Are terrorists winning?

Over the weekend, we (Pati and me) met up with a couple of friends who were in India on the weekend of the Bangalore and Ahmedabad bomb blasts (July 25-26, 2008). Our conversation began at a sad note feeling sorry for all the lives lost and somehow ended at the wrath that the majority of India is feeling towards the perpetrators. There is no element of surprize in that at all. Same was the case in North America after 9/11. People wanted someone to blame and to take their anger and frustration out at. Many hate crimes directed at anyone who looked like a stereotypical Muslim (as projected by media) took place all over North America post 9/11. What did that do? That resulted in alienating some more people of the minority groups that already felt isolated which, in turn, most likely led to more frustration and perhaps triggered further attacks like 7/7 in UK.

By definition, the word ‘terrorist’ refers to someone who induces terror. Violence geared towards innocent people is merely a means to bring about that terror. The need to terrorize could vary from politically motivated reasons like greed for power to misinterpreted religious extremist ideas for a better after-life. List of reasons is unending but the consequence for all the reasons is the same: death, destruction and infliction of terror. As long as humanity has existed, history is proof that terror tactics have always been employed and as situation stands today, the pattern doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Group A feels victimized by Group B due to reasons that are debatable. An unbiased decision cannot be ascertained whether Group A is victimized by Group B or not. Either way, Group A feels that it must get even with Group B by using violence against innocent people because that’s the only way it will get heard. Group B hears it and reacts with anger in turn which further agitates Group A and the cycle goes on. Something or someone has to break this cycle somewhere, don’t you think?

Are we not giving in to terrorism by getting angry? Anger usually is a result of fear for our own safety or the safety of people and things that we care about. Terrorists want their victims to get angry. They want their victims to take that anger out on innocent people of the group terrorists belong to. That way, terrorists will have more reason to terrorize and they’ll have support from the people of their indigenous group too. To better state what I am trying to say in the context of the recent bombings in India, I urged Pati to write something for this topic yesterday owing to his better knowledge of Indian political and social scene. He wrote what he felt in regards to the acts of terrorism in Bangalore and Ahmedabad and how he feels that Indian public and government should react. I copy/paste:

Before the majority cries that Muslims don’t consider India as their country and are traitors, they should ask themselves the question as to what it is to be a minority. I am not defending or condoning the recent most gruesome acts of Islamic terrorism in India but I am questioning as all of us should about the motivation behind these young men turning into ruthless butchers?

I haven’t found an answer, and I haven’t yet heard a good answer from anyone else either. But I think the answer lies in the attitude of ‘ghettoism’. When I was in college in India, I was a part of what you would call the ‘in crowd’ and we always mocked anyone who was in a minority group. We mocked students from north east – called them chinkis -,  we mocked people from Tamil Nadu – called them maddus -, and so on. We never cared about how they felt and they ghettoised themselves as a result. They stayed within their own groups and this alienated them more. However, after I moved out of India, I became the minority. For all the years of my post graduation, I was a minority. Although I wasn’t mocked for the way I looked or spoke, I still felt the need to ghettoise myself with the group of people who looked like me and talked like me for just perhaps the need of belonging to a group. Despite by best efforts to curb the tendency to ghettoise, I hung out with Desis most of the time.  I feel that it is this ‘ghettoism‘ that all of us naturally fall into leads to the feeling of victimization and which, in turn,leads to groups organising themselves into a social guerrilla warfare as sort of revenge from the majority.

If we see what’s happening in our society, some of the Indian muslims have organised themselves into guerrilla outfits and are waging a guerrilla warfare. In such a situation, no convention policing will help. Any more conventional policing activity will make them more hardened in their resolve. I understand that in response to the attacks that we witnessed a couple of weeks ago, bravado in majority will force them to say  ”Chudiya pahen ke gher pe baith jaayein kya?” (Should we wear bangles and sit at home?) But what answer do we expect for that question from the people we are gearing to fight against?  More suicide attacks? And, thus, the vicious cycle will continue.

So what should Indian government do? I don’t know. I can say what they should not do: they should not do any aggressive policing on Muslims to show the skeptic Muslim population that the government doesn’t consider anyone whose name is Ahmed or Mohammed as a terrorist. Then what? Somehow make the majority of Muslims feel that India is as much as their country as it is of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. How do we do that? First, perhaps by not electing BJP. However much it disguises it policies, it’s still very communal and other steps follow. Further, as a majority, the onus is on Hindus to include the minority and make it feel welcome. Shop in their shops, make a Muslim friend, invite a Muslim family over for dinner because if the majority starts to move further away from the aggravated minority as a result of these terrorist attacks, more agitated and victimzed the minority will feel and we will be stuck in this logjam for a long time to come. How bad can that be? Just ask the Lankans.

Guerrilla warfare can sustain only when it has a native population supporting it. LTTE in Sri Lanka is the closest analogy. Lankans haven’t been winning the guerrilla warfare just cause the host ‘tamilian’ community is supporting LTTE with blood and money. Lankans have been militarily extremely proactive in this warfare (a contradiction as the Lankans are majority Buddhists and Buddhism promotes peace) for last couple of decades but they haven’t won. Would we want a similar situation in India? Certainly don’t hope so.