Defining ‘terror’ and ‘riots’

THE political class in India and the governments have been treating terrorism as a major threat to the nation, whereas ‘communal riots’ are treated as events causing some disturbance, which can be taken in the national stride. Is this so because its victims are mostly minorities, i.e. ‘the other’?

Classifying and labelling of incidents of mass violence into ‘communal’ and ‘terrorist’ and the unlawful use of force by the state being treated as mere ‘excesses’ have caused serious distortion in public attitudes and the thinking of policymakers in India. Unless this is corrected, it will continue to impair the capability of the state and society to effectively deal with all varieties of violence, the victims of which are innocents.

It is well that the Administrative Reforms Commission’s fifth report on public order as well as the apex court’s observations on two occasions in the course of hearing of cases of the Gujarat carnage in 2002, have characterised communal violence as a greater threat to the state and society than terrorism. Even more important is the linkage between them as definitively established by Justice Srikrishna Commission for the Mumbai serial blasts of March 1993 and by Justice Gokula Krishna for the Coimbatore blasts of 1998.

The learned trial judge of Coimbatore blasts took cognisance of the targeted killings of Muslims by the police during the ‘riots’ in 1997, which made sections of angry, frustrated Muslim youth desperate, who having lost hope in the system, took recourse to terrorism.

How would one label the targeted killings of Muslims by state forces, the worst examples are provided by Hashimpura (Meerut) and Malliana (May 22-23, 1987)? The Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) of UP picked up more than 40 Muslims from their homes in Hashimpura under search orders, took them in a truck to the Ganga canal and Hindon river and shot them dead, throwing their dead bodies in the canal or river. It stirred the conscience of the nation.

There was expression of horror from all quarters and severe condemnation. Nikhil Chakrovarty called it a “Nazi pogrom to terrorise an entire community”. Such gruesome murder by the PAC is the worst but not the only example of state terrorism committed with hate motive.

How would one label the demolition of Babri Masjid? Was it a ‘communal’ riot? While deciding its label, it needs to be kept in mind that this act of state aided terrorism, which was spread over 48 hours, took place in the presence of full strength of the PAC. It brought in its wake a trail of blood in large parts of the country, and the first incident of retaliatory Muslim terror in Mumbai.

Acts of terrorism arouse an extreme sense of outrage, as its victims are always the innocent masses. However, the barbarism of rioters who can burn people alive, rape women and kill them is still worse. Terrorists’ designs are fiendish; but their acts are anonymous in the sense that they do not select individual victims and kill or burn them before their own eyes.

Whereas both terrorism and ‘riots’ cause undeserved suffering of the innocent, repugnant to the conscience, in ‘riotous’ acts communal hate motive is more intense and directed against weak and vulnerable members of the targeted community. Ripping open the stomach of a pregnant woman and crushing the foetus to death, as was done in Gujarat 2002, is definitely an outrageous deed. But so is planting a bomb at a place where those killed by splinters of the blast include children.

Is there a generic difference between ‘riot’ and ‘terror’? The nature and modalities of riots in pre-independence India could be treated as a distinct class from ‘terror’ as then practiced by some political groups against the British. But in post-1947 India, most major riots have been caused by the pursuit of the agenda of hate and revenge against Muslims by the Sangh Parivar, with varying degrees of complicity of the state’s law-enforcement system under political direction based on cynical calculations in the game of power.

What are the goals of those who engineer such ‘riots’? Apart from short term political and social gains, the organised Hindutva group wants to instil fear in the hearts of minorities, especially Muslims, so that they may submit to their will. The long term goal is to terrorise Muslims into submission, accepting to live in India as second class citizens.

Terrorism is inherent in the Sangh ideology of Hinduisation of polity and militarisation of Hinduism. Its leaders have showered praise over Hitler and his ways of dealing with the Jews. The Rashtriya Sawayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) is organised on the model of the military. Its constitutional scheme of the country is based on denial of rights as citizens to followers of religions of non-Indian origin, especially Muslims and Christians. Its leaders have made no secret of their faith in the use of force to achieve their goals. Nathu Ram Godse, who killed Mahatma Gandhi by his bullets, was inspired by this ideology.

Given this analysis of the role of different players in spreading communal terrorism by the Sangh and desperate retaliatory acts of terrorism by isolated Muslim youth, possibly with the support of non-Indian outfits, terrorism of this variety cannot be successfully tackled merely by more stringent laws and better intelligence. Thankfully acknowledging the current unanimous campaign of the Muslim community organisations and leaders in India against terrorism of all varieties, the majority community needs to demonstrate similar abhorrence of communal terrorism of the Sangh Parivar. It needs to undertake a vigorous campaign against all violence — by the state, militants and communal groups — whose victims are innocent persons, defeating the Sangh’s agenda of hate and revenge.

It is time for a common civil society campaign in India and Pakistan including Jammu and Kashmir for mobilisation over a common minimum agenda of peace in terms of protection of innocents in all situations of use of force by the state, the organised armed groups and communal organisations.

The writer is a retired professor of Aligarh Muslim University, India and a human rights activist based in Aligarh and Delhi

iqbalnsari35@gmail.com

How will it end?

THE Mohmand incident in which 11 Frontier Corps (FC) men were killed by a US missile attack was not the first time that Pakistan territory had been violated, although it was the first time Pakistani soldiers were killed in such an incident. US spokesmen have taken the position that America acted in self-defence and has a right to do so.

The Afghan president has gone one step further and threatened to send his troops to clear Baitullah Mehsud and his companions out of their lairs inside Pakistan. It is not very likely that Karzai would actually launch such an attack but not unlikely that he had the tacit backing of the US and Nato in putting Pakistan under pressure.

Karzai was indeed only echoing their increasingly impatient complaints about the situation on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Indeed for all the praise that was lavished on Gen Musharraf as an ally and the talk about a long-term strategic relationship, there has always existed an undercurrent of disquiet in the US on where Islamic Pakistan really stands and how reliable a partner it is in the war against Islamist terror. The settlements the new government is trying to negotiate in Swat and Fata have sharpened these doubts and concerns.

The former commander of US forces in Afghanistan went so far as to suggest that men of the Frontier Constabulary may be in cahoots with the Taliban. If, nevertheless, for the moment the new government is being given the benefit of the doubt, it is thanks in part to the ambiguity and double-speak that characterise the US-Pakistan relationship.

But perhaps due also to the fact that neither side knows exactly what to do in the alternative and that the available alternatives may make matters worse.

The fact is that America’s trouble in Afghanistan goes beyond its problems with Pakistan. Essentially, it comes from the fiction underlying the concept of a ‘war against terrorism’. In the case of Iraq the deception was blatant and evident from the start and the world is now hearing it from inside sources.

Terror is not an ‘ism’; it is the weapon of the weak, the fanatical or the demented. Different terrorists — Tamils, Corsicans, the Irgun, Basques, IRA — fought or fight for different things. No one thought of going to ‘war’ against them; they were dealt with by a combination of police and political action.

Muslim terrorism too is diverse and related to Muslim grievances over the Middle East, the Balkans, Kashmir, and the Philippines. But in the Bush Administration’s view they were all lumped together as a monolithic Islamo-fascist movement, led by Osama bin Laden and headquartered in the Afghan-Pakistan borderland. This is not so but in the popular mind in the West ‘All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslim’ who hate western freedoms and want to set up a caliphate to dominate the world.

In the case of Afghanistan, in order to obtain quick results the Americans co-opted the Northern Alliance and thereby entered the fray in the war-torn country. This, and the way America fights wars these days, preferring air support to ground action that inevitably causes ‘collateral damage’ i.e. wedding parties, or people asleep in their beds and so forth, has caused America to be seen by the Pashtuns as the enemy in Afghanistan and so has America’s ally, the Musharraf government.

By the time the US asked Pakistan to join the action in Afghanistan, the Taliban had become more hindrance than help; a sanctuary for sectarian murderers and an embarrassment and bad example with their obscurantist policies. So Musharraf did not need the threat of being bombed back to the Stone Age in order to ditch them.

Indeed his decision to join the Americans was not unpopular, except with some religious groups; many welcomed the western aid that helped the country back from the economic and financial brink where it was at the time. Now we seem to be back there again and facing even more critical choices as the Afghan war spills over into Pakistan in the shape of suicide bombs, predator attacks, Taliban laying down the law in parts of the country.

The new government has decided to rely more on dialogue, economic and social development, etc., than on military force in order to resolve the situation. This is the right approach but this ‘new approach’ is not all that new since under Musharraf it was tried twice and it failed.

The government claims that the difference is that this time, having retaken military control of the areas, it is negotiating from a position of strength.

Moreover, the government affirms that it is not talking to the bad guys, only to peace-loving elements. The idea is to co-opt the latter in order to isolate the extremists. But the Taliban with whom agreements have been reached are threatening to go on the offensive again if the agreements are not implemented to their satisfaction within a week. One does not know what this would mean as the terms of the agreement have not been published.

In any case the Taliban threat to resume trouble does not show them to be a peace-loving lot. Moreover, the fact that they are giving ultimatums to the government, holding public meetings, going about fully-armed, does not bear out the government’s claim of being in control of the area. Nor do Islamabad and the NWFP seem to be on all fours in the matter. The situation is reminiscent of the Musharraf government’s hesitation and indecisiveness during the Red Mosque crisis. At the heart of it all is the fact that those who govern and rule Pakistan have not been able to decide whether the country they want is Jinnah’s Pakistan or Maududi’s.

Afghanistan is today a bubbling cauldron of ethnicity, nationalism, sectarianism, with drug barons and warlords and Taliban stirring the pot. Whatever happens there cannot leave Pakistan unaffected. How it will all end is difficult to tell. It is not very likely that the US would stay to the end or that the ‘democratic’ system they have installed would outlast the American presence. As things stand, the chances do not look very promising that it would end well for either Afghanistan or Pakistan or the relations between them.

No ice at the North Pole

IT seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic — and worrying — examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

”From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water, said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below the seabed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is actually faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

‘The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice — ice that formed last autumn and winter. Iwould say it is even-odds whether the North Pole melts out,’ said Dr Serreze.

Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700 miles away from the North Pole.

This meant that about 70 per cent of the sea ice present this spring was single-year ice formed over last winter. Scientists predict that at least 70 per cent of this single-year ice — and perhaps all of it — will melt completely this summer, Dr Serreze said.

‘Indeed, for the Arctic as a whole, the melt season started with even more thin ice than in 2007, hence concerns that we may even beat last year’s sea-ice minimum. We will see what happens, a great deal depends on the weather patterns in July and August,’ he said.

Ron Lindsay, a polar scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, agreed that much now depends on what happens to the Arctic weather in terms of wind patterns and hours of sunshine. ‘There is a good chance that it will all melt away at the North Pole, it is certainly feasible, but it is not guaranteed,’ Dr Lindsay said. ‘There is a substantial probability of that happening, perhaps 50 per cent or more. It is certainly not a minute chance and I would not be at all surprised if it melted all the way to the Pole,’ he said.

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further.

Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine, said that the conditions are ripe this year for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

‘Last year we saw huge areas of the ocean open up, which has never been experienced before. People are expecting this to continue this year and it is likely to extend over the North Pole. It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer — it is not happened before,’ Professor Wadhams said. There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up.

Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water ‘polynya’ — an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice — that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Inuit natives living near Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland are also reporting that the sea ice there is starting to break up much earlier than normal and that they have seen wide cracks appearing in the ice where it normally remains stable.

Satellite measurements collected over nearly 30 years show a significant decline in the extent of the Arctic sea ice, which has become more rapid in recent years. Scientists had predicted a totally ice-free Arctic Ocean by 2080, but later revised it to 2030. More recently, computer models have suggested that an ice-free summer may occur within the next 10 years.

— © The Independent, London