Home-grown jehad

The proud claim made in recent years has been that, while Islamist jehadism has swept virtually every country with a large Muslim population, India has been miraculously free from the problem and that this is testimony to the soundness of the Indian democratic system. The claim is no longer tenable. The arrests made in the wake of the Mumbai train blasts, of people from Bihar and Maharashtra, confirm that India now has an indigenous jehadi problem quite independent of the militancy in Jammu and Kashmir. As much was evident in earlier episodes as well""like the bomb that was set off at the Gateway of India. The involvement of local people may be limited so far to logistics support and the provision of safe havens, while the actual attackers still come from Pakistan, but it is hard to ignore the evidence which says that there are Indian Muslims (however few) who are now part of the jehadi network. This is a qualitatively different situation from the Mumbai blasts of 1993, which were basically the result of an underworld operation. It is of course true, as the Prime Minister has said, that the terrorist activity of the kind that led to the recent train blasts cannot take place without support and help from across the border""and the country now knows that the problem is not confined to the Pakistan border, it extends to Nepal and Bangladesh as well. But recognising that fact does not negate the existence of a domestic problem.

To say this is not to demonise a whole community of something like 150 million people. But it would be equally foolhardy to shut one's eyes to the issue. The sources of the problem have to be identified, and wise solutions applied. The Sangh Parivar has already jumped to the conclusion that the answer is legislation that dilutes the standards of evidence and proof ordinarily required, and to reduce the protection available in the area of civil liberties. But this standpoint is born out of prejudice, not logic, for India has had such draconian legislation in one form or another for many years, and the manner in which those laws were used do not give comfort. Also, to the extent that such special legislation has been used in the past to target people from the Muslim community, it only makes the situation worse. As is the case so often, the real solutions lie in the unspectacular but long-term issues.

People think of extreme action when there is alienation. The way to prevent alienation is to achieve full participation by a community in a country's economy and polity, to have social exchange between communities, and to bring everyone into the education mainstream. On all these fronts, there is much to be done. The problem is that the Congress brand of secularism and the BJP brand of communalism both end up ghetto-ising the Muslims, who have not had the benefit of very wise community leaders, either. The preference for education in madrassas rather than in mainstream schools, for instance, points to a problem with basic choices. The national effort should be to make sure that, even if Pakistan does its damnedest to plant evil seeds in this country, it must not find hospitable soil.