Author: Saradindu Mukherji
Publication: Vijayvaani.com
Date: September 16, 2011
URL: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1963
The legendary colonial administrator, Col.
Sleeman, while travelling through the nawabi territory of Oudh [Awadh] in
1849-50, was surprised to see at Bahraich both his Hindu and Muslim soldiers
offering obeisance at a shrine built in memory of a general of Mohammad Ghazni.
On enquiry, he found that this alien Muslim
general was responsible for wanton and unprovoked invasion of this Hindu territory
and the massacre of many Hindus trying to fend off the invader. While Muslims
(though many of them must have been recent converts to Islam) may have had
an obligation to do what they did, the Hindu worshippers had neither logic,
nor history, nor a modicum of sense of honor on their side. But then, they
were slaves - they had no option.
Much to the surprise of the Sleemans of the
world, there are numerous monuments built in memory of such characters from
Ajmer to Anhilwad [now Patan], Udaipur to Udaypuri (A.P), Vikramshila to Vaishali
- many of them on the compulsory visiting list of our obeisance-offering VIP's
and gullible tourists! In fact, our collective amnesia and dogged refusal
to learn the rudimentary facts of relevant history from an unending chain
of Islamic terror-wreaking system may largely explain the UPA's so-called
lack of "political will", its failure to either nab the Jihadis
in Delhi or other successful Jihadi operators, as most recently in Mumbai,
and get away without a scratch on its unsullied "secular" record
a few days after the mayhem. Fortunately for our rulers, the nation, except
those directly affected, goes into slumber soon after.
The latest attack in New Delhi on 7 September
- certainly not the last - was not the first Jihadi attack on Delhi, but a
millennium-old continuum. Those with some knowledge of history would remember
the forces and ideology let loose on hapless Hindus / Jains in Delhi when
27 of their temples were razed to the ground, and a grand mosque built over
the ruins, mostly with the remains from those very temples, in the 1190s,
by Aibak, slave of Muhammad Ghori.
Those forces and ideology are still rampant.
The negationists say this is part of our shared heritage! The only difference
is that the earlier acts were perpetrated by alien invaders while the latest
are the handiwork of zealots whose forefathers were Hindus/Buddhists etc,
turned into tools of Arab/Islamic imperialism, with or without external support.
The mayhem on 7 Sept may also be traced to
the preachings of another "renaissance" figure in 18th century Delhi
- Shah Waliullah (1703-1762), who in his wasiyatnama called upon the "faithful",
"We are strangers. Our forefathers came to India from abroad - that there
should not exist any religion in the world which was superior to Islam, and
the slaughter of "Infidels also helped to diminish the evils away---".
His followers like Sayyid Ahmad Shahid [Barelvi]
wrote to foreign rulers to invade India and establish Dar-ul-Islam. Surely
there are people and institutions in Delhi who uphold the message and memory
of many Shah Waliullahs!
In many such attacks in the past, the Jihadis
have candidly claimed to carry on the unfinished tasks initiated by Mohammad
Ghazni, Mohammad Ghori, Firoze Shah Tughlaq, Aurangzeb et al, and exhorted
their committed followers to attack our Judiciary, Parliament and all the
pillars of our polity. Their exhortations against the Indian state and our
civilisational interests are eerily similar to the fulminations of the likes
Arundhati Roy who sermonise the chosen few regularly along these lines.
If the on-going Jihad is going on quite successfully
in India, even after its partition on a religious basis, we must acknowledge
the consistent and substantial service rendered to that cause by our "secular"
establishment. When our incompetent de jure Prime Minister merely condemns
such "cowardly" attacks, it elicits ridicule from all. Jihadis feel
emboldened after such vacuous statements from the authorities and our spurious
"intellectuals".
Soon after the latest Mumbai blast, a section
of the Indian media tried to obfuscate issues blatantly. A mind-boggling editorial
mentioned Congress-Shiv Sena political rivalry in Mumbai and the latter's
"politics of grievance", but desisted from saying anything which
could explain to its readers the repetitive and highly successful Jihadi attacks
by active "sleeper-cells", the underworld linked with sections of
the entertainment industry, its Gulf ramifications, and the centrality of
our communal votebank-based political culture. One NRI historian ridiculously
ascribed the blast to the divisiveness set in motion by Shiv Sena and its
'nativist and Hindu nationalist political party". When this writer wrote
a letter that while Shiv Sena might have had a deleterious impact in Mumbai,
one could equally look back to Muslim-Parsi riots of 1845 and the opposition
Badruddin Tyabji faced from his co-religionists after his election as third
President of the Congress in 1887, it was ignored. Such is their censorship
of truth and encouragement of diversionary tactics!
Another columnist wrote, "Don't give
terrorists the satisfaction of having extracted a strong reaction from us",
while telling them that "they are certainly killing folks, but they are
not getting too far in achieving any of their larger objectives, assuming
they have some". He suggested that as long as our large market remains
unaffected, we must sit quietly, oblivious of their "larger objectives".
So they can successfully carry on one Jihadi attack after another, and if
caught and punished, our "secular" politicians prevent/postpone
execution of the death sentence for fear of "political consequences".
Because they had long-term objectives, there was total decimation of Hindus
and Sikhs in Pakistan but no exchange of population from our side of the border.
And many refugee-victims from Pakistan are today in the forefront of strengthening
Muslim separatism by blatantly demanding communal job quotas, by declaring
as our de jure Prime Minister did that Muslims have the first claim on our
resources, and that both Pakistan and India are victims of terrorism and UPA
itself was fomenting rebellion in Baluchistan! Indeed, we have a star-studded
panel at the top.
Our ruling class prevents the potential victims
from seeing the pattern - the umbilical cord that binds all such Jihadi perpetrators;
this was reaffirmed when three "intellectuals" gave evasive answers
on a panel discussion on the terrorist attack in a Sunday evening TV programme.
One of them had once justified the invasion and destruction of Somnath; another
believed that in the making of "modern India' Syed Ahmad of Aligarh Muslim
University & assorted "fame" and Mohammad Ali Jinnah played
important roles, but not the likes Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak or Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose etc etc.
The message is simple. There is an active
lobby in India which is concealing the nature and ideological impulses behind
the attacks. Hence our government had to do the unthinkable and stoop to manufacture
the myth of Hindu and Saffron terrorism to "balance" the guilt on
both sides. No one takes this seriously. But that Black lie carefully but
insensitively manufactured by the likes of Chidambaram and Digvijay Singh
and popularized by media, gave the BBC the opportunity to divert attention
from the real perpetrators. On the 7 Sept. afternoon telecast, its newscaster
(with an Indian name) said that given the diversity of the sources of terror
- Islamic (they call it Islamist), Maoist and Hindus - operating in India,
it was not clear who the perpetrators were. Mind you, this is Lord Reith's
legacy, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and that when England has never
faced any attack from "saffronites" or Maoists.
The announcement of a special team to enquire
into the blast went on giving us the CV of the officials. Let's accept that
they are the best, but does it solve the problem at hand, does it minimize
the pain and angst of the people who lost their near and dear ones and all
those potential victims who have been faced with the same terror over the
centuries?
Our security apparatus and "experts"
have hair-splitting arguments on the quantum of responsibility - the role
of the one or other Jihadi outfit, whether it is Huji, Indian Mujahiddin,
Lashkar-e-Toiba… They probably deliberately "miss" the fact
that irrespective of nomenclature, these are devoted soldiers of a cause,
and are loyal to the Ummah. The Islamic terrorist groups - state actors and
non-state actors - are not separate water-tight compartments, nor are they
like national cricket teams engaged in cut -throat competition to reach the
top of the chart; rather, they are one composite whole, with unwavering commitment
to the millat [members of an ecumenical community], determined and consistent
in achieving their "Holy" political-religious objectives, viz.,
the Caliphate and decimation of "Unbelievers". To their credit,
the Jihadis don't hide their agenda, history and the mission. That onerous
task is left for our politicians, media persons, their employers and the "progressive"
public-sector intellectuals and their international patrons.
As Jason Burke in his "9/11 Wars"
put it, they are "an amorphous, dynamic and fragmented movement based
more on personal relations and a shared world-view than on formal membership
of an organisation". Is it not astounding that we can't quote any Indian
"security expert" worth the name on such serious matters? Why is
it so impossible for Indian "experts" to be truthful? They would
lose their "secular" tag and everything that makes for a "successful"
career and unending assignments.
Capacity-building: In his latest press conference
our Hon'ble Home Minister said capacity-building takes time. Perhaps true,
depending on what your agenda is. But a civilization at the receiving end
should not take so much time. Emergency situations call for emergency response
- not dilly dallying and cooking an alibi for non-action.
It is not so much the late arrival of the
NSG team in Mumbai in 2008, nor the absence of CCTVs in Delhi High Court which
are to blame, as the unwillingness of our political class to anticipate danger
and prevent or minimize the assault. Just think if such a mayhem occurred
on the rain-drenched 9 September - even our vehicles would not have moved,
no ambulance could have reached, so many things would have to wait for hours…
International dimension: The Home Minister's
jibe to his political adversaries on the failure of authorities in non-UPA
controlled states to solve Jihadi-terrorist cases was perhaps a bit of a faux
pas. Jihadis have a global nexus, and they can be pursued at the international
level only - a task beyond the jurisdiction of Raipur, Lucknow, or Ahmedabad.
The Indian media systematically sought to
paint Anna Hazare's Ramlila gathering as a "majoritarian" venture
and objected to the picture of Bharat Mata on the podium and showed discomfiture
over the chanting of Bharat Mata, and crudely raised fingers about not including
minorities blah blah blah! They gave wide coverage to the rantings of some
maulvis. Such mischief by sections of the media to create an apparition of
the emergence of Hindus Rashtra adds to the groundswell of centuries old conflict
which shows no sign of abatement.
Root cause: In a TV discussion the evening
of the High Court blast, on the root cause of such troubles, a retired Intelligence
official referred to some of the ideologues' idea of restoring Mughal power,
another "expert" immediately blurted that another root cause was
the arrest of members of a particular community after such attacks!
This was so repulsive that the writer had
to switch it the television and could not hear the opinion of the anchor.
May be some arrests are made from areas which police call "no-go-areas",
may some innocents are detained for questioning, but these cannot be called
'root causes"; they are an inevitable collateral cost to the devastation
caused in the name of one community's supremacy.
As an irregular TV watcher, one is unaware
of the identity of the "expert" who gave such an outlandish rationalization,
but he was certainly covering up the truth. We, witnesses to a history of
vandalism and destruction spanning a millennium, precisely know the root causes
- the concepts of Jihad, Momins, Kafirs, Dar-ul-Harb, Dar-ul Islam…
Only, India's ostrich-like secular-liberal
establishment has strictly censured public discussion of such uncomfortable
ideas.
- The author teaches History at the University
of Delhi, Delhi
