Fighter488
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Keep Politics Out
Malegaon in Maharashtra, the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan belatedly but with gathering momentum, evidence is emerging of a network of fundamentalist Hindutva organisations behind them. Swami Aseemanands December confession providing many of those details may now be disputed by his lawyer as having been made under duress, but it is not the only source of information. The National Investigation Agency has ferreted out a number of operational details related to the Samjhauta Express blast as well. Taken together and added to information gleaned from the arrests of Lt Col Srikant Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur we have an emerging picture of a threat serious enough that there can be no political gamesmanship over the issue as we are witnessing now.
The hopeful sign, however, is that if the emerging picture is correct, Malegaon, Mecca Masjid et al have been traced to a small group of extremists, and rolling them up at this point should stop the contagion from spreading. That is what we need to focus on. The BJP should no longer be in denial about saffron terror, but instead purge its ranks of those inclined to follow violent methods in pursuit of religious goals. To some extent the RSS has gone further than the BJP has. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwats admission that some members of the Sangh had shown extremist tendencies and were consequently asked to leave is a step away from the Sangh Parivars policy of absolute denial.
But the continuing political battle over semantics and vote banks misses the point entirely. Terrorism is terrorism; there is nothing to choose between the Islamist variety, greater in scope, and the Hindutva variety, more insidious in its effect on the countrys socio-cultural fabric. As there has been a public outcry over laxity in dealing with cross-border terrorism and subsequent attempts by the government to address the lacunae so there must be an effort to close down the network of operatives from groups like Abhinav Bharat, Jai Vande Matram and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti.
While the BJP continues to be in denial on saffron terror the initial wrong turn taken by investigative agencies, which had started out by blaming Muslim extremist groups for the blasts, is an embarrassment for them as well. A good deal of time has elapsed since the blasts happened, and shoddy investigations risk losing vital evidence while pursuing innocent people. Investigative agencies should speed up their gathering of evidence and prosecution of the guilty, while innocents who were harassed deserve to be compensated.
ToI editorial dated 12th Jan 2011.
Fighter
SEC O N D O P I N I O N
Terror is colour-blind and has no shades of meaning other than hate and fear
Jug Suraiya
Is so-called saffron, or rightwing Hindu, terror an answer to so-called green, or radical Islamist, terror? No, it isnt. Terror by whatever name it calls itself, or that others call it is never an answer to anything: it is an affirmation. It is an affirmation of the only demonic gods that terror, of any stripe, worships: hate and fear.
This cannot be emphasised enough at a time when investigations into several bomb blasts in the country, including the explosion on the Samjhauta Express, have evoked the spectre of a retaliatory bomb-forbomb saffron terror to counter Islamist terror. The confession made to the authorities by the self-styled Swami Aseemanand about the involvement of terrorist conspirators with RSS links has sparked a war of words between the Sangh Parivar and what calls itself the secular camp, led by the Congress. While the secularists have once again raised a demand for banning the RSS, the organisations chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has said that those suspected of the bombs were no longer part of the parivar fold, having either left voluntarily or been externed. This in turn has provoked a Congress spokesperson to respond that it was a case not of rats leaving the sinking ship, but of the ship leaving the rats.
This politicisation of terror, of dividing an indivisible menace into two opposing camps, is exactly what terrorists of all hues want. It has been said before but it needs to be said again, and yet again: terror does not owe allegiance to any faith or religion except to its own perverted and obscene creed which thrives on the massacre of innocents.
The dynamics of terror are based on the twisted logic of obsession. Hatred and fear the evil twins who always go hand in hand, each reinforcing the other are both the propagators as well as the spawn of terror. How does the perpetrator of terror ensure its own escalation? By destroying the feared and hated Other, the Enemy? No, because the Other, the Enemy, is necessary for the terrorist himself to exist; without the hated Other, the terrorist has no reason for existence. The survival of the terrorist and his unholy credo dictates a strategy very different from the destruction of the Other. The terrorist doesnt want to destroy the Other, for that would mean self-destructing himself; he wants to turn the Other into a mirror likeness of himself, each locked to the other in an antagonistic embrace of mutual fear and hatred. Hindu terror and Islamist terror arent mortal enemies; they are incestuous siblings, each feeding of the others insatiable lust.
The real Enemy, the true Other, of the terrorist is not another terrorist the two are in fact allies but the common humanity, the shared cycle of birth and death and the rites of passage in between, that binds us together, regardless of our differences of belief, or caste, or race, or colour. It is this common humanness humaneness, if you prefer which is the real target of the terrorist, of whatever kind. For the terrorist, whatever prefixes or suffixes he attaches to himself, the real Other, the Enemy is humanity, the civil society of ordinary people accommodating each others differences and occasional disputes as they go about the everyday business of living.
The everyday business of the terrorist saffron or green, or pink, or polka-dotted is not living but dying, causing the deaths of others and often of himself as well in suicide missions. What happens when a countrys way of life becomes a way of death? Today Pakistan arguably the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world has shown with tragic inevitability what happens when, left unchecked, terror consumes itself.
Lets not colour-code terror, by saffron or any other shade. Terror is not just colour-blind; its eye-for-an-eye spiral of vengeance makes for a world of sightless darkness.
Curb terror, whichever direction it comes from
Malegaon in Maharashtra, the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan belatedly but with gathering momentum, evidence is emerging of a network of fundamentalist Hindutva organisations behind them. Swami Aseemanands December confession providing many of those details may now be disputed by his lawyer as having been made under duress, but it is not the only source of information. The National Investigation Agency has ferreted out a number of operational details related to the Samjhauta Express blast as well. Taken together and added to information gleaned from the arrests of Lt Col Srikant Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur we have an emerging picture of a threat serious enough that there can be no political gamesmanship over the issue as we are witnessing now.
The hopeful sign, however, is that if the emerging picture is correct, Malegaon, Mecca Masjid et al have been traced to a small group of extremists, and rolling them up at this point should stop the contagion from spreading. That is what we need to focus on. The BJP should no longer be in denial about saffron terror, but instead purge its ranks of those inclined to follow violent methods in pursuit of religious goals. To some extent the RSS has gone further than the BJP has. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwats admission that some members of the Sangh had shown extremist tendencies and were consequently asked to leave is a step away from the Sangh Parivars policy of absolute denial.
But the continuing political battle over semantics and vote banks misses the point entirely. Terrorism is terrorism; there is nothing to choose between the Islamist variety, greater in scope, and the Hindutva variety, more insidious in its effect on the countrys socio-cultural fabric. As there has been a public outcry over laxity in dealing with cross-border terrorism and subsequent attempts by the government to address the lacunae so there must be an effort to close down the network of operatives from groups like Abhinav Bharat, Jai Vande Matram and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti.
While the BJP continues to be in denial on saffron terror the initial wrong turn taken by investigative agencies, which had started out by blaming Muslim extremist groups for the blasts, is an embarrassment for them as well. A good deal of time has elapsed since the blasts happened, and shoddy investigations risk losing vital evidence while pursuing innocent people. Investigative agencies should speed up their gathering of evidence and prosecution of the guilty, while innocents who were harassed deserve to be compensated.
ToI editorial dated 12th Jan 2011.
Fighter
SEC O N D O P I N I O N
Not saffron or green
Terror is colour-blind and has no shades of meaning other than hate and fear
Jug Suraiya
Is so-called saffron, or rightwing Hindu, terror an answer to so-called green, or radical Islamist, terror? No, it isnt. Terror by whatever name it calls itself, or that others call it is never an answer to anything: it is an affirmation. It is an affirmation of the only demonic gods that terror, of any stripe, worships: hate and fear.
This cannot be emphasised enough at a time when investigations into several bomb blasts in the country, including the explosion on the Samjhauta Express, have evoked the spectre of a retaliatory bomb-forbomb saffron terror to counter Islamist terror. The confession made to the authorities by the self-styled Swami Aseemanand about the involvement of terrorist conspirators with RSS links has sparked a war of words between the Sangh Parivar and what calls itself the secular camp, led by the Congress. While the secularists have once again raised a demand for banning the RSS, the organisations chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has said that those suspected of the bombs were no longer part of the parivar fold, having either left voluntarily or been externed. This in turn has provoked a Congress spokesperson to respond that it was a case not of rats leaving the sinking ship, but of the ship leaving the rats.
This politicisation of terror, of dividing an indivisible menace into two opposing camps, is exactly what terrorists of all hues want. It has been said before but it needs to be said again, and yet again: terror does not owe allegiance to any faith or religion except to its own perverted and obscene creed which thrives on the massacre of innocents.
The dynamics of terror are based on the twisted logic of obsession. Hatred and fear the evil twins who always go hand in hand, each reinforcing the other are both the propagators as well as the spawn of terror. How does the perpetrator of terror ensure its own escalation? By destroying the feared and hated Other, the Enemy? No, because the Other, the Enemy, is necessary for the terrorist himself to exist; without the hated Other, the terrorist has no reason for existence. The survival of the terrorist and his unholy credo dictates a strategy very different from the destruction of the Other. The terrorist doesnt want to destroy the Other, for that would mean self-destructing himself; he wants to turn the Other into a mirror likeness of himself, each locked to the other in an antagonistic embrace of mutual fear and hatred. Hindu terror and Islamist terror arent mortal enemies; they are incestuous siblings, each feeding of the others insatiable lust.
The real Enemy, the true Other, of the terrorist is not another terrorist the two are in fact allies but the common humanity, the shared cycle of birth and death and the rites of passage in between, that binds us together, regardless of our differences of belief, or caste, or race, or colour. It is this common humanness humaneness, if you prefer which is the real target of the terrorist, of whatever kind. For the terrorist, whatever prefixes or suffixes he attaches to himself, the real Other, the Enemy is humanity, the civil society of ordinary people accommodating each others differences and occasional disputes as they go about the everyday business of living.
The everyday business of the terrorist saffron or green, or pink, or polka-dotted is not living but dying, causing the deaths of others and often of himself as well in suicide missions. What happens when a countrys way of life becomes a way of death? Today Pakistan arguably the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world has shown with tragic inevitability what happens when, left unchecked, terror consumes itself.
Lets not colour-code terror, by saffron or any other shade. Terror is not just colour-blind; its eye-for-an-eye spiral of vengeance makes for a world of sightless darkness.
