Kamal Haasan has done a disservice by raising 'saffron' terror bogey
The incendiary call by Ashok Sharma, a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (ABHM), following actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan’s remarks on Hindu terror shows how extremist Hindu outfits have reduced themselves to the level of assorted Maulvis routinely issuing death threats to BJP and RSS leaders.
This is what Sharma said: “There is no other way to handle people like Kamal Haasan but to either hang them or shoot them dead.”
It is disappointing that senior leaders in the BJP have not condemned the Hindu Mahasabha and sought Sharma’s prosecution.
The Hindu Mahasabha is a prime example of how ideologically bankrupt extremist Hindu groups have become. Kamal Haasan has every right to express an opinion – in this case on Hindu terror – however provocative and wrong it may be. Debate him but do not hound him.
By filing a complaint against him in a Varanasi court (which will hear the case on November 22), advocate Kamlesh Chandra Tripathi is playing right into the hands of those on the Left who try to conflate Hindu extremists with Islamist terrorism.
To describe isolated acts of criminal violence or death threats by extremist Hindu groups as organised terror devalues the real fight against terrorism.
In India, politicians have trodden a thin line over the issue of “Hindu terror”. The Congress-led UPA needs Muslim votes to stay in power. In the 2004 Lok Sabha election, it won just 145 seats and 26.53 per cent voteshare. The minority vote comprised a large chunk of this. Without Muslim votes, the Congress would have been reduced to less than 100 seats in 2004.
In the 2009 Lok Sabha poll, the Congress won 206 seats with 28.55 per cent voteshare. Again, the Muslim vote proved crucial.
This explains the Congress’ attempt during UPA-1 and UPA-2 to coin the term “saffron terror”. Rahul Gandhi, then a young MP, told a US envoy in 2005, according to a Wikileaks document which has not been disputed, that saffron terror was a larger threat to India’s national security than Islamic terror.
Those words came to haunt him in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The Congress faced a strong backlash from precisely the Hindu voters Rahul had demeaned by invoking the myth of saffron terror. The party plunged from 206 to 44 seats.
Is saffron terror really a myth? Didn’t the blasts at Malegaon, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer Dargah and on the Samjhauta Express prove that extremist Hindu groups like Abhinav Bharat were terrorists?
The cases against Colonel Shrikant Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya have collapsed. The Samjhauta Express blast remains unsolved with LeT terrorist Arif Qasmani named by the US Department of Treasury as one of the culprits.
Assuming though that extremist Hindu groups were responsible for these four acts of terror during 2007-08 – and none thereafter – it hardly points to organised “saffron terrorism”.
Even one life taken by terror is unacceptable. Extremist Hindu groups, when found guilty of acts of terror, must be prosecuted, tried and if found guilty punished.
But politicians seeking Muslim votes do Muslims themselves a disservice by conflating isolated incidents of “Hindu terror” with organised widespread Islamist terror perpetrated by ISIS, al-Qaeda, LeT, JeM, Hizbul Mujahideen and the Taliban. Such false narratives inculcate a sense of victimhood in ordinary Muslims. This makes them ever-more clannish, estranged from the mainstream, and vulnerable to radicalisation.
Kamal Haasan speaks of Hindu terror as if it were the biggest threat facing India. It isn’t. The term Hindu terror is oxymoronic. Hindus are by nature a passive (though not necessarily pacifist) people.
If they were not, in a poor country beset with huge social and economic injustices, there would be violent civilian unrest of the kind we see in Catholic South America and the Islamic Middle East.
If anything, Hindus have been silent victims. The incarceration of Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya for over six years without a charge sheet led to only muted protests from extremist Hindu “terror” groups and silence from the general Hindu majority population.
For Kamal Haasan and his ilk to misuse the oxymoron “Hindu terror” reflects poorly on their judgment.
The Roots
Islamist terrorism is a deadly global scourge. Its most virulent manifestation laid deep institutional roots in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States, mired in a Cold War against the Soviets, saw in the invasion a repeat of the 19th-century great game when the Russian and British Empires contested the region on either side of the Khyber pass. The Afghans, then as now, were the hapless victims.
Between 1979 and 1989, a US CIA-led operation trained and funded jihadis to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Pakistan was the hired gun. That planted the seed of modern Islamist terrorism.
Two white Christian countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, thus helped create modern Islamist terror. Pakistan, the ever-willing servant of the West, seized the opportunity.
In 1989 when the defeated Soviets withdrew, the US scaled down its jihadi operations in Afghanistan and left it to Pakistan to clean up the debris. Left to themselves, the Pakistani army and the ISI dispatched hardened, out-of-work jihadi fighters to the Kashmir Valley in 1989. The rest is history.
Pakistan had used terrorists in the Khalistani insurgency. But the real target was Kashmir, the unfinished business of Partition.
Benazir Bhutto, then Prime Minister, midwifed the Taliban in the early-1990s. Terror sank deep roots in Pakistan. Afghanistan was the ISI’s laboratory of jihadism. Radicalisation of Kashmiri youth began even as the Valley’s Pandits were brutally driven out of their homeland.
Pakistan realised after its Kargil defeat that winning a conventional war with India was impossible. Terrorism presented a cheaper alternative. Young, impoverished boys from Pakistani villages were given elementary training in terror and sent across the border to kill Indian soldiers and civilians.
It was low-cost, high impact. Families of Pakistani terrorists killed by Indian security forces were given money and land as compensation. The jihadi industry ticked along smoothly.
Until the jihadis turned on their masters. Pakistan became both the biggest creator of terrorists and their biggest victim.
Those attempting to draw an equivalence between such malignant, institutionalised Islamist terrorism and “Hindu terror” do India great harm.