Extremist indulgence

Time for govt to monitor funding of Wahhabi NGOs in India

At one level, the new wave of Kashmiri militancy, now spreading from its stamping ground in the north to the south of the valley, underlines yet again the rank failure of the Centre and state to deal with a crisis that has been openly festering for some years. This failure, however, goes beyond the chronic inability of the state security forces, local administration, intelligence agencies and the National Democratic Alliance to anticipate the unprecedented local support to insurgency and the causes for it. Over the past half-decade, Kashmir's tragically polarised society has been radicalised even further by an extreme religious socialisation that has less to do with the machinations of the usual suspect, Pakistan, and more to do with the lavish funding of organisations promoting the hard-line Wahhabist brand of Islam.

This trend has been gathering momentum in the south and east as well following India's closer ties with Shi-ite Iran and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism and is rapidly overwhelming the attractive syncretist Sufi version of Islam prevalent in Jammu and Kashmir, in tune with the innate secularism known as Kashmiriyat. The Jamiat-Ahl-e-Hadith, a welfare organisation that was registered in 1958, has emerged as the most proactive among them but there are innumerable small charities that channel money, mostly, according to American intelligence, sourced from Saudi Arabia, global patrons of this school of Salafist Islam. Inevitably, their message of the virtues of Sharia law and the need for its violent imposition finds a receptive audience among the alienated Kashmiri youth who have become victims of the habitual brutality of state and security agencies. It is an open secret that random arrests, kidnapping, torture and rape of young Kashmiri men and women by the many Indian agencies operating in the state are carried out with tacit official knowledge. The authorities' intolerance towards Kashmiri youth, however, has to be juxtaposed against a curious indulgence towards the so-called religious and welfare organisations, whose influence is now palpable throughout the valley in the sartorial choices of many people and the large, conspicuous networks of lavishly built mosques.

Indeed, the thriving existence and open influence of these organisations on young people stand in odd contrast with the National Democratic Alliance's steady crackdown on NGOs since it came to power. Whereas large NGOs with accredited records like Ford Foundation and Greenpeace, to name just two, were banned from accepting foreign contributions for allegedly working against "the country's economic progress," - a broad-brush condition that has been included in the foreign contribution law - the activities of the Jamiat and its variations flourish in full view. Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are also beneficiaries of a South Asia-wide campaign by the petro-dollar millionaires funding Wahhabi Islam. Officials openly acknowledge that none of these organisations submit full accounts of the foreign funds they receive. Why are these NGOs not brought to book? It is possible that Saudi Arabia's dominance of India's crude oil imports accounts for this strange look-away policy. In this commodity downturn, the issue can be easily solved by diversifying across a range of eager crude sellers in West Asia. At any rate, allowing a narrow geo-economic concern to swamp a serious national crisis can hardly be called good diplomacy.