THE TERRORIST
Source: India today
At first glance, there is nothing that makes him distinctive in the bustling anonymity of a metropolitan street.
He is not a grainy image confined to the front pages or the small screens any longer; he has migrated to the consciousness of a nation savaged.
He is the living residue of the Evil that spreads from streets to railway station, from hotel rooms to Jewish quarters, from the frozen gaze of the dead to the seared sighs of the living, leaving behind a wreckage of fear and anger, grief and dread. Ajmal Amir Kasab is his name. We have seen him; we seem to know him. He is one of them. The most recognisable one. The terrorist we are getting familiar with.
The professional with terror as his calling card pictures himself as freedom’s last warrior, guided by gods and ideology, and accessorised by wares of death, preferably death in a spectacular backdrop.
His definition of freedom, though, excludes the essential dignity of what he calls the enemy and what the rest of us see as humanity.
In the last century, terror at its sanguineous worst was ideological, and it was a necessary condition for the creation of the empires of the working class.
The Great Terror of Stalin, institutionalisation of the gulag, Cultural Revolution of Mao, the killing fields of Pol Pot, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Baathist horror chamber that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (aptly described as the Republic of Fear by an exiled dissident writer)— they were all extreme manifestations of revolutionary instinct.
And remember: every revolutionary begins as a romantic, triumphs as a liberator and rules as a terrorist.
Around the time the god of ideology began to fail in the Soviet block, the god of the Book joined the freedom struggle in Persia.
The Great Islamic Revolution of Iran was the 20th century’s first introduction to faith-in-power.
It was a war against modernity and it signalled the restoration of the absolutism of religion.
The Sword of Islam would become more than a metaphor.
On September 11 in 2001, the rage of religion would reach its zenith, literally, and the flames that melted down the twin towers of the World Trade Center would magnify the new mascot of terror.
Those words by Islam’s Che-in-the-cave hardly hide the enormity of hate or the imaginary history of suffering.
Al Qaeda may not be the operational base of terror any longer and Osama may be withering away somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, though the idea continues to kill and the dateline of death keeps changing and the killer never stops updating the technology to make every strike as spectacular as 9/11.
The war in Iraq has cost one of the world’s most ruthless dictators his country as well as his life, and made the warrior-in-chief the least popular president of America in recent history.
It has also set the stage for the first African-American occupant of the White House. If Iraq is the just war that has gone wrong, the war in Afghanistan is about to get added priority under the new dispensation in Washington.
India should know. The horror of 9/11 may have introduced America to the reality of a brand new Evil Empire. India’s experience with Islamist terrorism is older than 9/11. We have been living through it with our unmatched sense of sangfroid. Then, the tragedy of Kashmir has never been spectacular. Even the attack on the Indian Parliament in the afterglow of 9/11 has failed to make us one of the most vulnerable victims in the eyes of the rest. We were alone in our suffering and we excelled in our stoicism—in our pathological passivity.
The terrorist could not have chosen an easier battlefield, for in the wake of every attack on India, we saw the grotesquerie of politics feasting on the dead. Lives were getting cheaper here, dispensable and disposable; it was as if we were swarming marketplaces and railway compartments to make jihad a story told in the blackened blood of India. And the face that reflects in the blood that India shed in the year 2008, our annus horribilis, is the face of the terrorist, a pronoun of fear we are still struggling to comprehend.
Still, to remember is to calm the dead. In Jaipur (May, 80 killed), the picture postcard city, Ahmedabad (July, 53 killed), a power house economic development with glaring communal fault lines, and Delhi (September, 26 killed), the national capital, the killers chose the method of serial blasts—jihad as cowardice. In Mumbai on October 30, it was a frontal attack on the financial citadel, prolonged and spectacular, and the killers were ready to be killed for the cause. A textbook case of fidayeen (suicide) attack: make hell, gain houris in paradise. Excluding Kashmir and the North-east, over 400 Indians and foreigners were killed in the struggle for a unipolar caliphate.
For, only the naïve and the politically dishonest would argue that the terrorist has no religion. Say it once more and you would be further insulting his god and his mission. The ideology of jihad is as old as Islam, and it has become so elastic a term that it can suit the bloodlust of the revolutionary as well as the pacifism of the preacher. The cult of permanent struggle runs through the liberation text of almost every guru of “pristine” Islam, whether it is Syed Qutb, considered to be the patron saint of modern jihad, or Hasan al-Banna, who established the Muslim Brotherhood, or Maulana Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-i-Islami, or Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the apostle of “absolute monotheism”.
Modern jihad, as the Egyptian Qutb, himself a martyr, laid out in his influential Milestones, radical Islam’s mandatory samizdat reading, is an active rejoinder to the godless ways of the West and the culture of jahiliyyah (ignorance): “There is only one place on earth which can be called the home of Islam, and it is the place where the Islamic state is established and the Shariah is the authority and God’s limits are observed and where all Muslims administer the affairs of the state with mutual consultation.”
The terrorist is the god’s volunteer who gives his life and takes others’ for a future built on a perfumed past. He returns to the purity of the Book when the world around him becomes too profane, worthy of annihilation. In his hallucinatory vision, the India of 2008 was such a place. His grievance is not just Kashmir; the very concept of India is incompatible with his idea of justice. Every revolution needs an enemy; if there is none, the revolutionary will invent one.
With the exception of Malegaon, which points to the possibility of “saffron terror”, every attack on India bore the imprint of the jihadi. He doesn’t always cross the sea to reach the target, and his nationality is not necessarily Pakistani. As the encounter at Batla House near the Jamia Millia campus in Delhi revealed, the terrorist could very well be the boy in the next classroom who had come to the big city from his home town of Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh. (Azamgarh, a favourite destination in terror tourism, has earned its notoriety as the common back story of almost every terrorist attack in the country.) That is the thing about the modern jihadi.
He could be the product and the beneficiary of a liberal democracy like India. He would use every aspect of freedom it has to offer for the perpetuation of hate, for making the war against civilisation fool-proof. He would employ every technological trick of the satanic enemy for the success of his mission. His allegiance is not to the flag of his country; his identity is not defined by his nationality. He is the citizen of a scriptural make believe; he is here on a sacred assignment.
Still, the India after November 26 is a different country. For once, there is a confluence of grief and anger and patriotism. This time, there is no dispute about the nationality of the terrorist; there is little doubt about the identity of his benefactor either. The nation has ceased to be a dirty word across the ideological divide, though the communists refuse to change. The politician has not been allowed hawk terror for the preservation of the vote bank, and someone called A.R. Antulay looks convincingly repulsive as he scavenges the debris for postponing his political redundancy.
The rage of the terrorist has sharpened our perception about the enemy: Pakistan is not just an Indian obsession, or a diversionary bogeyman; the Islamic Republic is the original Jihadistan, our unrepentant tormentor. The terrorist has also forced us to look within.
Our failure in national security is huge, and we are beginning to accept the reality that the war on terror is not always someone else’s war. It’s our war too. The world has survived the ideology that built some of the biggest graveyards in history, and the world will overcome the theology that terrorises us with its medieval fury. The Newsmaker of the year won’t be the maker of our destiny, Inshallah.
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
Comments