Author: Dr. M.K. Teng
Publication: Kashmir Herald
Date: Volume 1, No. 7 - December
2001
URL: http://www.kashmiri-pandit.org/kashmirherald/featuredarticle/civilizationalwar.html
The sudden and surprise attack which
ripped through the World Trade Center and tore down the part of the complex
of buildings of the Pentagon in the United States, evidently administered
a rude shock. American administration, had for more than three decades
used the Muslims as their allies in the Cold War. The history of the evolution
of pan-Islamic fundamentalism and the Islamic revolution, goes back to
the time of early phases of the Cold War when the western world began planning
a fresh struggle for what in called the free-word, against the ideological
state, the communist world symbolized. The psychology of freedom, the Anglo-Saxon
world upheld, was the mental make-up of an international system, in which
the Anglo-Saxon powers had played the role of a major determinant of the
balances of power, which characterized the concert of Europe or what I
have called the "Consensus Imperialism".
The Muslim countries of the West
Asia, were never formally colonized like India, Africa, South East Asia
and the Latin America. The Middle East, with its strategic importance and
oil resources, in fact, formed a subsidiary alliance between the Anglo-Saxon
powers and the Muslim of Asia or the middle east which was consolidated
into a major power-block in between the two world wars. That was almost
the pattern of colonial expansion followed by the Anglo-Saxon powers in
the far East, China, Japan and Korea. The policy of open door followed
by "Consensus Imperialism" promoted in China the opening of the Meiji Japan,
more or less, sought imperial pacification limited to subsidiary alliance
structures. The American expression of the "Consensus Imperialism" and
subsidiary alliance took the form of the Monoroe Doctrine. The Monoroe
Doctrine, in fact, enunciated the basic principle which bound the Latin
America, the Caribbean States and entire seas around the Southern hemisphere
of the American continent to the political hegemony of the United States
of America. In the pattern of the emerging bipolar international relations
in the aftermath of the second world war, the Muslim factor assumed a new
significance.
The partition of India, aimed to
de-Sanskritise the Himalayas, in order to demolish the traditional Indian
frontier in the north, was an expression of the western effort to link
up the Muslim strains right actors the middle-East and North Africa, North
of India and Western China and the tapering Muslim peoples in South East
Asia. In this link-up, Pakistan was always considered to be a major epicenter,
providing the whole Muslim, expanse a more stringent ideological version
of Wahabi Islam, which had originated in Saudi-Arabia in the 19th century.
India had come directly under the Wahabi movement and the British had suppressed
Wahabism with a stern hand. But the Wahibi ideology assumed a new forum
after the commencement of the liberation struggle in India in the beginning
of the twentieth century. Indeed the new form actually reflected the subsidiary
alliances, the Muslim power formed with the concert of Europe. Pakistan
was in fact the first and most important achievement in forging a new alliance
system in which the free-world of the west and Islam joined to defeat communism.
The historical role played by Maharaja
Hari Singh and the Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir thwarted the plot to bring
the Himalayas under the Muslim hold.
For four decades, the Cold War continued
after the end of the Second World War. Pakistan supported by the Western
powers spared no efforts to undo the accession of the State to India, with
a long fifth column inside India, supporting the Pakistan's political and
military maneuvers. In 1947, let the record be put straight, lest the truth
is buried under the debris of what in India is called objective history,
the Indian leaders stubbornly refused to include the Indian States with
a hundred million people living over one-third of India in the liberation
struggle against the British Colonialism. At least not till they carried
the British India to the sacrificial alter of the partition and the Indian
states to the brink of disaster. The Indian army which drove out the invaders
of Pakistan after the Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India, was unable
to dislodge the invaders from the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu
and Kashmir. It was never deployed to save Gilgit and Baltistan, due to
the indecision of the Indian leaders and the treachery inside. Almost half
the state was allowed to be occupied by Pakistan. The rest of the state
was handed over to the Muslims of Kashmir, virtually in perpetual possession.
A decade after a part of the state was meekly left to be occupied by China.
The subsidiary alliance with the
west consolidated the Muslim states into a closer uniformity, around the
concept of the unity of the Muslim Ummah and its role in a world divided
on ideological basis and a new political sociology of the Muslim power,
which was ideologically committed to the theological imperatives of Islam.
The foundation of Pakistan therefore, was the first expression of the pan-Islamic
unity of the Muslim Ummah and the beginning of the evolution of the fundamentalisation
of the Muslim society. The Muslim state of Pakistan, lost no time to underline
its commitment to the theological imperatives of Islam. The claim of the
Muslim power to unite on the basis of the theological imperatives of Islam
underlined a conflict, which was more fundamental than the conflict in
the ideologies of States. It underlined a conflict in ideologies of the
civilization. The first expression of the conflict which the western powers
supported wholly, was the Muslim resistance to the Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan and the Muslim crusade launched to annex the Jammu and Kashmir
state. The subsidiary alliance of the Muslims with the powers of the West
lost their anchor with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end
of the Cold War. The Muslim revolution came to a dead end for it suddenly
found the Western powers, erstwhile partners in their alliances of the
Cold War, emerge out as the sole-super power with a set of commitments
to a new world in which the Muslim states, were reduced to their original
shape and size. The Muslim crusade in Kashmir, did not lead to intervention
of Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir, because western powers were no longer
interested in the expansion of the Muslim power to the east into India.
The terrorist operatives, must therefore, be viewed in the their historical
context. Jews and Hindus are the two defined enemies of the battle for
the ascendance of Islam and the unity of the Muslim Umah. Buddhism was
defeated with the Bamiyan demolitions. The terrorist attack in Jammu and
Kashmir was never cross-border terrorism. It formed a new genus of international
terrorism, which marked the advance of the Muslim power into India under
the banner of Islam. The terrorist attack on the United State is an inseparable
part of the same Muslim crusade.