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Global Myth vs. Local Reality: Towards Understanding “Islamic” Militancy in India1

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13602000902943534

1469-9591

Taberez Ahmed Neyazi,

Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

Abstract Islamic militancy in the form of armed protests against established regimes prevails in many parts of the world, notably in West Asia and North Africa. These movements owe much more to socio-political and economic factors rather than to religious factors, but it has led many to conclude that Islam is inherently radicalizing and orients Muslims towards militancy. This paper argues that Islam is neither monolithic, nor does it prescribe a single course of political action. It offers a wide repertoire of possible political actions from which individuals may choose one according to exigency. Under the present circumstances, any attempt to attribute a course of moral action as singularly binding upon a Muslim is grossly misleading. Moreover in India, the possibility of the rise of Islamic militancy is unfeasible because of India's adoption of a liberal-democratic framework after independence. Historically in India, there always existed moderate and reformist Muslims, albeit having low voice, along with radicals and fundamentalists. However, during the last decade the reformist elements are increasingly coming into the mainstream who are determined that the discourse of Islam must no more be hijacked by the radicals or the so-called “defenders” of Islam. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Theodore P. Wright, Micheal Dusche, Peter Reeves, Amir Ali, Sarah Moser, Nasim Zehra, Staffan Lindberg, Farid Alatas and Pralay Kanungo, for their useful comments and guidance. I am also indebted to Imtiaz Ahmad, Arjumand Ara, Ramesh Bairy and Kalimuddin, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. However, remaining shortcomings are entirely my responsibility. Notes The paper is the revised version of a paper presented at 18th European Conference in Modern South Asian Studies, Lund, 6th to 9th July 2004. Three suspects of the September 11 attacks lived in Hamburg, Germany. According to Javeed Alam, the recurrence of communal riots in India has helped in uniting the internally differentiated Muslim community. See, Javeed Alam, “The Contemporary Muslim Situation in India: A Long Term-View”, Economic and Political Weekly, January 12, 2008, pp. 45–53. The victims of riots have also been recruited by terrorist organizations to wage Jihad against the Indian state. See Praveen Swami, “The Well-Tempered Jihad: The Politics and Practice of Post-2002 Islamist Terrorism in India”, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2008, pp. 303–322. Thus, Javeed Alam's observation and Praveen Swami's evidence show the growth of sense of discrimination and deprivation among some sections of Indian Muslims and a small number of them are even willing to take to arms. The Indian government should take it as an early warning for even a small number of motivated fighters can jeopardize the security of the Indian state. Praveen Swami shows the evidence of the growth of home grown Islamist terrorism in India, especially after post-2002. See Praveen Swami, ibid. All these developments have also led Samuel Huntington to speak even more explicitly about “the age of Muslim Wars” and the global emergence of Muslim grievances and hostility towards America. See, Samuel P. Huntington, “America in the World”, The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 7–18. Even Connecticut's liberal Senator Christopher Dodd, in a television interview in November 2003, cautioned Americans not to expect too much tolerance from Islam given its propensity for ideological control over public life. Quoted in Mark Juergensmeyer, “Is religion the problem?”, The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 6, No 1, Spring 2004, pp. 22–31. See also Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, New York: Random House, 2003; Barry Cooper, New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004; Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam, Oxford: Westview Press, 2002, p. 97. For a detailed discussion on the factors leading to these movements see N. Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, London: Routledge, 1991. See also Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996. Also see Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet, op. cit. John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. One of the most violent conflicts has been carried out in Sri Lanka by the followers of Buddhism, often assumed to be the world's most peaceful religion. Similarly, bombings of abortion clinics and killing of abortion doctors by the Christian fundamentalists are rarely described as Christian militancy. A well institutionalized democratic state provides room for self-determination movements to emerge and possesses a fair amount of legitimate coercion to repress these movements. See Atul Kohli, “Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? The Rise and Decline of Self-Determination Movements in India”, in Community, Conflicts and the State in India, eds Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 7–14. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press, 1992. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1981. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media, ISIM Paper 6, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Graham E. Fuller, “The Future of Political Islam”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 2, 2002, pp. 59–60. Imtiaz Ahmad, “Introduction”, in Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India, ed. Imtiaz Ahmad, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981. Leif Manger, ed., Local Islam in Global Contexts, London: Curzon Press, 1999, p. 17. Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Also see Imtiaz Ahmad, “Fundamentalism and Islam”, World Focus, Vol. 16, Nos 2–3, 1995, pp. 24–27. Imtiaz Ahmad, “Fundamentalism and Islam”, World Focus, Vol. 16, Nos 2–3, 1995, p. 25. The Sachar Committee report released in 2006 clearly highlights the deprivation of Muslims in comparison to other minorities in India, which is concomitant to their own self-imposed fear that kept them away from participating as equal citizens in the public sphere. However, one cannot totally exonerate the past governments for pampering and siding with the conservative elements within the community, rather than devising policies and programs that could uplift the marginalized groups of the community. See Justice Rajender Sachar, Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India: A Report, New Delhi: Government of India, 2006. For a detailed discussion, see Taberez A. Neyazi, “State, Citizenship and Religious Community: The Case of Indian Muslim Women”, Asian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 15, No. 3, December 2007, pp. 303–313. Graham E. Fuller and I. O. Lesser, A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Quoted in Francis Robinson, “Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations?”, Asian Affairs, Vol. 33, Part. III, October 1995, pp. 307–320. However, there are scholars such as Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutub and Ruhullah Khomeni who assert that power has always remained central to Islam, ignoring the fact that the Arab unity that existed in the time of Prophet Muhammad was not political unity and the leadership of the Messenger over the Arabs was a religious leadership and not a civil one. The people's submission was a submission to beliefs and faith, not submission to a government or a power. Moreover, the Prophet never hinted at any thing that could be called an Islamic or an Arab state any time throughout the length of his entire life. See Ali Abd al-Raziq, “The Problem of Caliphate”, in Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought, eds Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talattof, London: MacMillan, 2000, pp. 95–100. There are many other categorizations that developed later on to describe the division of world under Islam such as Dar al-Amn (house of safety), Dar al-Sulh (house of treaty), Dar al-Dawa (house of invitation). For details, see E. van Donzel, Encyclopedia of Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1994. Gilles Kepel, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe, London: Polity Press, 1997, p. 89. Though the aim of the Deoband movement and Tablighi Jamaat was to purify Islam from non-Muslim influence, they never resorted to violence and thus confined their activities to the establishment of madrasahs and public preaching. For a very good study of Deoband, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. For an insightful study of Muslim history in South Asia, see Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Under the impetus of Abul ‘Ala Mawdudi, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan was converted into a veritable political party and the conquest of the state became its main objective. The Indian counterpart had to operate in a different social and political environment where Muslims constituted a minority (only 11% of the population at the time of partition) and therefore JIH could not afford to carry the heritage of Mawdudi's original way of thinking and vow to establish an Islamic state. For details on the difference between the political programs and strategies as well as on ideological differences between Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan and JIH, see Frederic Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent: The Jamaat-i-Islami, New Delhi: Centre De Sciences Humaines & Manohar Publication, 2001. For a detailed discussion on developments of militancy in some Pakistani madrasahs see Yoginder Sikand, “Militancy and Madrasahs: The Pakistani Case”, Muslim India, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2004, pp. 10–13. Stephen Philip Cohen, “The Jihadist Threat to Pakistan”, The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2003, pp. 17–18. Bhim Singh, “J&K Situation: The Genesis and the Resolution”, The Hindu, 10 July 2001. The role of religion as the guiding principle in Kashmir imbroglio has also been discounted by Jonathan Fox in his recent study, where he shows that several other factors are consistently more important than religion in determining the extent of ethnic militancy. These include repression, international military support for the minority group, and the spread of conflict across borders, and all these factors are present in the case of Kashmir. However, these factors cannot be wholly insulated from the religious overtones of the conflict and no doubt religion indirectly influences ethnic conflict through above mediating factors. See Jonathan Fox, “Are Religious Minorities More Militant than Other Ethnic Minorities”, Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2003, pp. 91–114. Asghar Ali Engineer, Introduction in “Secular Crown on Fire: The Kashmir Problem”, Islamic Perspective, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1990, pp. 1–14. Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 16. See also Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the unending war, London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. Engineer, op. cit., “Introduction”, 1990, p. 9. Gautam Navlakha, “Ceasefire in Kashmir: Some Critical Issues”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 9, 3 March 2001, p. 727. Yoginder Sikand, “Changing Course of Kashmiri Struggle: From National Liberation to Islamist Jihad?”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 3, 20–26 January 2001, p. 218. Ibid., p. 220. For a detailed discussion of the Shah Bano case and its impact on the image of Indian Muslims, see Taberez A. Neyazi, “State, Citizenship and Religious Community”, op. cit., pp. 303, 318. For details on “saffronization” of history text books see Mushirul Hasan, “The BJP's Intellectual Agenda: Textbooks and Imagined History”, South Asia, Vol. 25, No. 3, December 2002, pp. 187–210. See also Romila Thapar, “In Defence of History”, Seminar, Vol. 521, January 2003, pp. 65–72. For example Theodore P. Wright believes that post-1992 Indian Muslims have invariably resorted to violence and actively participated in terrorist attacks. See Theodore P. Wright, Jr, “Does Democratic Political Participation Reduce Political Violence? The Contrary Case of the Muslim Minority in India”, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 89–112. See also Smita Narula, “Overlooked Danger: The Security and Rights Implications of Hindu Nationalism in India”, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 16, 2003, pp. 4–68. The BJP is not the only political party complicit in large-scale episodes of communal violence in India. In 1984, following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the then-ruling Congress (I) Party was charged with complicity in the killing of over 2000 Sikhs in Delhi. See Smita Narula, “Overlooked Danger”, op. cit., pp. 4–68. For a detailed account see V. R. Krishna Iyer, et. al., “State Complicity”, in Fascism in India: Faces, Fangs and Facts, ed. Chaitanya Krishna, New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2003, pp. 242–278. The current political and democratic assertion of hitherto underprivileged sections of the society like Dalits, other backward classes/castes and women reflect their aspiration for intra-democratization (social and educational reform) as well as inter-democratization (recognition of equal social status in the society). This awakening is partly a result of polarization unleashed by the electoral democracy and partly due to social fragmentation of the constituency. However, the social position of the Indian Muslims has been left untouched by the working of Indian democracy. The Indian Muslim community by and large remains trapped in feudalized social mores, suffers from ghetto-mentality and inferiority complex and is unable to meet the challenges of modernity. Paradoxically enough, the community desires to live in a secular and democratic polity without democratizing itself. See Anwar Alam, “Democratization of Indian Muslims: Some Reflections”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 38, No. 46, 15 November 2003, pp. 4881–4885. Yogendra K. Malik and Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi, “The Rise of Hindu Militancy: India's Secular Democracy at Risk”, Asian Survey, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1989, pp. 308–325. It should not be construed here that poor people were better off during the Congress period. Rather Congress could portray itself as pro-poor and adopted gradual and calibrated policies of economic reforms. However, the BJP-led NDA government over the past five years aggressively followed “pro-market and neo-liberal economic policies (which) increased its acceptability among the rich and upper middle class but alienated it from the rural and urban poor as well as middle and lower middle classes”. See Manini Chatterjee, “Debacle and After”, Seminar, Vol. 539, July 2004, pp. 14–21. Deendar Anjuman and Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) are the two radical Islamic groups operating outside Kashmir. But both have been subsequently banned by the Indian government. However, evidence provided for their alleged involvement in the terrorist activities is rather slim. See Yoginder Sikand, Muslims in India since 1947, Islamic Perspectives on Inter-faith Relations, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp. 151–192. Kanti Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism, New Delhi: Penguin, 2002, p. 21. I am not saying this sense of security was always intact among the Indian Muslim. There were always communal riots and in those riots Muslims were the worst sufferers. But those riots were always confined to certain pockets. But the belief of Indian Muslims in democratic means to resolve their grievances could not be depleted. However, the past policies helped the radical groups in Pakistan to buttress their position vis-à-vis the state. This resulted in the change in the nature of the state and the subsequent government, albeit trying to marginalize the radical groups from the national mainstream could not be successful. BJP was defeated in Rajasthan, but they retained power in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh. In the rest of the states, secular parties came to power. This reflects that people in India are not easily mobilized on the basis of communal and divisive issues such as terrorism; rather they make their choice on the basis of other local factors. For a detailed analysis of elections in these six states, see Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 44, No. 6, February 2009. The middle class never formed a homogenous group but rather differed from time to time as well as from place to place; nevertheless they always search for independence and individual rights, for specific freedom and the protection of their possessions, for a culture of their own and respect for individual achievements. See Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, “Introduction”, in Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe, eds Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2001. Here I do not mean that migrant Islam is more prone to militancy than historical Islam. Rather I wish to make a point that there is very close cultural proximity between Indian Islam and Hinduism which has developed because of the continuous existence of both communities over a very long period of thirteen centuries. Jackie Assayag, “Can Hindus and Muslims Coexist?”, in Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict, eds Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2004, p. 55. Ibid., p. 54. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, London: Yale University Press, 2002. Defeat of the communal forces like the BJP in the General Elections of 2004 and 2009 are the best example of the two communities coming together to give a befitting blow to sectarian forces. “Ahmedabad blasts: Indian Mujahideen claims responsibility”, retrieved on 27 July 2008, available online at: http://specials.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/27video.htm. See also “India on high alert after Ahmedabad blasts”, retrieved on 27 July 2008, available online at: http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/India-on-high-alert-after-Ahmedabad-blasts/341109/. In a controversial speech on al-Qaeda chief Osama bin-Ladin, Zakir Naik proclaimed, “If he is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him. If he is terrorizing America the terrorist – the biggest terrorist – I am with him”. “Every Muslim should be a terrorist”, Naik conlcuded. “The thing is, if he is terrorizing a terrorist, he is following Islam”. Quoted in Praveen Swami, “Ahmedabad blasts: the usual suspects”, The Hindu, 1 August 2008, retrieved on 1 August 2008, available online at: http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/01/stories/2008080155141000.htm. “Declaration of All India Anti-Terrorism Conference”, retrieved on 26 May 2008, available online at: http://darululoom-deoband.com/english/index.htm. Harish Khare, “Indian Muslims and their Linkages”, The Hindu, 6 June 2008, retrieved on 6 June 2008, available online at: http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/06/stories/2008060654460800.htm. Gopal Krishna holds this kind of view. See Gopal Krishna, “Piety and Politics in Indian Islam”, in Muslim Communities of South Asia: Culture, Society, and Power, ed. T. N. Madan, New Delhi: Manohar, rev. edn., 1995, pp. 392–395.