Dismantling Terrorism in India – It is about pluralistic governanceContents:
- Article by Mike Ghouse
- Article by Ramesh Thakur
- Comments
Indian government must be applauded and appreciated for handling the terrorism wisely. Ramesh Thakur has rightly pointed out the example of Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign minister who escorted the terrorist to get release of the hostages; it must go down in the annals of history as act of wisdom. While India’s approach towards terrorism has contained terrorism, Bush’s mindless aggression has increased terrorism, and it must be condemned for its stupidity. By the way, it is not an American aggression, as the American public is not with the administration and it is the act of the few, just as terrorism was the act of the few. Unfortunately our laws prevent us to take Mr. Bush off the Presidency and save the nation from further ruin, there is no such thing as a no confidence move to get him off, as we do in Israel, India, UK and other democracies. .
I expect a few comments on this piece to be raging with anger from those few loud mouths like the Fox, the Neocons and their ilk, who equate patriotism with supporting the government blindly. Criticism of the government amounts to being unpatriotic. I welcome those comments though, as we move towards encouraging pluralistic societies, we have to put all the cards on the table to effectively deal with the problem. Thank God for Cindy Sheehan, Mike Moore and thousands like them, who have saved us from a greater disaster in Iraq, they have fulfilled the most patriotic duty as an American, to keep the government in chuck. We need to save America from yet again another disgraceful act against Iran.
If some one murders on the street, his ass must be hauled off to Jail and must be tried for his crimes, and not bomb the whole country. We have to isolate the criminals and not lump them with their community. India has done a lot of wise things that we can learn from, including handling of terrorism and containing the evil to the specific act and has not let it spread to the whole nation, nor has it blamed a religion for the acts of the individuals. It is a good example of not making a mess of the situation.
A snap shot of Iraq in 2001 which had nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11; Neither the Sunnis were killing the Shia’s or vice versa. Except the reign of Terror of Saddam, there was no terrorism in the public square. It was progressive secular society and look at today what is happening.
Our aggression has created over half a million widows, who have no one to support but live their livelihood through the flesh trade, as the only supporters their brothers, fathers or husbands are dead. Our aggression has created massive unemployment causing the youth to resort to vandalism and leading to the Shia Sunni rift, a new phenomenon in Iraq because of our aggression. Unless we admit we are the cause of evil in Iraq, we cannot bring a resolution to our collective guilt and liberation and peace to us and the Iraqis. Our presence has caused so much death and destruction. The world has to be repaired from these ventures. Every war, every evil in the world can always be traced to hate filled insecure individuals; religion is just an easy target.
As Ramesh Thakur has pointed out, there is a lot of anger festering in the youth whose parents were burned alive in front of them, or were made homeless for no fault of their own. It was again like an act of Bush, killing the whole township for the evil acts of the few. India has room to set things right and continue to express and act on its traditional wisdom. It needs to bring justice to the people who have suffered in Gujarat, both the victims and victimizers without regard to the religion they wear. Injustice causes the victims to fester and keeps the spark of the anger alive; it can be extinguished only by bringing justice to every Gujarati. Without justice every one remains tense and alert on their toes and live in paranoia. We have an opportunity to live in peace, it is in our interest as Indians, as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Jews, Tribals and others to put things behind. It can be achieved by repentance, justice and forgiveness. We have to move from cautionary living to unguarded living.
We cannot have peace, by un-peacing others.
Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker and a Writer. He is president of theFoundation for Pluralism and is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing interfaith, political and civic issues. He is the founding president of World Muslim Congress with a simple theme: Good for Muslims and good for the world. His comments, news analysis and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website http://www.mikeghouse.net/. Mike is a Dallasite for nearly three decades and Carrollton is his home town. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com
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Here is a good article by Ramesh Thakur
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080728.wcomment0729/BNStory/specialComment/home/
RAMESH THAKUR
Special to Globe and Mail Update
July 28, 2008 at 11:27 PM EDT
Seventeen bomb blasts in a 10-kilometre radius in 70 minutes on Saturday in Ahmadabad. Nine blasts in Bangalore, outsourcing capital of the world, on Friday. A country on the edge of panic.
The world shares in Indians’ pain, anger and determination to face down the terrorists, to not give them the triumph of being cowed or the satisfaction of fomenting communal hatred and bloodletting. For security from acts and the fear of terrorism is indeed indivisible, and the world is the battlefield.
We have been here before. In 1993, twin attacks on Bombay’s financial centre and Air India building were dress rehearsals of a sort for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. Then, the world ignored how India and Southwest Asia had joined the front line of global terrorism. No longer.
The most immediate tasks will be to help the victims, tighten security, plug the fatal intelligence gaps and prevent outbreaks of violence against Muslims.
Chances are high the perpetrators will turn out to have pan-Islamic links with the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh or similar groups. All the more reason to insist that not all Muslims are terrorists and not all terrorists are Muslim.
Before the Iraq war, the leading practitioners of suicide terrorism were Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers: Hindus. The most ruthless terrorism in 1980s India was perpetrated by Sikhs. Europe, including Britain, has had its share of Christian terrorists. If anything, India’s 140 million Muslims are a salutary negation of the facile thesis about Islam’s incompatibility with democracy.
In a billion-strong country with an 80-per-cent Hindu population, the Prime Minister and army chief are Sikhs, the previous president was a Muslim and the power behind the throne is a Catholic of Italian origin — profound testimony to the pluralism and accommodation of India’s complex and adaptable power-sharing arrangements. Democratic politics, political freedoms, civil liberties and religious tolerance must be protected at all costs.
But India earned its reputation as a soft state that can be intimidated into meeting terrorists’ demands. Jailed terror suspects are released in exchange for kidnapped kin of political leaders. In December, 1999, in a day that will live in infamy in the annals of international terrorism, foreign minister Jaswant Singh personally escorted three terrorists to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in order to secure the release of passengers from a hijacked Indian Airlines flight. One of the freed terrorists was later implicated in 9/11. In response to an attack on Parliament in December, 2001, India mobilized its defence forces for a year along the border with Pakistan at great expense, only to send them back to barracks with no actual action — war-mongering without war.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the anger and disdain of the people for the tough rhetoric followed by no action of successive governments of all parties.
To break out of this trap, India must eliminate the corruption and politicization of the police forces and their antiquated training and equipment, as well as criminalization of politics. The number of parliamentarians with pending criminal cases is alarming. Terrorism thrives and prospers in such conditions.
India habitually points the finger of criminality at Pakistan, whose offers to help with the investigations are repeatedly spurned. Some foreign footprint — training, financing, arming — is likely. But for a foreign government to be able to infiltrate groups of Indians and recruit them to the terrorist cause indicates failures of intelligence and interdiction, on the one hand, and disaffection among sections of the population, on the other.
The intelligence agencies function as autonomous fiefs with little oversight and virtually no accountability for failures and lapses. This is matched by the flaws of the criminal justice system, which is rudimentary and lamentable by the standards of mature democracies.
Justice has neither been done nor seen to be done with respect to the large-scale atrocities against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. They spawned a crop of angry and twisted young men whose rage can be channelled into lethal terrorist violence.
India also needs to be tough on the causes of terrorism. Poverty is not a direct cause, but it is an incubator of terrorism and a root cause of corruption. New Delhi needs to implement reform in order to maintain rapid economic growth. It also needs to solve its long-running territorial conflicts — more than 90 per cent of suicide terrorists aim to compel military forces to withdraw from territory they consider an occupied homeland. India’s terrorism problem is specific to Kashmir, not generic to Muslims.
External involvement in Kashmiri militancy is not absent, however. The world must coax or coerce regimes that are tolerant of export-only terrorist cells to confront the menace. One group’s terrorist cannot be tolerated as another’s freedom fighter.
The blowback phenomenon has returned to haunt the West, which supported jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It also consumed Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Pakistan remains in danger of tearing itself apart from the inside because of armed elements espousing a variety of foreign extremist causes. These South Asian neighbours must pool resources to root out the tyranny of terrorism throughout the region.
Ramesh Thakur is distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo.
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