India, UAE discuss ways to curb radicalisation, terrorism

Experts from India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) jointly discussed ways to counter the growing menace of radicalisation and terrorism during a two-day seminar titled 'Indo-UAE co-operation against Radicalization and Terrorism' here on Friday.

"All the civilised nations in the world, the civil societies and the international communities are concerned about its spread and are desperate to find ways to contain this menace because it is causing danger to humanity itself," Anwar Alam, an academic at the conference noted while referring to radicalisation and terrorism.

"It is in this background that we have been trying to examine the whole development of radicalisation over the last 30 years. We realise that India and UAE are two of the exceptional countries where the trend of radicalization is almost negligible," he added.

Furthermore, experts asserted that the underlying principles of non-violence and tolerance are behind the success stories of both India as well as UAE.

"Not only now, but for a long time, the co-operation between the two countries against terrorism and radicalization has been going on because there are many similarities between India and the UAE. Both the nations share the values of tolerance that have been left behind by Sheikh Zayed in UAE and Mahatma Gandhi in India," Ebtesam al-Ketbi, the President of the Emirates Policy Center said at the conference.

The experts at the event were of the opinion that to control global terrorism, the state-centric approach alone will not work. They laid emphasis on international pressure and a ban on financial aid, among other top-down measures which are in conjunction with civil-society perspectives to counter radicalisation.