In India, Nigerians are the proverbial ‘troublemakers’. Their ‘claim to fame’ here is mostly drugs. To most (ignorant) Indians, Nigerians are ‘drug mules’, involved in smuggling contraband across international transit routes which pass through India. Nigerian (and most other Black African) women are considered to be of loose virtue (as seen in the now-infamous Somnath Bharti incident). Countless other stereotypes exist - I once heard someone suggesting that these people are closeted cannibals! The overall picture is that of a depraved and primitive community.
In reality, Nigeria has a lot in common with India. It is a former British colony, Africa’s most populous nation and a few days ago, became Africa’s largest economy. A country with a rich (and often painful) history, Nigeria is home to a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual population. Although democracy has had a tenuous hold on the country, it is currently enjoying an uninterrupted phase of democratic rule.
In these early years of the 21st century however, as Nigeria has made rapid strides towards progress, it has had to confront the gravest danger to its national security, one that is much greater and more lethal than the Biafran War (1967-1970), the last time when Nigeria came on the brink of breaking up.
The main cause of this danger is a once-obscure, but now very infamous Islamist group - Boko Haram. It is a name that strikes terror these days across Nigeria and West Africa, much like the Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban used to in their heyday.
Boko Haram, formed in 2002 in northeastern Nigeria by cleric Muhammad Yusuf, is the most brazen and depraved terrorist group to emerge in the Muslim world since Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its name - a mix of the Hausa language spoken throughout northern Nigeria, and Arabic - means ‘Western education is forbidden’. Which is also the group’s main ideological viewpoint. That secular, western education is taboo, especially for Nigeria’s Muslims who form 51 per cent of the country’s population. The group favours traditional Islamic Madrassas over western schools. It also calls for women’s education and social life to be banned, and for women to take up traditional roles in the household.
Since 2005, Boko Haram has initiated a full-fledged, armed and very violent insurgency against the secular, federal government in Abuja, which it seeks to overthrow and install an Islamic state, with Sharia law as the constitution. Nigeria is a deeply divided nation, with a clearly demarcated ‘religious geography’. Its north is populated by two dominant ethnic groups - the Hausa and the Fulani - who are Muslim by faith. The southwest is inhabited mainly by the Christian Yoruba and the southeast by the Christian Igbo. While many groups exist, these three - the Hausa-Fulani (bunched together since they share a lot of similarities), the Yoruba and the Igbo make the majority of the population. Religion-wise, Muslims (51 per cent) have a slight edge over Christians (48 per cent), with animists forming the remaining one per cent.
The year 1999 was crucial for Nigeria, when most northern, Muslim-dominated provinces made Sharia the official personal and criminal law. With the federal government proving highly inept and corrupt in most spheres of politics and administration, many Muslims also demanded Sharia for the remainder of the country. Out of the resulting friction between Christians and Muslims that followed, emerged the Boko Haram, though many scholars have pointed that its roots go far back into Nigeria’s colonial and pre-colonial past.
Since it turned militant in 2005, Boko Haram has bombed churches, mosques, police stations, government buildings and schools. It has killed Christians, forcibly converted them to Islam, murdered moderate Muslims (including many Imams) who stood up to it and kidnapped Nigerians as well as westerners for ransom. It also has close links with the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Al Qaeda affiliate that operates in north Africa.
Last month, Boko Haram crossed all limits of depravity. On April 15, it laid siege to a residential school for girls in the small town of Chibok in the remote northeast of the country in the dead of the night. After killing the guards, the terrorists kidnapped 300 girls, put them in trucks and disappeared in the dead of the night into the thick Sambisa Forest Reserve near the town, on the border with Cameroon.
A few days later, a video surfaced in which a man grinned and said in Hausa: “I abducted your girls. They are slaves. By Allah, I will sell them in the marketplace. I will sell them because I have the market to sell them. There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell; He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.” The man’s name is Abubakar Shekau, the secretive and ruthless leader of Boko Haram, who took over in 2009, after Muhammad Yusuf was killed by Nigerian police.
Since April 15, nobody has a clue as to what happened to the girls. Many reports have been filtering in, suggesting various scenarios, but none have been verified. The whole of Nigeria has been rattled by this latest act of Boko Haram. There have been demonstrations across the country and abroad too. Not that Shekau and his men are concerned. In fact, they have intensified their campaign, abducting more girls, attacking a border village and murdering 300 of its residents.
On other occasions, Boko Haram has been dismissed as a purely Nigerian problem. This time though, international governments and agencies have sat up and taken notice. The US, UK and China, all have offered to help Nigeria in getting the kidnapped girls back. Shekau already is a wanted man, with the US State Department having put a bounty on his head.
Boko Haram is the latest front that political Islam has opened on the continent of Africa. Like its peers, the AQIM in north Africa, Ansar Dine in Mali and Al Shabab, on the other side of the continent, in Somalia, Boko Haram is an avowed believer in the Wahhabi/Salafi ideology and will go to any limits to achieve its goals.
Like the rest of the international community, India too should offer whatever assistance it can to Nigeria in its hour of need. Having battled a similar insurgency by Islamists in Kashmir for so long (and currently by the Indian Mujahideen) and knowing how Islamist groups follow each other, it is only natural that India should offer help to Nigeria. In the end, it is only by their combined efforts that the nations of the world would be successful in defeating the scourge of Islamism across the world.
