Author: B. Raman
Publication: South Asia Analysis Group
Date: March 8, 2008
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers27/paper2611.html
In a statement made after the July, 2005,
blasts in London organised by suicide terrorists of Pakistani origin, Mr.
Tony Blair, the then British Prime Minister, spoke of the need to counter
jihadi terrorism not only operationally through better intelligence, better
physical security, better counter-terrorism operations etc, but also ideologically
in order to draw the attention of the public to the pernicious ideas being
spread by Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda jihadi organisations and counter them
energetically.
2. Amongst such pernicious ideas are that
there was no civilisation in the world before the advent of Islam, that the
Muslims have a right to re-capture all lands which historically belonged to
them, that the Muslims do not recognise national frontiers and ,therefore,
have a right to wage a jihad anywhere in the world where Islam is in danger
and that the Muslims have the religious right and obligation to acquire weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) and use them to protect their religion, if necessary.
3. The Pakistani jihadi organisations such
as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which
are members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF), project
Aurangzeb as the greatest ruler in the history of the Indian sub-continent
and describe their aim as the "liberation" of the Muslims of India
and restoration of what they view as the golden era of Aurangzeb in the sub-continent.
4. This glorification of Aurangzeb was actually
started by the Pakistan Government after the birth of Pakistan in 1947. The
text-books got written and prescribed in schools by different Pakistan Governments
depicted that there was no civilisation or culture in India before the Muslims
came to the sub-continent and glorified Aurangzeb. In September 1996, Murtaza
Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir Bhutto, was allegedly killed by
the police of Karachi after he had returned from Islamabad, where he allegedly
had a fierce quarrel with Benazir and her husband Mr. Asif Ali Zardari over
his demand that he should be appointed as the Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan
People's Party. In a piece on the rule of Benazir, the "Economist"
of London compared her to Aurangzeb.
5. This created a lot of interest among analysts
over the influence of the Aurangzeb model on the minds of Pakistani rulers----political
and military--- who grew up after its independence and studied the text-books,
which glorified him. It is now recognised by imany that one of the reasons
for the spreading prairie fire of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan is the pernicious
influence of the Aurangzeb model on the mind-set of the Pakistani youth. Many
of them, who are spreading havoc across Pakistan, see themselves as the Aurangzebs
of today. Aurangzeb as well as bin Laden are their role models.
6. The overwhelming majority of the Indian
Muslim youth, who remain intensely patriotic, have not let themselves be influenced
by this pernicious veneration of bin Laden and Aurangzeb and their ideas,
but recent events such as the involvement of one or two Indian Muslims in
the UK with Al Qaeda, the role of two Indian Muslim youth in the attempted
terrorist strikes in London and Glasgow in June last and the recent arrests
of some Muslim youth of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in
Karnataka indicate that some of these pernious ideas might have started winning
adherents in the India Muslim community too---- in India as well as in the
diaspora in the Gulf and the West.
7. Before this spreads further, it is important
to counter this phenomenon ideologically. This is what some respected Muslim
clerics and scholars, who had met recently at Deoband, had done. One must
welcome their initiative in condemning terrorism. That is also what some activists
against terrorism under Mr. Francois Gautier, a well-known French journalist
living in India for many years, have been doing. Whereas the appeal of the
Deobandi congregation was addressed to the Muslim community specifically,
the anti-terrorism campaign of Gautier and his small, but devoted band of
associates is addressed to all people----whatever be their nationality, religion,
ethnicity etc. It seeks to educate them not only on the evils of terrorism,
but also on the mental origin of it.
8. To understand the mental origin of the
jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan, it is important to identify not
only their present-day mentors such as bin Laden, the Pakistani jihadi leaders
and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but also their historical idols.
Aurangzeb is one of their topmost historical idols. It is important to educate
the people of India on the real nature of Aurangzeb, his policies and actions
so that they do not get easily carried away by the way Aurangzeb's rule is
depicted by the jihadi terrorists.
9. an exhibition organised by Gautier and
his associates as part of this education process had a successful run in New
Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. In Pune, over 100,000 people visited it. In none
of these places, did the members of the local Muslim community view the exhibition
as anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. Unfortunately, some members of the community
in Chennai viewed it as anti-Muslim and demanded that the exhibition be discontinued.
This has reportedly been done on the advice of the Police.
10. I had attended the inauguration of the
exhibition on the opening day (March 3,2008) and spoke on the importance of
understanding the pernicious ideas about Aurangzeb being spread by Pakistani
jihadi organisations. I had seen all the exhibits before the inauguration
and did not find any of them of a provocative nature. More than the paintings,
what was so eloquent in the exhibition was the collection of scanned copies
of the various orders issued by Aurangzeb during his rule. These documents
were authentic and the scanned copies were made over a period of three years
from a Mughul Archive in Rajasthan which, I was told, contain a wealth of
documents relating to the Mughul period.
11. One of the contentions of those, who protested
against the exhibition, was that raking up the past would create a communal
divide in Tamil Nadu, which has been relatively free of it.One of the lessons
of history has been that remaining silent on unpleasant periods in history
leads to a repetition of such unpleasant experiences. That is why Western
school children are taught about the evils of rulers like Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin etc. That is why the Jewish people keep reminding themselves and the
rest of the world about the holocaust. That was why some years ago Jean-Marie
Le Pen, the French rightist leader, was severely criticised for denying the
reality of the holocaust.
12. When we deny harsh truths of history,
we are only playing into the hands of jihadi terrorists, who see themselves
as the Aurangzebs of today.
13. The Annexure gives extracts from what
foreign scholars, including scholars in Pakistan itself, have been saying
on this subject of what a Pakistani scholar described as a creation of myths
regarding the real nature of Muslim rule. When Pakistanis have themselves
started realising the damage done to their society and country by this myth-making,
leaders of our Muslim community should refrain from starting a similar myth-making
exercise in India about the past
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of
India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,
Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
