I was just now watching the weekly debate program on NDTV called “We the People”; due to its heavily tilted nature I don’t normally watch it but today I watched it (online) because Kanchan Gupta was among the panelists — couldn’t watch the entire program due to time constraint.
The topic of the debate was should P Chidambaram (India’s Home Minister) have used the term “saffron terrorism” while refereeing to the Hindu fringe groups indulging in random terrorist activities.
The common problem in such debates is there are always two differing opinions and every side presents irrational arguments while trying to prove the other side wrong. Of course, all the arguments are not irrational but the format of the program and the way Barkha Dutt conducts it, particular views, even if they make perfect sense to an informed person, get distorted and seem irrational.
So there was a group trying to downplay the Islamist terrorism while thoroughly demonizing saffron terrorism and then there was the the other group (as it happens on all NDTV debates there are just two people differing and the majority supports a particular view) who was trying to downplay Hindu terrorism while listing out instances of Islamist terrorists activities.
The problem with such debates is that nobody is actually interested in talking about the root cause. For instance people were trying to justify Muslim youths becoming terrorists by referring to the babri masjid demolition, the 1992 Bombay riots and Gujarat riots and many other instances of injustice that normally happen in the Indian society in particular and the lesser developed world in general.
Similarly the two isolated voices constituting of Kanchan Gupta and Tavleen Singh were trying to prove how the Islamist terrorism is an international problem and it doesn’t stem from the way Muslims have been targeted by the so-called Hindu nationalists.
This is sad because nobody talks about terrorism as a common problem; they are always pointing fingers at each other and in this way this problem will never be solved. It is like two neighboring ladies quarrelling with each other about who threw the garbage in the street.
The same thing happens with Maoist terrorism: there are some people who give all the reasons under the sun for people becoming Maoists and there are some people who don’t want to go into the details of why people feel victimized by the system and take to the gun.
Terrorists are simply terrorists. They take inspiration from religious texts and misinterpreted contexts but other than this they are simply criminals killing people whether in India or abroad and they should be dealt with accordingly. Muslim terrorists think that the entire world is against Muslims and always trying to insult them or hurt them and the so-called Hindu nationalists (regarding India) derive their motivation from historical facts that say that Muslim invaders perpetrated unparalleled atrocities and eventually they were responsible for the partition. In today’s context, such historical facts are irrelevant because no matter how hard you try you cannot go into the past and undo them. Muslims were invaders but right now most of the Muslims in the country are those who converted to Islam due to the problems they faced in Hinduism.
People trying to explain why Muslims become terrorists get too occupied with playing the victim card and pointing fingers at the majority community, in India’s case, Hindus. Of course, there are some Hindu groups that spread hatred but then such groups exist in every religion and they never enjoy the social acceptance at the grassroots level the way, sadly, Muslim terrorists enjoy. And herein lies the difference.
Terrorism has adopted its current shape primarily due to rampant appeasement and this is happening all across the globe. It seems politicians and lawmakers are not actually interested in solving this problem because if they were the problem would have been solved decades ago. when they wanted to knock down Saddam Hussein they did it within months. with Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, it’s almost been a decade. one reason can be that Osama is an American Frankenstein. the same happens in India. Our politicians have planted journalists and intellectuals who are constantly pointing fingers at the soft target (Hindu majority) and finding excuses for Muslim/Islamist terrorism. They have done this because they don’t want to solve the problem. They want to keep people occupied. They always want to say, look, there is a bigger problem so, stop ranting about silly issues like corruption, backwardness, lack of development, bizarre social disparity and lawlessness.
In India’s case, the solution doesn’t lie in pointing fingers at each other. It lies in branding terrorism as normal crime and then punishing them as criminals not as some ideological crusaders who are carrying out some sort of “war”. Only then we will be able to have a color-less and religion-less terrorism and only then we will be able to tackle it without “hurting” sentiments.
