Terrorism And How We Are ‘Covering’ It (Up)
By Mustafa Khan
13 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Terrorism came handy to usual antagonists of Muslims, RSS and other Muslim bashers as a handle to beat the Muslim minority and a brush to tarnish its whole image in the country and beyond. The work went on in full swing whenever a bomb exploded in the country. The media preying on the paranoia of the majority community with increasing attacks blamed on JeM, LeT or HuJI sensationalized stories with descriptions kept ready. For example this facile submission, or editorial of the Hindu: “Challenge of Islamic terror”. “Investigative leads point to Harkatul Jihadi-e-Islami (HUJI), the Islamist organization behind the Mecca Masjid attack in Hyerabad, as being behind the terrorist strike at the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmir. What can one say about an outfit so consumed by hatred as to deliver death to the shrine of a saint who preached the oneness of god’s creation? The Ajmer bombing is the latest in a series of terror strikes directed at both Hindu and Muslim religious institutions. Investigators have been able to establish that many of these attacks were carried out by Islamist terror groups such as the Lashar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-eMohmmad, and the HUJI.”
The editors of the Hindu did not make any painstaking research or else they would know that the most motivated organization to create communal discord in the country is the RSS. As of now, the middle of 2010 is showing loud and clear the involvement of RSS in the bomb attacks across the country. Instead of banning it and exterminating it root and branch there are people who feel that “Hindutva terror will give Pak a handle” to beat us. We are tightly holding the handle and beating Pakistan all the while is another matter.”With the emergence of evidence that in a number of blasts, from Malegaon to Ajmer to Mecca Masjid, Hindu fundamentalist groups are involved, it weakens our case against terror internationally.” This comes from the spokesperson of the Congress party Manish Tiwari. There is a big question mark not only on what Tiwari says but on who made India join the juggernaut “to mobilize international opinion against Pakistan’s failure to contain Taliban factions and terrorist groups like Let”? Rather than fighting terror we have chosen to join what Hemant Karkare called in the last interview of his life ‘politics of terror. And why does not Tiwari include Samjhauta expess attack in his list of Hindutva terror? Karkare sacrificed his life in unearthing Malegaon that led to Samjhauta. Should the country allow his sacrifice go in vain?
Terror is being covered as news events and it has lent itself to some, who are judgmental in other fields, another occasion of covering up, hiding and camouflaging the real perpetrators behind the events. However, there are others who have redeemed sanity and refused to be obliged by partisanship. Kuldip Nayyar had called Malegaon 2006 terror attack as the handy work of al Qaeda. He dismissed it in one sentence. But over the years he was awakened to the horror of the Hindutva terror and affirmed what he heard from some of the professional minded investigators that Hindutva outfits were after all behind the Malegaon attacks of 2006.
Taveleen Singh preens herself as politically incorrect, what she means is best known to her but she believes that protests over the death of boys killed in the Kashmir valley is a return of the jihadists. “What matters is the jihad and its goal of subjugating idol-worshipping, infidel India once more to the domination of Islam”. Is by any stretch of imagination the aim of those who are throwing stones at the police this subjugation of the infidel India? If that were so why should they sacrifice themselves for what they shout Aazadi, freedom, even as their swearing by Kashmiriat is diametrically in contrast with Islam?
On the Martyrs’ Day July 13 in the valley does Singh think that those whose graves the mothers, sisters, daughters and wives are visiting were victims of any jihad? In 1994 the police would seal areas, separate men from others, and then shoot them dead in what they called seal and search operation. The so called operations were conducted to liquidate the insurgents. That was the peak year when there was not much of international focus on Kashmir thanks to the attention diverted to ethnic cleansings in former Yugoslavia. But the killings had been going on all the time. The police had also killed many in the funeral procession of the father of the present Mirwaiz Umer Farooq. That the senior Mirwaz was assassinated by the security forces is a common knowledge there. That happened during the reign of Jagmohan as the governor. During his tenure in office he put into practice what Tavleen Singh and the BJP and RSS want: extinction of the ‘terrorists’. So many were killed that that “he managed to turn the people on the streets from idealistic dreamers of freedom into a united front that despised India with the intensity only possible among the mortally aggrieved and mourning.” Where was the question of Jihad anywhere here or in other cases for that matter?
More than 800 jawans of the Rajputana Rifles had descended on the village of Kunan Poshpua in Kupwara district on February 22, 1991 and raped almost all the women and killed many men. Were the victims of police brutality jihadists, or terrorists for that matter? By what standard can the boys being killed recently jihadits? Therefore in covering the events of terror there is either an account or comment on facts or an attempt to deny the truth and create fiction which is easily sold as fact.
Justine Hardy who has been covering the events in the valley for more than two decades is sober and unbiased. She describes a slew of complexes as by product of terrorism: “The conflict (in Kashmir) has brutalized women but they do not turn to each other in their pain. They turn inwards, into silence, and away from the calls for their men to pick up the gun; from the sounds of rifle butts against their door demanding entry, from the cry of a neighbor telling them that their boy has gone, from the extremist throwing acid in their face for not wearing the veil; from the rapist between their legs, demanding entry.” Is the state not responsible for these dehumanizing reflexes as well as for more than 300 kinds of depressions that Dr Arshad Hussain of the Shri Hari Singh Medical College is treating every day? Whose terrorism is this that is playing havoc in the valley?
The religious angle is a different kettle of fish. After more than three years of dilly dallying the CBI has only now begun sighting the tip of the iceberg, that Swami Aseemanand supervised all the three instances of bomb blasts, Malegaon, Ajmer and Mecca masjid. What is looming larger as Takht-e-Suleiman overlooking all these is Samjhauta express blasts which are so dazing that the investigators are still stunned and have not regained sight! The friendly train is suppressed willfully as if our cordial relations with our neighbor are so brittle that it would soure everything, the mere acknowledgement of it. In the mean time the bomb maker and planter Ramji Kalsangrah has been busy in outshining every other terrorists by casting his vote in the local assembly election of 2009, Ramji is sending out signal that he is hale and hearty even politically by enjoying his right to choose. Thus the game of hide and seek goes on in the name of terror.
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