalk of marijuana and mixed it with tobacco. “Do you work for a television channel?”
“A newspaper. And what do you do?”
“We?” he said. “We get high.”
So here’s the real issue, they said, between bouts of hysterical laughter. “Think about it, here we all are, sitting around. And them? They’ve got five lakhs compensation per house. Do any of these homes look like they are worth five lakhs?”
“Some families? They claimed their sons were living separately. Five sons, 25 lakhs.” “They could buy themselves a BMW with that money.” More laughter.
“They’ve given our names to the police, though,” said another, a well-built boy in a striped shirt. “I knew the Muslim boy who did it. I said why have you put my name on the list of rioters? I paid him 30,000 rupees to strike my name off the report. He said the cops took 20,000 to do it.”
“My name is still in the police files,” said a third young man whose thick spectacles magnified his slightly dilated pupils. “The cops asked for a lakh to strike my name. I don’t have a lakh, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter for him, because he’s not applying for a government job, you know,” said a boy who looked about 19. “We all want government jobs. You can’t get a government job if you have a pending case. He hasn’t gone to college. But wait, you came first in school, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” The boy with the spectacles frowned. “Yes, you could say that.”
The afternoon sun dipped and a mild, early-evening melancholia set in. I sat with them for a while, listening as they ribbed each other, but the fun seemed to have slipped away with the sunshine and everyone seemed preoccupied by the thought of going home to face their parents.
* * *
For years, the Muslim film-maker nursed the possibility that he would – one day – marry his Hindu girlfriend. We met at a dinner organised by a friend in Muzaffarnagar. When I mentioned my work, he called me over for tea the next day. Our conversation had prompted a recollection of love and riots at another time and place. “I saw her on a train,” he recalled. “She was travelling from Dehradun to Ahmedabad, where she lived, while I was going to Mumbai to try to break into the film industry.”
She gave him her phone number, and asked for his. “But I didn’t have a number,” he said. “I was living out of a cheap hotel room in Mumbai’s red-light district.”
So he decided he would visit Ahmedabad every few weeks to see her. “I would take the overnight train and wait for her at the temple outside her office. She would sneak out at lunchtime, and then again after work.”
They’d talk until she left for home and he’d take the train back to Mumbai. But when her sister found out, she wasn’t pleased. Loving a Muslim, the sister said, was a path to schizophrenia. “Their mother had schizophrenia – so her sister’s remarks hit home. The logic was that marrying someone outside the Hindu fold would cause some sort of psychic schism.”
In February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat was set alight, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people, most of whom were Muslim, were killed in the riots that ensued.
“She said it was too dangerous for me to come to Ahmedabad after the riots,” the film-maker said. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. “We continued to meet, but it wasn’t the same.” Sometimes he is tempted to look back at the whole episode as a shared, youthful folly. “But it was love,” he said. “For what it was, for as long as it lasted, it was love.”
I once asked Vijaykant Chauhan if he thought it was possible for a Hindu and a Muslim, with complete knowledge of each other’s beliefs, to be in love. My fear, I told him, was that his campaign was fostering suspicion and fear rather than amity and understanding.
“We are not against love, Aman-ji. We are against deception and forcible conversion,” he said. He referred to Muslim Bollywood superstars with Hindu wives. “In most cases, the women are brainwashed and converted. Like Indira Gandhi.”
“Indira Gandhi?”
“Yes, she was married to Feroze Gandhi – but he was actually Feroze Khan, a Muslim. She was the first victim of love jihad.”
“But Feroze Gandhi was Parsi.”
“That’s what you think, Aman-ji, that’s just what you think. Everyone knows Feroze Gandhi Khan was a Muslim. It’s all over the internet.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)