Gujarati community should help accelerate healing process

Arun Mukherjee The Statesman Asia News Network Calcutta

Fundamentalists are basically people who claim to preach and practice the "unvarnished word of God" along with the assertion that their authority is derived "directly from God" or from their version of the scripture or the Holy Book. Hence, they assert, their viewpoints or diktats are beyond question by any mortal. However, they will generally be very selective in their preachings to suit their objective.

One verse in the Koran condemns killings while another commands slaying of the "infidels". It would be for the fundamentalist preacher to select one and ignore or negate the other. In Lebanon, for example, the Hezbollah gained considerable clout from the Muslim clerics' emphasis and promotion of the injunction to "be fruitful and multiply". Thus, from 1956 to 1975 the Shiite minority population jumped from 19 to 30 percent.

In post-revolutionary Iran, another Islamic country, their officials publicized how unchecked population growth hurt families and their quality of life; officials then promoted birth control measures, a revolutionary step, given the widely prevalent Islamic injunction against any such measure being "un- Islamic".

Recently we came across a dangerously naive thesis sought to be propagated by a member of India's Minority Commission to say that "terrorism is mainly a problem of hunger" (Valson Thampu, "Threat of terrorism mainly a problem of hunger", The Statesman, Jan. 9-10, 2002). Is it hunger which created Osama bin Laden or Molla Omar, the guru of the Talibans? Is it hunger which created the terrorists who launched the attacks of Sept. 11 or those who attacked Indian Parliament on Dec. 13, 2001 or the terrorists who killed the policemen in front of the American Center in Calcutta on Jan. 22? Or, the terrorists who operate in the North-East India or in Jammu and Kashmir?

Many of them, and certainly their leaders are lolling in luxury in foreign lands whereas their cadres in the field have turned extortion into a fine art and a very profitable commercial proposition. Terrorism born out of religious fundamentalism has a special alchemy and it is very necessary that such a romanticized view of terrorism, especially of the dangerous religious fundamentalist type is discarded before it is too late for the security of our country.

It is, however, a different matter that quite often the crafty religious preachers and the gurus of the terrorist cults fully exploit the poverty of many of their brethren and use the latter as their cannon fodder.

A related aspect of the "poverty syndrome" pertains to the issue of the madrasas or Islamic seminaries. It is public knowledge now that over 10,000 madrasas in Pakistan were the training and recruiting ground for "jehadis" and terrorists known as the Talibans.

Realizing, belatedly though and perhaps under intense pressure from U.S., Pakistan President General Parvez Musharraf had to disband most of the mushroomed madrasas there, bring the rest under strict regulatory control and make it mandatory that no new madrasa could be established without the prior approval of the government -- a step which we in India have not dared to take. Why?

Because such a step may run counter to the electoral compulsions of the petty partisan politicians across the board. It has by now been fairly well documented at the center and in some states that many of the madrasas on our soils, especially those bordering Bangladesh (e.g., in West Bengal and Bihar), have been the breeding grounds of subversion and espionage and the training-cum-recruiting centers of fundamentalist terrorists.

It has been recently reported that the 507 registered madrasas in West Bengal continue to receive an annual grant from the government to the extent of Rs 115 crores and that no accounts are called for nor received from them for being audited. And there are several thousand unregistered madrasas in West Bengal alone, mostly along the Bangladesh border in addition to others in Calcutta, Howrah, Hooghly and most other districts.

Many of them are reported to have been flush with foreign funds, some having foreign students as well on their rolls. It would look as though no one in authority is any the wiser about the sources of their funding, the type of teaching and preaching imparted and their "extra-curricular activities". Of late, equipped with a considerable body of evidence and intelligence on the above matter, the West Bengal chief minister rightly decided to initiate some long-overdue steps to remedy the above state of affairs. Immediately a volley of protests from all conceivable quarters -- "secular" and "non-secular" -- have been raised to thwart any such move.

Let us face it. Godhra was not a spontaneous outburst of the Muslims against the "Ramsevaks", despite the misleading, if not deliberately mischievous, assertions of many of our untrustworthy politicians and social activists. Moreover, did any of them care to unambiguously and forcefully condemn the Godhra carnage during the first 24 or even 48 hours?

Did any of the non-communal Muslim political and religious leaders care to do so, knowing fully well that such an outrage was most likely to inflict severe damage to many of the innocent members of their own community? Did they not know what could be the repercussions in the Muslim community of any such dastardly attack and burning alive of even a small group of Muslims returning from the Haj pilgrimage?

But in the aftermath of the Godhra brutality by a well- prepared and organized Muslim gang, these community leaders and their high priests, the Sahi Imams et al, chose to observe total silence for quite some days thereafter.

Such pervasive silence of the "political secularists" and Muslim religious and community leaders sent a dangerously wrong signal to the Hindu fanatics and their exalted patrons in Gujarat and elsewhere. However, this should not be construed to even imply, not to speak of justifying, the dastardly attacks and mayhem being perpetrated for so long in Gujarat.

Even the hallowed hermitage of Gandhiji was not spared when the goons invaded and attacked those who had congregated there for a peace meeting. One wonders what is the overall reaction to all such outrages among the Gujarati community, known for their peaceful disposition and entrepreneurship. Let them raise their voice louder along with the rest of the country to accelerate the healing process.