While Vajpayee's friendly gestures were rewarded by the Kargil war, Manmohan Singh's tenure saw the terror attack in Mumbai in 2008. The Indian Prime Minister’s persona is unimportant in defining India-Pakistan ties
One of the fallouts of the mayhem in Paris is that serious questions are being asked about the mindset that motivates senseless violence against humanity. Behind the hand that pulls a trigger, explodes a bomb, or detonates a vest full of explosives to kill random people, is an idea, an ideology, an upbringing in a particular social and theological milieu.
In this respect, what US President Barack Obama said at a Press conference in Turkey about the terrorist attacks in Paris is as much applicable to the Indian Muslims as to the followers of Islam elsewhere.
“I do think”, the US President said, “that Muslims around the world religious leaders, ordinary people have to ask very serious questions about how did these extremist ideologies take root. Even if it is only affecting a very small fraction of the population, it is real and it is dangerous and it has built up over time and with social media it is now accelerating.”
It is also for the first time that Mr Obama, who so far, was among those, who rejected the alleged connectivity between Islam as a faith and the justification for mindless violence in its spread, had to come out to expose this very connectivity within the community and ask certain questions.
“On the one hand, non-Muslims cannot stereotype, but I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we can make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that that is justified by religion”, Mr Obama said at the Press conference in Turkey. So far, it is Kemal Atatürk’s secular, though Muslim-majority country, where, under the current political dispensation, appeal for religious fanaticism has been growing over the last three decades.
Mr Obama was expressing his feelings not only for his own country that saw the worse massacre when over 3,000 Americans and foreigners were killed in the 9/11 attacks, but also for the entire world, especially India. Analysts are now seeing the Mumbai massacre of 2008 as a template for what happened in Paris.
After many events in America and Europe, that saw new converts to Islam, and the failure of his desperate efforts to sustain the claim that the community cannot be held responsible for what some perpetrate in its name, Mr Obama has come out with the realisation that there is an undercurrent of feeling within the Muslim community and that the movement of extremists, with mindless violence as its flagship has the sanction of religious texts and tradition.
“And to some degree, that (rejection of the claim that the religion justifies violence) is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself, and I think there have been times where there has not been enough push back against extremism”, Mr Obama said.
Tearing into the pretentiousness over this ‘religion does not justify violence’ statements of many Islamic leaders, the US President said, “There’s been pushback there are some who say, well, we don’t believe in violence, but are not as willing to challenge some of the extremist thoughts or rationales for why Muslims feel oppressed. And I think those ideas have to be challenged..”
It almost looks as if Mr Obama was addressing these words to many Indian champions of secularism, both within the Indian Muslim community and outside, among various political parties who have beengenuflecting before the Islamic orthodoxy, rejecting all demands for any change whatsoever within the community, and playing all the time the victimhood game.
These apologists include Uttar Pradesh Minister and Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan on the one end of the political spectrum and Congress leaders Mani Shankar Aiyar and Salman Khurshid at the other.
In an interview to a Pakistani news channel, Mr Aiyar not only linked the Paris attacks to the well-sustained victimhood of the Muslim community, but also poured some political music into by stating that India-Pakistan relations can improve only when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is removed from office.
The Congress duo, Mr Aiyar and Mr Khurshid, essentially made two points. First, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is an epitome of peace. Second, India-Pakistan ties cannot improve till Mr Modi remains the Prime Minister of India.
What Mr Aiyar has blurted out might be just to sooth his frustrated soul; but that is a tinder that the Pakistani establishment will light up to uphold its own Prime Minister’s claim that it is India that is blocking progress in India-Pakistan relations. In fact, Mr Sharif repeated this in Washington recently.
While the world is busy waging a war against terror, Congress leaders are providing fresh oxygen to the otherwise dying state of Pakistan, which has emerged as the epicentre for training and financing of global terror machine, for which India is a specific target for decades.
Relations between India- Pakistan are not dependent on any individual on either side of the border. It’s a clash between two ideas one is catholic and plural and the other claiming monopoly of the divinity where mere suspicion of any deviation from the ‘revealed’ path is punished with death within the country and outside as well.
The first war between the two nations took place in October 1947 when Pakistan invaded the princely state of Kashmir that had merged with India. Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister. lal Bahadur Shastri’s short-tenure as Prime Minister saw another battle in 1965. There was yet another war in 1971 and Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister. Having failed to humble India in a direct war, Pakistan resorted to proxy war through terror actions in Punjab, which ultimately claimed Indira Gandhi’s life.
While Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s friendly gestures were rewarded by infiltration in Kargil, Mr Manmohan Singh’s tenure witnessed the terror attack in Mumbai in 2008. So, the persona of the Indian Prime Minister is unimportant in defining India-Pakistan relations.
While waiting for the Congress’s response, let us read it out to Mr Khurshid and Mr Aiyar what the Islamic State’s suspected mastermind of Paris massacre, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Muslim, called for in a video just a year back: “It’s nice to see, from time to time, the blood of the infidels.” Does it not provide us with a key to the vicious and evil minds that are holding the entire civil society to ransomIJ