Editorial: Beyond religion

The reports that members of extremist Hindu groups have been arrested in connection with a terrorist bomb attack in Malegaon should be used as an opportunity by all political parties to de-communalise the issue of terrorism. So far, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has used its anti-terrorism plank as a thinly veiled form of anti-Muslim mobilisation. Separately, the case has been made quite often that militant activity has a religious/minority basis (Muslims in the Kashmir valley, Sikhs during the Punjab terror phase, and Christians in Nagaland). This was always a partial picture, of course, because there are the Bodos in Assam and the Naxalites in the heartland, not to mention the Gorkhas of Darjeeling, all or most of whom are Hindu, while groups advocating Hindutva have been attacking Christians in Orissa and Karnataka. Now that the boot can be on any foot, so to speak, this is an opportunity to move from posturing to serious thought and action.

For a start, even where the problem is sourced to religious minorities, it must be recognised that there are other factors at work—history and ethnicity in the case of the Nagas as well as Kashmiris, for instance, while Orissa has a tribal vs dalit colour to the conflict. Second, mainstream political parties rarely speak up in the broader national interest against militant groups from their community. Factions of the Akali Dal, for instance, were compromised during the militant phase that Punjab suffered in the 1980s, and Muslim organisations and parties have rarely spoken out against Islamist terror. While the BJP is ever willing to argue for tough anti-terrorist laws and for banning organisations like the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi), it adopts a quite contrary posture when the Bajrang Dal’s goons run riot for weeks on end in Orissa’s Kandhamal district, arguing that the Dal is a ‘nationalist’ organisation and cannot therefore be compared with Simi. Yashwant Sinha, in arguing that those whom the police suspects of having perpetrated the Malegaon blasts should not be termed ‘Hindu’, merely echoes pleas in the past from Muslims and Sikhs who have argued that terrorists should not be given a community tag. And if, tomorrow, the police were seen to be indulging in third-degree or worse against Hindu suspects, as they have done for years in Kashmir, Punjab and elsewhere, the BJP may not remain quite so enamoured of laws that give the police untrammelled powers to extract confessions under duress and then present as evidence in the courts. The failure of the mainstream political parties to take unbiased positions when tested on sub-national issues shows up even in Mumbai, where Raj Thackeray has been conducting a violent campaign against ‘outsiders’ in Mumbai; yet, no major political party (least of all, the ‘nationalist’ BJP) has joined serious issue with him on the fundamental freedoms granted under the Constitution.

For a start, therefore, everyone must recognise that terrorism is not a party issue, or something to be used as communal football. There is of course a communal basis to most terrorists, in that they speak and act in the name of their religion or their co-religionists, but everyone should agree that terrorists place themselves beyond the pale of any community. Second, causes must be identified—you could argue that the Malegaon blast was a Hindu response to repeated Islamist terror strikes, but the counter-argument would be that the Islamist terror groups are responding to what happened to the Babri Masjid and in Gujarat. The cycle of counter-productive violence and counter-violence has to be broken, and it can be done only if the mainstream parties choose to address the problem rather than grandstand in the hope of mobilising along community lines and garnering votes.