22 February 2013, 02:44 PM IST
The twin blasts in Hyderabad underline how the politics of communalism has made India vulnerable to terrorism imported from Pakistan and executed by Indian extremists. While Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde's statement in parliament this afternoon throws little light on the Hyderabad terror attack, the imprint of the Indian Mujahideen (IM) seems clear.
The hate speeches by politicians like Akbaruddin Owaisi and Praveen Togadia inflame communal tensions. Owaisi, an MLA, should be debarred from electoral politics. Togadia should not be allowed to enter it.
I posted the following piece on September 10, 2011 shortly after the Delhi bomb blasts. What appears here is an edited excerpt of that article whose relevance is sharper than ever before.
* * *
When will India stop being a soft terror target? The short answer: when politicians start putting the public interest above their own.
Since Pakistani-sponsored terrorism began in 1989, the government has been terrified of losing its loyal minority vote. This approach to Indian Muslims is deeply misguided. It exacerbates social divisions and emboldens terrorists. Poorly educated and economically backward – as the Rajinder Sachar Committee has reported in great detail – India's Muslims have been placed in economic and social silos. The outcome: a siege mentality.
But as younger Muslims wake up to the way their parents and grandparents have been tricked into a perpetual cycle of backwardness and sullen insecurity by successive governments, there are growing rumbles of dissent.
Muslims in India want to be an integral part of India's economic growth story. They don't want to be treated as votes to be banked every five years. The tokenism of Muslim ministers and Muslim presidents will no longer placate them. India has had three Muslim presidents – Dr. Zakir Hussain, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam – out of the twelve presidents since independence. At 25%, that ratio is well above the Muslim population of India (14%) and stratospherically above the average 3%-8% ratio of Muslims in the judiciary, bureaucracy and the professions.
This tokenism hides a quiet tragedy: a community kept in darkness which falls easy prey to insecurities force-fed by the sort of counterfeit secularism practised by the Azamgarh and Batla House school of politics. Leaders of the Muslim community are complicit in keeping their flock in a metaphoric veil. They lack real leadership qualities and benefit from the power and perks of office.
Successful counter-terrorism requires three ingredients:
One, political determination to end terrorism regardless of political (i.e., electoral) consequences;
Two, professional policing independent of government interference;
Three, high-quality intelligence gathering.
Without good political intent, terrorism cannot be defeated. The Hyderabad blasts demonstrate once again the unprofessional management of our intelligence establishment which is misused for narrow political ends – for example, conducting poll surveys for the government rather than intelligence surveillance in sensitive areas.
Until the government eschews narrow, misguided political interests in the fight against terrorism, India will be hit again – and again. Those who suffer twice over in this are India's 165 million Muslims. They are exploited during elections with fraudulent secular arguments which keep them tucked away in electorally safe ghettos. And then they are maligned – by association – by the proliferation of crossborder and IM-SIMI sleeper terror cells for whom they have no sympathy. They end up being unfairly ostracized by mainstream society.
Despite attempts by communal politicians, masquerading as the exemplars of secularism, to use them as vote fodder, members of the minority community remain largely peaceful and committed to the idea of a plural India. They are a credit to the country; but they need to be valued, not appeased.
The more education Muslims get, the more they see through the male fide tactics of politicians who have a vested electoral interest in keeping the community economically and socially shackled. But such politicians are on the wrong side of history.
Terror attacks no longer cause communal riots. Muslims increasingly regard themselves as Indians first. As they receive the benefit of progressive education, they will become mainstream assets to the country. Their votes will no longer be on offer to counterfeit secularists who pretend to protect them against communalism but in reality alienate and marginalize them from mainstream society.
India is a large-hearted nation. The damage divide-and-rule communal politics has done to majority-minority relations can be reversed. There is goodwill on both sides. But we must end the politics of division practised under the guise of secularism. The price is far too high for India to pay.
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