Author: Richard L. Benkin
Publication: Americanthinker.com
Date: March 03, 2011
URL: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/jihad_has_come_to_india.html
Jihad has come to India. The Obama administration
and the State Department will tell you that it is nothing more than isolated
acts by individuals. The government in New Delhi will say you are stirring
up anti-Muslim sentiment. The mainstream media will ask how you can say that
when we are hearing nothing about it from them. But it is real, and it is
happening now. I have seen it first-hand. The Obama administration's studied
denial will find us caught as flat-footed in India as we were in Lebanon,
Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The difference is that India is an economic and
military giant, with nuclear weapons, and could be a cornerstone of any effective
fight against radical Islam.
For several years, I have been talking about
the progressive radicalization of Bangladesh. Although it is the only country
that ranks among the ten most populous and the ten most densely populated,
as well as being the second largest Muslim-majority nation, events there do
not capture people's imagination. When you talk about India in the same context,
however, people take notice. The thought of an Islamist dominated India scares
the heck out of them and should. While our own strategic thinkers concentrate
on internecine struggles in the Middle East, their obliviousness to the significance
of an Islamist India has enabled our enemies to further their agenda.
I have spent several years along India's 2545
mile-long frontier with Bangladesh, and have seen the impact Bangladesh's
radicalization has had on its giant neighbor to the west. Amitabh Tripathi,
who has been fighting against what he calls his country's "soft policies,"
noted that Bangladesh's Muslims "are not radicalized but their institutions
are." That radicalization and a level of corruption on both sides of
the border that makes my fellow Chicagoans look like amateurs has already
produced demographic change in many strategic areas of India. It also has
given Muslim activists carte blanche throughout the entire country. The process
is deliberate, has been going on for decades, and should send us a screaming
warning signal, not only because of what it bodes for India, but also because
of what sort of future the Obama administration's soft policies and tolerance
for an open border to our south mean for the United States.
Each year in districts like Uttar Dinajpur
and North and South 24 Parganas directly across from the Islamic state, my
colleagues and I find that more and more villages which once had mixed Hindu-Muslim
populations are now all Muslim or Muslim-dominated. Gone are the roadside
temples characteristic of places where Hindus practice their faith openly;
gone are the sights of Hindu women dressed in their colorful saris and other
vestments. They have been replaced by mosques and burqas. Last year, Tripathi
and I met with Bimal Praminik, Director of the Kolkata-based Centre for Research
in Indo-Bangladesh Relations and arguably the foremost authority on these
population changes. He is convinced that this population shift is a deliberate
and an integral element the jihad that threatens all of us: "Bangladeshi
infiltration with Pakistani ideas... trying to 'Pakistanize' the entire region,"
he said adding that that the dominant culture for South Asian Muslims has
become more "Arabic," than South Asian.
In 1947 when the British left, they partitioned
the Indian subcontinent into Hindu and Muslim states. West Bengal went to
Hindu India, and East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became part of Pakistan. While
Hindu and Muslim majorities respectively, remain, exhaustive studies by Pramanik
and others hold out little hope that things will continue that way. During
the second half of the 20th century, the Muslim proportion of West Bengal's
population rose by 25 percent and its Hindu population declined by nine, a
process that has continued into the 21st. At the same time, Bangladesh's Hindu
population dropped from almost a third to nine percent. The process has not
been pretty and has involved murder, gang rape, abduction of women and children,
forced conversion to Islam, and legalized thievery of ancestral Hindu lands
under Bangladesh's anti-Hindu Vested Property Act. And now it is happening
in India.
Between 1981 and 1991, Muslim population growth
in West Bengal actually exceeded its growth in Bangladesh. The South Asia
Research Society concluded that Hindus have been fleeing Islamist persecution
in East Bengal since the partition; but that since Bangladesh's emergence
as an independent nation in 1971, "there has been large scale voluntary
infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims...to West Bengal and other parts of India"
as well. The actual Muslim population growth exceeded Indian government projections
that were based on demographic factors (fertility and mortality), internal
migration, and the influx of Hindu refugees; thus, there had to be another
element driving the change. Pramanik identifies it as "illegal immigration
from across the border." Islamist plans have been so detailed and longstanding
that since 1951 the Muslim growth rate exceeded that of Hindus in each individual
district of West Bengal.
Statistics might be the "smoking gun,"
but jihad's impact is far more powerful in the testimony of individual non-Muslim
residents who are its victims. One elderly woman in the Howrah district told
us how Muslims are taking over her property piece by piece. She even showed
us a wall with a star and crescent on it that local Muslims built to identify
it as dar al Islam. In another village, residents showed us the remains of
a Hindu temple that Muslims recently destroyed after urinating on its holy
objects. Most poignant was the testimony of a crestfallen mother whose 22-year-old
daughter was abducted weeks ago by local Muslims. Abduction of Hindu women
and girls in the name of Islam has been common in Bangladesh for years and
is a key element in jihad: eliminating females of childbearing years from
the gene pool and forcing them to "produce" Muslim offspring instead.
It is now happening in India, according to victimized parents who told me
about it in India's North and Northeast.
Residents of Deganga, only 40 kilometers from
the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, lived through an anti-Hindu pogrom last
September. The pogrom started -- as these things are wont to do these days
-- with a fabricated land dispute in which Muslims claimed a wooded area off
the region's main road that Hindus own and on which sits a Hindu shrine that
is considered very sacred. As the 2010 Islamic observance of Iftar came to
an end, a large group of Muslims attempted to seize the land until local Hindus
stopped them. It was then that they started attacking Hindu households and
shops indiscriminately, forcing many to flee the area with little more than
the clothes on their backs.
I returned to Deganga last month to find that
while many homes and shops have been rebuilt, a sense of security by Hindus
in their ancestral land has not. Most of the residents spoke about leaving
the area; others talked about being fearful of attack, their children unable
to attend school, and Hindu women being harassed whenever they go to the market
or other places in the area. Many of them showed us charred pieces of their
former residences; in other cases we were able to see signs of it bleeding
through a new coat of paint. Hindu women and girls showed us where they hid
during the attack to avoid being raped or abducted and made concubines; a
fate that likely has befallen the missing 22-year old daughter of the mother
above.
In every single one of these cases, local
authorities have refused to take action. In fact, during the Deganga pogrom,
they arrested the community's wealthiest Hindu on the false charge of firing
on the jihadis. In the past, this official inaction has been purchased; but
it is also a product of the alliance between Islamists and Communists in India.
That alliance was announced publicly at a meeting in the south Indian state
of Kerala; and it has been policy for West Bengal's three-decade old communist
government. Wherever we spoke with these villagers, Muslim neighbors would
gather menacingly in an attempt to intimidate our informants. In some cases,
they attacked after we left -- again with no action by the authorities.
In Meerut northeast of New Delhi and far from
Deganga, the population of this once Hindu-dominated town is now split down
the middle between Hindus and Muslims; and the Hindus are living in fear.
Just five days ago before my arrival, a Hindu was burned to death and shortly
before that a community leader was targeted and killed. These actions are
becoming more common in this substantial-sized town with no police re-action;
and according to residents and activists, it is only a matter of time before
things explode.
Our State Department will tell you that there
is no jihad in India. They will hew the official line that the liberal Awami
League government in Bangladesh has put an end to anti-Hindu actions there.
A similarly weak government in New Delhi will parrot the same platitudes.
Yet, their false palliatives bring no comfort to the scores of victims who
have told us their stories; or the many others now unable to do so.
They cannot explain away major terrorist attacks
in India's largest cities like Mumbai, Pune, in New Delhi, and elsewhere.
They cannot explain how insurgents can regularly kidnap minor officials and
receive their ransom (usually release of prisoners, cash, and government forbearance
from counter terrorist action) every time they do. If the Obama administration
and its left-wing counterparts in India do not replace their studied ignorance
with effective action, we will be as "surprised" over what becomes
of India as we were with Iran, Egypt, and a host of other nations.
- Imagine what an Islamist India would mean
for us.
