India's Muslim Time Bomb By Pankaj Mishra

India's Muslim Time Bomb

By Pankaj Mishra

The New York Times
17 September, 2003

Soon after arriving at the site of the bomb explosions in
Bombay that killed more than 50 people last month - the sixth and most
lethal in a recent series of blasts in the city - Lal Krishna Advani, the
deputy prime minister in India's Hindu nationalist government, blamed
terrorists based in Pakistan.

This was to be expected: the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party routinely
describes India as besieged by Muslim terrorists backed by Pakistan and
based there or in the disputed valley of Kashmir, where Indian security
forces have fought a Muslim insurgency for more than a decade. This time,
however, Mr. Advani's accusation was swiftly contradicted by the Bombay
police. The four people arrested this month in connection with the attacks
were Indian Muslims, part of a new group called the Gujarat Muslim Revenge
Force. They may have received logistical support from a Pakistani militant
outfit with links to Al Qaeda, but they were Indian citizens.

This can be only disturbing news - for India, the region and the United
States. The radical Islamist movements that spread so quickly in the last
decade in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan had heretofore left
untouched India's 140 million Muslims, even as the Hindu nationalists rose
to power in India by demanding, among other things, that Muslims adopt
what they define as India's "Hindu culture."

Indian Muslims had stayed away from the anti-India insurgency of their
culturally distinct co-religionists in Kashmir. More remarkably, they had
not heeded the many pied pipers of jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan who
lured Muslims from all parts of the world, and managed to delude even a
non-Muslim from California.

It may be that most Indian Muslims are too poor and downtrodden to join
radical causes elsewhere. It is also true that they have an advantage
denied to most Muslims in the world: they can participate in regular
elections and choose - since they comprise just 13 percent of India's
population - their representatives if not rulers.

But this faith in democracy, which Indian Muslims have long expressed by
voting tactically and in large numbers, has been tested repeatedly in the
last decade. In 1992 Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque
in the town of Ayodhya that they claimed was built by a Muslim conqueror
of India upon the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The Bharatiya Janata
Party, which assumed power in 1998 promising to restore Hindu pride,
promises to soon complete the construction of a temple on the site of the
demolished mosque.

In the nationwide violence that followed the demolition of the mosque a
decade ago, almost 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in Bombay alone. In
1998, an inquiry identified some Hindu police officers and politicians
responsible for the killings; not one has been tried or convicted.
Observing the 10th anniversary of the killings last year, Amnesty
International noted that "even when those responsible are identified, they
are allowed to go unpunished."

And early last year, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed in the western
Indian state of Gujarat in a series of attacks by mobs that Human Rights
Watch has said were organized and protected by Gujarat's Hindu nationalist
rulers. Here, too, the perpetrators of the very public massacres are
mostly known. But they are unlikely to face justice, judging by the
collapse of one recent trial in which the primary prosecution witness in a
massacre case withdrew her testimony; human rights groups say she was
threatened by Hindu extremists.

So the surprising thing, perhaps, is not that militant groups like the
Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force are now emerging in India, but that it has
taken so long. As revealed by the English-language newspaper The Indian
Express, most of the 27 Muslims who have been arrested by the Bombay
police in connection with the string of bombings confessed that they did
so in revenge for the state-assisted killings of Muslims in Gujarat.

What is particularly worrisome about the new Muslim terrorism is the
backgroud of its adherents. Many of these young men have degrees in
business management, forensic science, and chemical and aeronautical
engineering. They have been radicalized in a geopolitical environment that
has never been more highly fraught for the Muslim community at large. And
so while the rage and resentment of such educated Muslims may have purely
Indian origins, they are now likely to feed faster on the international
events - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombings in Indonesia,
Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Baghdad - that probably still seem too remote to
an older, impoverished generation of Indian Muslims.

The parallel with Indonesia, a new and floundering democracy, is striking.
In the only country with more Muslims than India, a new, educated and
politically aware generation has outgrown the old tolerant culture of
Indonesian Islam. Its distrust of the Indonesian government, which they
call anti-Muslim and pro-American, is increasingly channeled into the
politics of anti-Americanism and, for some young Muslims at least, into
association with Al Qaeda and radical Islamist groups in East Asia.

Yet while religious violence has made the Indonesian government cautious
in its dealings with both radical Islamists and the Bush administration,
the Hindu nationalists in New Delhi and the provinces seem eager to expand
the Indian Muslim list of grievances. Their initial desire to assist the
Bush administration and commit Indian troops to postwar Iraq was checked
only by strong protests from opposition parties. And in a spectacular
reversal of India's traditional support for the Palestinians, the
Bharatiya Janata Party is developing close political and military
relations with Israel, whose prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited India
last week.

With general elections next year, the nationalists are unlikely to tone
down their anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan language. Muslims pondering their
fate in Hindu- nationalist-ruled India will feel only a greater sense of
isolation and impotence.

It is exactly these sorts of local political frustrations that - in North
Africa, the Middle East and, more recently, East Asia - have given the
network of terrorism its global range and resilience. In historical
retrospect, the explosions in Bombay may come to be seen as the moment
when the recruiters of Al Qaeda, heartened by the mess in Iraq and by
fresh gains in Indonesia, received news of some more unexpected bounty:
militant disaffection among the second-largest Muslim population in the
world.

Pankaj Mishra is author of "The Romantics," a novel.