Pakistan’s DAWN newspaper features a great investigative piece that details how its reporters tracked down (whereas other major papers failed) the family of Mohammed Ajmal “Babyface” Kasab (who may really be Mohammad Ajmal Amir) and listened to what they had to say. Kasab was, of course, the lone surviving gunman from the recent Mumbai attacks.
Ajmal Kasab…was supposed to belong to the village Faridkot in the Punjab. Media organisations such as the BBC and now the British newspaper Observer have done reports trying to ascertain the veracity of claims appearing in the media that the young man had a home there.At the weekend, the Observer in England claimed that it had managed to locate the house everyone was looking for so desperately. Its correspondent said he had got hold of the voters’ roll which had the names of Amir Kasab and his wife, identified as Noor, as well as the numbers on the identity cards the couple carried…
However, the man who said he was Amir Kasab confirmed to Dawn that the young man whose face had been beamed over the media was his son.
For the next few minutes, the fifty-something man of medium build agonized over the reality that took time sinking in, amid sobs complaining about the raw deal the fate had given him and his family. [Dawn]
I have commented before on SM about how much I disagree with using the term “evil” to describe men like Ajmal Kasab. To call them “evil” or “insane” (without clinical proof of insanity) in my opinion gives society an undeserved excuse. It allows us to isolate them as others, as subhumans. It allows us to feel superior in thinking that we were born good whereas these men were born bad. Their “affliction” is seen as having zero probability of transmission to good people like us. It just cannot spread. You are born evil. Then you go and talk to their parents and you realize the difference between how we were nurtured and how they were nurtured can’t really be pinpointed except for a few wrong turns and bad decisions that cascade into fanatic acts. The father continued:
‘I was in denial for the first couple of days, saying to myself it could not have been my son,’ he told Dawn in the courtyard of his house in Faridkot, a village of about 2,500 people just a few kilometres from Deepalpur on the way to Kasur. ‘Now I have accepted it. This is the truth. I have seen the picture in the newspaper. This is my son Ajmal…’Indian media reports ‘based on intelligence sources’ said the man was said to be a former Faridkot resident who left home a frustrated teenager about four years ago and went to Lahore…
After his brush with crime and criminals in Lahore, he is said to have run into and joined a religious group during a visit to Rawalpindi.
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p>’He had asked me for new clothes on Eid that I couldn’t provide him. He got angry and left.’ [Dawn]
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p>I just finished watching Slumdog Millionaire. I know, I know. It is just a fictionalized drama. A few plot elements are very plausible though, especially the development of Salim as the movie progresses. Characters in the movies City of God and Syriana also follow similar trajectories. Bad choices and the bitterness of broken dreams lead to sociopathic tendencies.
While Amir was talking, Ajmal’s two ‘sisters and a younger brother’ were lurking about. To Amir’s right, on a nearby charpoy, sat their mother, wrapped in a chador and in a world of her own. Her trance was broken as the small picture of Ajmal lying in a Mumbai hospital was shown around. They appeared to have identified their son. The mother shrunk back in her chador but the father said he had no problem in talking about the subject. [Dawn]
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p>His own mother is often a terrorist’s last victim. It doesn’t matter that she and her husband may have tried to do right by their kids:
He modestly pointed to a hand-cart in one corner of the courtyard. ‘This is all I have. I shifted back to the village after doing the same job in Lahore. My eldest son, Afzal, is also back after a stint in Lahore. He is out working in the fields.’It is not and Amir Kasab repeats how little role he has had in the scheme since the day his son walked out on him. He calls the people who snatched Ajmal from him his enemies but has no clue who these enemies are. Asked why he didn’t look for his son all this while, he counters: ‘What could I do with the few resources that I had?’ [Dawn]
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p>Update: Here is Ajmal’s narrative of the path he took and it partially contradicts his parents.
Of course, many of the other residents of Faridkot are still in denial:
In interviews, residents variously claimed Kasab does not exist or is the son of a potter, a brick factory worker, a street vendor or is an 80-year-old man. “There is no Ajmal. There is no Kasab,” said Ali Sher, brother of the town’s mayor. “We have a list of each person who is registered to vote. There is no Ajmal…”“It is totally baseless. There is no Pakistani role. They are not Pakistani,” Sher said. “He might be Afghan. He might be another nationality. We don’t know that guy, so how can we know if it’s true?” [Washington Post]
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p>
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p>Does anything of Kasab’s story sound familiar? Sure it does. We have heard this many times before. Remember Dylan Klebold of Columbine? Here is a 2004 interview with his parents:
In their first interview since the Columbine High School massacre, the parents of one of the killers said they feel no need be forgiven and didn’t realize their son was beyond hope until after he was dead.“Dylan (Klebold) did not do this because of the way he was raised,” Susan Klebold told columnist David Brooks in Saturday’s editions of The New York Times. “He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised…”
“He was hopeless. We didn’t realize it until after the end,” Tom Klebold said. [USA Today]
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p>Finally, I recommend this great 2004 article from Slate which describes the differences between psychopathic murderers and other types (especially depressives):
…if you want to understand “the killers,” quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems.Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as “nice.” But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. “Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people,” Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath. [Slate]
In the version of the story that I read, the parents knew that he had joined a jihadi outfit and he said that for the first time he felt proud in front of his family. It’s like he had landed a prestigious job. Anyway, I agree that the lack of opportunity drives people to join these organizations. As for suggesting that the parents aided and abetted, I don’t think it is a fair charge to assert against parents. Parents in the US for example put up with kids who are heroin addicts, abusive, or criminal in various ways. Parents are stuck with their kids in a way and under the particular circumstances, in an area where the LeT is practically legit, it may not even have struck the parents as anything other than that their son is now finally able to take care of himself, and perhaps them too.
a friend of mine who lives in karachi says that even continuous-shot rifles are very easily available, and he knows at least one friend of his who has an ak-47 at his home (he comes from a wealthy family and some of his extended family and friends are prominent enough in the art and culture scene that they have attracted attention from the nwfp based islamic radicals who want to talibanize pakistan). granted, this is one anecdote, but i guess $10 billion dollars+ from america (counting only the last 8 years, not the 80s of reagan-zia buddiness) when channeled to weaponry both for the pak army/isi and their nutcase tribal/terrorism buddies is bound to leak out uncontrolled on to the streets. add in crazy mullahs in radical madrassas, extreme poverty thanks to the govts corruption, and stir to explode, i guess.
anyone know of any good books that try and cast a light on the societal/religious/cultural factors that are in play in the al-qaeda inspired terrorist movements that have taken hold in the last 20 years?
not wahhabi, but my understanding that the primary radical school in india/pakistan has roots in the deobandi movement.
i have seen the dawn tilt both ways when it comes to india-pakistan. in the past, many of the articles have been sympathetic to pakistan, if i recall correctly, but after the recent attack, the dawn was the one newspaper that i saw that had an op-ed calling for the pakistan govt to act strongly and decisively against the jud and stating the impossibility of the state structure not knowing about the presence of these terrorist groups.
sorry to include a secondary source, but this is what i could find.
44 · vikram said
good, vikram? good? don’t you, in your infinite awareness, at least think they are shrewish?
Moornam, if they research some more an prove this story is a ruse then rest assured I will do a follow-up post indicating such.
54 · liberal said
Exactly, its regarded as their print media’s face to the rest of the world and has been linked to the PPP in the past by the PML. As the BBC indicates, it’s disconcerting seeing the disconnect in their Urdu press.
As far this blog post goes, seems like author thinks its “great investigative piece” because other outlets who were there at the same time or earlier “failed” because you know its Pakistan….bastion of free press and intellectuals. Set aside this is a “special report” with no citations and heavy editorialising.
Isn’t it possible, even if this was true that this family might have been debriefed. They never once invoke the word terror/terrorist and go as far coining “international fearmongerer” and sanitising the LeT into amorphous ‘enemies’. Nothing to wonder about folks, no agenda…
The Guardian got the real story which was that the Indian reports were true. They might have hidden them away but those voter rolls cannot lie. This piece of “reporting” a week or so after just confirms our “lying eyes” with a lot more heart tugging anecdotes.
57 · Aparna said
i get your sarcasm, but one (of the very few) good things that did happen to pakistan civil society under musharraf, was the liberalization and independence of the media in his early years – the time when he also took steps towards liberalizing the economy, and was popular among the people too, and that’s not a genie you can easily put back in the bottle (as musharraf himself realized in his last months). of course, with that profusion comes a lot of populism. i don’t have a sense of how the popularity of different channels breaks down etc., but there is certainly far more diversity of opinion now than before musharraf.
can anybody give an informed opinion/analysis of the degree of control that the pakistani government and army have in practice on azad/pakistan occupied kashmir? (i assume it is not as much of a wild west as, well, the wild west of pakistan)
Times of India is reporting that he was there 3 months ago. Too early to Dr.Phil this story IMO.
57 · Aparna said
Well the confusion before and henceforth, with the veracity of the story will precisely be because of this –
Revealed: home of Mumbai’s gunman in Pakistan village
My 2 cents:
Evil is as evil does. A 21 year old who guns down innocent people does not deserve any sympathy. Parents are not to blame for the actions of their evil children. Society may have done its bit, maybe there were unfortunate circumstances that led to these people taking up the path of violence, but they are going to hell for sure.
Nothing anyone does to you can ever be sufficient grounds to kill another person. In this case, many of them.
Hey Kashtum @ 29, I never said that!!!! Are you a troll?
Here is another article in the Dawn.
I don’t think anyone is attempting to sympathize with or justify the bloke’s actions. Mostly, it is an attempt to understand it so that it can be stopped.
Which, almost certainly, is a wrong track to follow.
If you are faced with an outbreak of malaria, you don’t go about understanding what causes mosquitoes to bite innocent people. You stock up on penicillin, use plenty of repellent, clean up the swamps and improve general hygiene. The Arundhati Roys of the world would argue rather eloquently that it is your fault that you have blood coursing through your veins. A short stint for them near the swamps can fix that.
Abhi, they do need to be isolated and treated as subhumans. That would be the first step in ensuring that their “affliction” doesn’t get transmitted to you or me or any of the billions of people who have been frustrated at some point in our lives. Rare is a 16 year old who hasn’t had fantasies of getting even with ‘them’. ‘Them’ being parents or teachers or other kids or the elderly uncle next door who admonished him for something. There will be rebellious kids for as long as there is mankind. What you don’t want is an organized infrastructure to pick up these kids, teach them to use guns and provide them with a ‘mission’ in life.
Basically mom and dad are only ashamed because he didn’t come back a hero. Had the public opinion had gone the other way, she would have been a proud mama not one who shrinks beneath her chador. That’s how moms are. And this being a Pakistani mom, where jihad is part of the everyday vocabulary, she would have been proud of her jihadi son.
41 · V S said
Give him a ticker tape parade, I would guess.
wtf?
and.
Abhi, good of you to post this, I agree with the premise.
There definitely is a vacuum in Pakistan for that kind of ideology to find root…Not every Pakistani kid is willing to give his life for such a mission.
Give the impoverished youth a reason to live, and this sort of ideology wont latch on.
Agree that the environment rules in this instance, and believe it directed many of the parents’ moves as well as the son’s.
Disagree. That message can’t be diluted, and we can probably hazard a somewhat educated guess that if they came back alive (and what were the chances of that happening?), the parents might have been thrilled but for sure we’d never hear about it. As it is, we can’t really tell what their pain or shame is about. We just know their son is world famous, and suspecr thqt they were debriefed.
my_dog_jagat hit it.
Mosquito behavior most definitely studied–that is par for the course to eradicate any disease. Stocking up on penicillin is only a way to treat a disease, but understanding the etiology of a disease is most definitely crucial to understanding how to prevent it in the first place. To carry your analogy further–one understands how to clean a swamp by studying what about the swamp breeds mosquitoes. Everything about a situation should be studied.
So, it is absolutely essential to understand where these boys came from, what gave them motivation, and to recognize that regardless of how others see it, these boys believe that they are fighting injustice in their own way. Trying to learn about something does not legitimize that thing–it simply allows one to make an educated approach to curing a problem.
I think the knee jerk reaction to dismiss these boys as being evil or crazy is shortsighted and ultimately counterproductive.
70 · Ne said
Brilliantly said. And lets not forget the pond that they come from is the same one most of come from we are one SOUTH ASIAN family.
thank you Ne @ 70 for eloquently saying what I was just about to write!
I’ll add this too – hasty responses to disease epidemics may take care of the problem for a short while, but the effects don’t last long and often come back to bite us in the ass. If you pesticide the heck out of an area to rid it of bugs (analogous to say, bombing a village in Pak), people will be effected by the harsh chemicals. Another example, using medicines to treat the problem after the fact rather than taking into account the history and cause of the problem (analogous to prolonged wars on terror maybe?) may work as a temporary fix but in the long run you build drug-resistance. the killers get more savvy, more dangerous. you waste all your time on quick fixes and you end up with a bigger problem than you started with.
people who try to understand terrorists are not simply sympathizers. i look at it this way – i dont want these guys around either, but you’re way (“otherism”, denial of the problem, etc) isn’t working. i’d like to find another way.
33 · khoofia said
to fight our fight, we need to figure out who the pawn is, and who the queen is. yes, these guys all want destruction, but so do a lot of generals in the pakistani army. how come their sons become bankers in wall st, become your friends and mine, usually come to the elite non-practicing/ritually observant moderate position, but kasab becomes a killing machine?? yes, not all poor people become terrorists; but most front-line terrorists are poor people or disenchanted kids. the disenchanted kids i am not really sympathetic to, because they have they a variety of information and options at hand, and they provide informed consent to terror. i’ve worked on the issue of informed consent broadly, and you know, most people like kasab etc would have provided what most ppl in the biz call ‘invalid’ consent.
52 · liberal said
i doubt that we know the same individual. i’ll admit that all the rich kids i know from pakistan claim to have weapons in their city/ancestral home in the village. the gents also tell me that they have spent time learning to use some automatic weapon or another.
53 · liberal said
nope, Let/JuD is wahaabi oriented. it seems to me the reason why you see so much use of te i-word even in the subcontiental context. f-ing wahabbis with their oodles of money, their brand of jehadi terrorism and interpretation of islam, coming soon to a city near you. there are influential deobandi madrassas too though.
Are you sure about that? I would be willing to take up arms in defense of my country and my religion if need be as well. I will fight in a war if my country calls on me and I have plenty to live for.
There is a difference between a willingness to give your life (and take life if necessary) and a willingness to engage in terrorism, which is to say willfully engaging in acts of violence against innocent civilians in order to make a political statement or demand. Poverty might make people more vulnerable to indoctrination, but in order for the indoctrination to work there needs to be some undercurrent of approval, or at the very least a lack of disapproval, that makes people feel comfortable shedding their moral qualms.
These ten fellows — or was it twelve? — being clearly at the bottom of the food chain or chain of command, since they were sent out to die and all, there must be more sophisticated thinkers as you go up the ranks, all the way up to party-going ladz with armaments and powders to snort in the basement. Something tells me Kasab was not the only one stylin’ his way– he learned it from someone who had the look to start with and was watching the action live on cable with cronies at a very safe distance. You just never know these days, what with academics telling Time magazine that Pakistan actually owns India.
I guess the point of the post is that this situation (and other similar events) is just horribly tragic for everyone on every side. No one benefits from these unfortunate situations. It sounds like his parents must be hurting as much as the victims, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe everyone has a different way of dealing with extreme stress. Some stressed out people get physically sick, psychosomatic illnesses, depression, etc, or some become mass murderers like Atta and Timothy McVeigh and Dahmer. Some people will try to get creative and get stronger to help themselves and help society. I think it boils down to how an individual’s brain is wired & their life experiences, environment & so forth.
One Kenyan friend of mine ( who is very spiritual and is a Buddhist) mentioned this attack on Mumbai is a difficult test from the Creator to test the Indian peoples’ faiths, practice for forgiving, etc. Psychologists might say the shooters were sociopaths, or, bipolar, or easily brainwashed,uneducated,or hardened by poverty, or whatever. A religious self righteous, moral majority type is probably thinking the devil or antiChrist is working through these criminals to bring about armegeddon or total destruction. A political researcher could say these are happening because of shoddy security and this is a justification for martial law and will lead to a further erosion of peoples’ rights, less international business, and so on. Astrologers probably say that the planets and stars weren’t aligned properly on those dreadful days during the attack. Some Jews and Hindus must be thinking this is a an attack on their faiths & their people and will lead to a forced conversion. Maybe a statistician will prove this is just some rare, random bad luck. Who knows – maybe even Joe the Plumber has an explanation.
airdrop ipods, in the millions.
shanti.
Not to nit-pic, and in general appreciating the analogy, Penicillin is not the treatment for Malaria. Depending on the location and the sensitivity of the parasite, I would go for Chloroquine or Quinine sulphate.
But they were brainwashed. They ended up believing that what they were doing was a good thing. Think of the number of people on this planet who go around believing that God exists and is responsible for things that happen. We indulge them all the time, in fact we go out of our way to respect, tolerate, and enable this type of fantasy. It is not that hard to get a bunch of people to believe in any rubbish. Even our values tend to be the same as the community around us. If jehad is considered a source of pride in some little village somewhere, we can hardly point to the shrivelled old couple in the hut to blame.
Mumbai attacks: How Indian-born Islamic militants are trained in Pakistan An underground network of Islamic extremists has recruited a new generation of Indian-born terrorists by exploiting sectarian tensions in the fault-line city of Hyderabad.
By Damien McElroy in Hyderabad Last Updated: 11:11PM GMT 13 Dec 2008
Muslim residents go through a police security check in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, which is known for its religious tensions Photo: REUTERS Indian authorities have denied that there is a homegrown terrorist threat to the country, instead blaming Pakistan for allowing Islamist attacks including the atrocities in Mumbai to be launched across its borders.
But The Sunday Telegraph has learned that scores of young Muslim men have disappeared from the central Indian city of Hyderabad, suspected of leaving for Pakistan to be trained by the country’s Islamist terror groups.
As many as 40 potential recruits are reported to have left the city – which has a large Muslim minority – under extremist guidance, while many other young men cannot be traced.
Police efforts to track the youths have floundered in the wake of the Mumbai attacks last month. A wall of community silence has protected the activities of teachers and other shadowy figures working inside fundamentalist Islamic schools and mosques.
“We have tried to establish where the city’s youth has gone but we don’t know,” said Hyderabad’s police commissioner, Prasada Rao. “We know they have gone to other places, either Indian states or abroad. We are checking but the parents or the others will not let us into what’s going on.”
Two Islamic movements based in Hyderabad, Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadath (DJS) and Tahreek Tahfooz Shaer-e-Islam (TTSI), have been accused by local police of allegedly acting as “feeder” groups for militants seeking to recruit armed fighters. They have denied the allegations.
Members of a third local group, the Students Islamic Movement of India – which has been banned by the government – carried out a gun attack on police just days after the Mumbai attacks.
Police in Mumbai blamed 10 Pakistanis and their leaders back home for the carnage that killed 171 people last month. But Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the banned Pakistan-based group India accuses of planning the attack, has deep ties to Hyderabad. When an initial claim of responsibility for the Mumbai attacks was made in the name of “Deccan Mujahideen” – a previously unknown group – the perpetrators revived a historic Islamic claim on the Deccan Plateau, the territory which stretches between Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Extensive surveillance operations and intelligence investigations have failed to penetrate the inner workings of Hyderabad’s radicals, officials admitted. “These kind of elements that are linked to violence even allow us to observe their gatherings,” said Commissioner Rao. “But they know we are there and so do nothing to trigger suspicion.”
Officials at the DJS madrassahs – religious schools – in Hyderabad were not willing to discuss the disappearance of the city’s young men.
While there is no suggestion that the organisation orchestrates terrorist acts, the DJS carries a message on its website that is explicit about the right of Muslims to resort to violence.
“The DJS has trained and are training thousands of Muslim youths to defend themselves and to help, protect and defend the other Muslims,” it states, before adding that once trained in “self defence” members can leave to join any other Muslim group.
It continues that “the long term goal of the DJS remains to achieve the supremacy and prevalence of Islam in practice in its entirety”.
Hyderabad, like war-torn Kashmir, has been disputed since Indian partition when its princely rulers chose India over the Muslim homeland. Even though the city was the venue for a recent gathering of conservative Muslim clerics, who issued a fatwa against terrorism following the Mumbai attacks, riots and terrorist activity have risen steadily in the city since the emergence of radical Islam across south Asia.
The atmosphere in Hyderabad’s alleys and markets leading from its Raj-era square is marked by mutual loathing and suspicion between Muslim and Hindu sects.
“The young people are totally insecure,” said Omar Farook Sidique, a madrassah owner. “Everything for them is highly impossible here – the situation is all manipulated for political reasons. Every killing and every beating is given labels to put down legitimate activities.”
But Ram Mohan Reddy, a prominent Hindu lawyer, claimed: “Hyderabad is the epicentre of all this terrorism in the world.
“Every house is a cell and everyday those people in Pakistan are on the phone and internet with people here drawing strength from Hyderabad. Terrorism has become such a big problem because of government laxity.”
Violence has marred Hyderabad’s recent drive to develop a high-tech reputation by adopting a second name: Cyberabad.
Deprivation in the predominantly Muslim old city is palpable. A lake of raw sewage, populated with pleasure boats, sits not far from the construction site of an elevated highway.
“The circumstances for Muslims have changed for the worse in the 60 years of India’s independence,” said Judge E. Ismail of the provincial Human Rights Commission. “Muslims have fallen down in education, health and are not properly represented in the police or the administration. They feel they are not part of the mainstream.
“It’s not as if terrorism started for these reasons but some people misguide the youth that because of this they are entitled to heaven.”
Hindu activists maintain a vigilant outcry against supposed government concessions that they condemn as nurturing extremism.
The predicament of India’s Muslim minority plays only a small role in the indoctrination of the youth, according to Commissioner Rao. “This new generation has much broader grievances,” he said. “They are motivated by extreme views on the American presence in Iraq, Middle East frictions and Muslim torment worldwide.”
ENDS
There is also a newsarticle that indicates that some months before the terror attacks Kasab went back to his village to ask the blessings from his mother as he was going out on a jihad mission(he TOLD his mother that he was going of to wage jihad). His family and some villagers KNEW that he was involved with a jehadi islamic group and that he was going out on a jihad mission. So they can’t pull of the “we are innocent, we did not know that he was going to do this” crap. India is pointing now to pakistan and saying there is absolutely no indian muslim inolvement YET most of the intelligence experts (that appeared on mainstream media like CNN/BBC etc) agree that these attacks could not have taken place without the support and help of locals. Seems like the Congress government is trying to protect parts of their votebank by ONLY blaming outside forces like Pakistan for these terror attacks. India needs to realize that they have a large fifth brigade inside their territory.The above article is just 1 very small example of that.
In 1948, the Nizam had 200,000 razakars Out of a total muslim population of 2 million
In short 90% of the able bodied men were in razakars murdering hindus
The MIM is a direct descendant of the Razakars
In Nizam rule, Telegu was banned in schools and Urdu was compulsory
The greedy secular congress has let this poison remain in Hyderabad
Incidentally there is no islamic terrorism in Indian punjab and we all know what the sikhs will repeat 1947 if there is any islamic terrorism
65 · Hari said
Understanding terrorism to stop it is the wrong track to follow!!! Lack of understanding is a hallmark of bigots.
I have never read her argue any such thing, but always found her eloquent. What rankles you and the others who have brought her into this debate is that she can make her point with an eloquence that her detractors can not muster.
Thoughtful post, Abhi.
Wow! Damien McElroy? The supply of deluded western origin hacks and dorks never ends. Why don’t the editors of these papers simply open a website to record statements and use Dargon and xcribe the statements and publish them? Do you really need a correspondent when you the desk lets by so many errors? The Nizam State [Hyderabad] has not been disputed since Indian partition and its princely rulers did not chose India over the Muslim homeland. It was reclaimed and integrated with the Union by force thanks to Sardar Patel and Ambedkar. Thus ended Jinnah’s fantasy of an enclave on the Bay of Bengal. It is true every part of India, including unlikely places like the enclaves of Malappuram in Kerala (carved out as a Muslim majority district by the secular and progressive paragon EMS Namboodiripad in an effort to build up a Muslim votebank) Keezhakkarai in Tamil Nadu, Assam, Murshidabad and Malda, Junagadh, Raigad, and several others, are disputed by the jihadis, who would like nothing better than a return to the mythical Mughal past and thence the Caliphate. It is amusing to see the Western press and its readers discussing whether India-directed jihadism is still generated from Pakistan and the Pakistani Military-State-complex. This is like the much trumpeted revelation of AQ Khan’s nuclear bazaar which the Indian press wrote about 15 years ago, that the Western press claimed credit for revealing 3 years ago! Delusional!! But of course terrorism by definition is only a Western thing, and in India terrorism is even more narrowly defined.
72 · ensure said
I understand the point that those who try to understand the terrorists are not simply sympathizers. That’s the first point I acknowledged. “Otherism” is not working because it is not framed strongly enough. It is often hijacked by various groups and is framed incorrectly. The line of division is not class, wealth, religion or nationality. It is about who works within the framework of law and who doesn’t. Whenever I’m induced to commit a crime, I should see is a clear line drawn. If I cross the line, I’ll be one of the “others”, and be starved of societal approval. This holds good not just for terror, but also several other ills that South Asia is plagued by – such as corruption and discrimination.
PS. At the risk of carrying the analogy too far, I would say that much of the effort towards understanding them is akin to trying to tame the mosquitoes and persuading them from not biting.
85 · jyotsana said
This is subject matter of intellectual debate; I attended a seminar where the speaker ( some kind of academician who studies terrorism) was actually tracing/connecting historical Asian connections of suicide bombings to British India’s freedom fighters Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad’s voilent struggle against colonial rule. In fact the Pak journalist – Ahmed Rashid is doing the same with Al-Q as in this discussion and I am sure many in the Pak establishment are doing the same with Kashmir’s struggle and maybe the same arguments were raised during Soviet occupation of Afghan. Terrorism as viewed through the lens of colonial struggles, cold-war and now post-coldwar struggles.
86 · Hari said
you probaby fall in the category of those critical of efficacy of HTS contrary to the views of Mr. Gates and money spent by Pentagon on the same
84 · bunty said
If refusing to accept, condone or justify terrorism – whatever the root causes maybe – is bigotry, then I plead guilty.
Arundhati Roy’s eloquent rant is precisely what I’ve argued against in my previous comment.
There is no side A or side B on the terror question. There is no fork. There is no imminent Civil War. There are only terrorists and victims. And there are ‘intellectuals’ happily toeing the terrorist line that unless ‘justice’ is served, they’ll cause trouble. Of course justice should be served. The guilty in all riots should be identified and punished. That would certainly reduce the pool of recruits the terror outfits draw from. But to attribute direct causality and implicitly justify the attack somehow seems a gross act of disrespect to the people who died in Mumbai on the 26th.
88 · Priya said
Interesting concept. If I were Mr. Gates, feeling my way through unfamiliar terrain and culture, I would certainly find it promising. If I were Mr. Headman of the village Kasav hails from, I would just draw the line and dare the kids to step over it. But I’m neither, so I just restrict myself to trying and influencing opinion on things that matter to me. Hopefully, Mr. Gates would continue using this new program, and Mr. Headman would somehow read my post and draw the line.
wrong example. see, when there’s a declaration of war…everything you live for is at stake…and, like yourself, I would pick up arms too.
but, to ask someone like myself to pull off a SUICIDE mission to help some larger cause, when no unjust has been done to me..it simply wouldnt happen…why?
Apart from other reasons:
1) I have an education, a job, and a wonderful family whose happiness I still I want to be a part of. 2) Nobody can “use” Islam to indoctrinate me with their agenda..because I have the ability to think critically, thanks to that education.
Anyway, I believe these training camps, organizations must be shut down … however, that’s only a tiny band-aid for the wound. The problems have become much more systemic than some maulana azhars and lakhvis. The solutions are glaring right at us, and yet we choose to ignore them.
oh, and the absurdity that is the “war on terror” only prolongs the status quo.
87 · Priya said
Not intellectual debate, but intellectual…
There’s no
There was a Krystallnacht in the Kashmir Valley in September 1989 when calls for violence against the Kashmiri Hindu Pandits were broadcast from the minarets of the mosques of the Valley, following which jihadist thugs went about butchering Kashmiri Hindus and drove out whatever remained from the Valley. The Indian government responded, gradually stepping up the use of force to quell the wholesale thuggery, till now the Valley and its jihadist elements have been brought to heel. Intellectuals, dishonest or otherwise, don’t matter.
89 · Hari said
I say understanding, you change it to acceptance (!), condoning (!!) and justification (!!!) of terrorism. Reflect on why you need such obfuscation to make your point.
89 · Hari said
Eloquence and ranting are antonyms, I think, cant be sure though.
89 · Hari said
You first claim there are no sides, and then later break the world up into sides. I wouldnt point out more inconsistencies in your arguments, there are too many. I want to thank you instead for the link. She is brilliant as always. She eloquently points out that hindu extremism is no better, or even worse than the Islamic variety. You have missed her point completely. She is refers to the two sides only to point out that they are one on the side of bigotry. It is clear to me that she faces anger in the blogosphere only because she is so persuasively secular.
“She eloquently points out that hindu extremism is no better, or even worse than the Islamic variety. “
it certainly is no better but in what way is it worse?
“She is refers to the two sides only to point out that they are one on the side of bigotry. It is clear to me that she faces anger in the blogosphere only because she is so persuasively secular.”
yet she clearly states that given a choice between the two bigotries, she would pick one – how is that “secular”? and do you honestly think that if the situation had been reversed – if 10 hindu youth with links to hindu extremist groups to anyone in india had gone a murderous rampage in pakistan (giving as their justification past attacks by pakistan-backed or based groups) – she would still be appealing for people to understand the “context”? do you not think that under those circumstances she would most likely state she was on the side of A (attributing it to some sort of ideology not rooted in a specific context or place and not linked to any grievance or provocation)? do you honestly think she would be as sympathetic as she appears to be? don’t you think everyone should be given the courtesy of “context” (including suketu mehta by the way).
“yet she clearly states that given a choice between the two bigotries, she would pick one – how is that “secular”?”
not to mention that she gives the benefit of the doubt to one bigotry and claims that they all think that “while there is no justification for terrorism..” really? they all think that? she can claim, with absolute certainty, that no one from side B thinks that terrorism is justified under any circumstances they deem suitable?
94 · Whose God is it anyways? said
You have evidently not read her superb essay. The two sides I alluded to are both placed by Roy into side A – that of bigotry. The word bigotry is mine in this context. For her, side B is the one that tries to understand what gives rise to terrorism. She chooses that side, so do I.
The rest of your rant lacks coherence.
How much effort would A. Roy expend on understanding Advani? Is he a born a-hole or a religious minority from Karachi whose family was uprooted in ’47?
@WGIIA, I think you slightly misread her. She is not dividing the extremists into two sides. She is talking about two imaginary sides engaged in current discourse about terrorism. Side A looks at terrorism without any geographical, historical and economic context. Side B does not. There are several problems with this framing. Taking religion out of the list of contextual dimensions, and implying mutual exclusivity between the two sides, are two major ones. According to the IB dossier recently released, outfits raising funds for ISI include Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, the Benevolence International Organisation, Bin Laden Front, Al Fuzaira, Khairul Ansar Al Khairia, Daulatatul Kuwait, Revival of Islamic Heritage Society and Doulatatul Bahrain. [link]. These fronts do not share geography, history, or economics. Ignoring religion as a dimension also leads her to question her own dubious framing as she thinks side-A analysts will have a hard time explaining Hindu extremism, which is surely not the case. The argument is more about degree/scale and expansion vs. defense nature, which admittedly is a very fuzzy line, than about the religious context of motivation.
“You have evidently not read her superb essay. The two sides I alluded to are both placed by Roy into side A – that of bigotry. The word bigotry is mine in this context. For her, side B is the one that tries to understand what gives rise to terrorism. She chooses that side, so do I.
The rest of your rant lacks coherence.”
well, i never claimed to be as eloquent as miss roy:) i read her essay- i can do that much at least. on second reading perhaps i didn’t take her literally enough and read between the lines of what she meant by side a and side b based on what she says later in the article. in my opinion only – and please bear with my incoherence and ranting — i can’t take her side a vs. side b argument seriously unless i see her apply it equitably, no matter who the perpetrators of mass murder are. that is, given a choice between side a or side b, she applies side b (as she chose) to all players. i feel she fails to live up to her own standards in this very same article when she brings up comparisons and incidents. she’s very certain of certain people’s guilt/culpability in this article and doesn’t call for any context or speak of any context and asks us not to rush to judgement when it comes to other groups/countries/suspects and look at context. given a choice in her own article, she appears to, to my ignorant mind, to not apply the same standards.
i don’t deny miss roy her space in a paper, and i even said i agree with some of what she says, but i am tired of seeing the same people being offered the chance to act as the “voice of india” everytime there are problems in india. just as south asian americans don’t want certain groups in the u.s. representing them all the time, i would like to see a diversity of voices – both those with whom i disagree and those with whom i agree or both — in the guardian, nyt etc. many papers have opposing viewpoints on the same page when it comes to israel, domestic problems etc. i’d like to see that with india, because while miss roy etc. are being offered the chance to put forward their viewpoint they also are being given the chance to put forward the viewpoint of those of whom they disapprove. so any opposing viewpoint is seen through them and their biases and not independently. there are other reasonable secular people in india – from both the “right” and “left” — who can surely be given a voice.
Hey, some of us secular folk aren’t too thrilled w/ her writing either. Her “eloquent” essay reads like a hack writer from NRO parodying left. She does show commendable restraint by not including illuminati and Roswell.