By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
The Gujarat Episode
The 2002 Gujarat riots, also known as the 2002 Gujarat
violence, was a three-day period of inter-communal violence in the western
Indian state of Gujarat.
While US and Pakistan
stress close ties, a United Nations deputy special representative in Afghanistan,
Chris Alexander, said today that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency
probably has been responsible for recent militant attacks in Afghanistan,
supporting accusations made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Globe and
Mail reported July 28. Plus, Reuters reported today that Afghanistan's National
Directorate of Security said Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has
been training thousands of foreign militants to attack road construction
projects by Indian companies working in eastern Afghanistan.
As for who is behind
the attacks the pro-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
immediately denied a relationship to former BJP policies, a questionable position as such.
However it is clear,
that both the July 25 and 26, attacks share a number of tactical features and
reveal a long-standing strategy by Islamist militants linked to the Kashmir
cause to incite Hindu-Muslim riots and provoke tensions between India and
Pakistan. In recent years, such attacks have not been very successful in India,
but certain factors now in play could change all that.
The perpetrators of
both attacks focused on soft targets using several small, concealed devices
that were triggered to explode within a short period of time. The explosive
filler in both cases was reportedly ammonium nitrate, some chemical powder
(believed to be sulfur) and shrapnel in the form of ball bearings, nuts and
bolts. The explosive devices were placed in containers attached to bicycles or
auto rickshaws or left on public buses to maximize casualties. In both cases, a
timing device was used to trigger the blasts. The Ahmedabad and Bangalore
attacks bear numerous similarities to May 2007 and November 2007 attacks in the
Uttar Pradesh cities of Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow; a May 2008
attack in Jaipur, Rajasthan; and an August 2007 attack in Hyderabad, Andhra
Pradesh.
A little-known group
calling itself the Indian Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the recent
Bangalore and Ahmedabad attacks in an e-mail, claiming retaliation for the 2002
communal riots in Gujarat in which more than 1,000 (mostly Muslim) people were
killed. The Indian Mujahideen appears to be yet another front group for some of
the better-known Kashmiri Islamist militant groups such as Lashkar-e- Taiba,
Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), which have cells sprinkled throughout India.
The strategic
objective of these groups is twofold: incite communal riots between Hindus and
Muslims and enflame political tensions between Islamabad and New Delhi. Meeting
both objectives would allow these groups to bring to light any grievances
Indian Muslims have with the Indian government and expand their support base
within the country. The more chaos that ensues, the more room these militants
have to maneuver in carrying out these plans and the more attention can be
drawn to the Kashmir cause to revive the issue after years of relatively quiet
relations between India and Pakistan.
In recent years, this
strategy has not achieved what the militants hoped it would. Serial blasts
would occur, security would be heightened, the government would condemn the
attacks and then life would go on as usual without any significant social
unrest. Under the current circumstances, however, these militants have a much
better chance of causing some real trouble in India.
Though the ruling
Congress party just survived a critical no-confidence vote, it is in no way in
the clear. Rising inflation and food and fuel costs are bearing down on the
Indian population, with the Congress party getting most of the blame for the
pains caused by the commodity crisis. Meanwhile, the ruling party is trying to
fend off accusations of bribing its way into winning the recent no-confidence
vote. Eyeing the political opportunity to root the party out of office in the
2009 general elections, the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is already gearing up its
campaign to bring the Congress party down using these issues to its advantage.
Throwing terror
attacks into the mix provides the BJP with the perfect fodder to use in its
incendiary political rhetoric. Not only can the BJP resort to its usual verbal
attacks against the Congress party for being weak on the terror front for doing
nothing more than issuing simple condemnations, it can also use the attacks to
fuel its traditional Hindu nationalist rhetoric against Muslims to solidify
support in its Hindu political strongholds.
And the militants are
more than willing to encourage the BJP to act. Fiery political rhetoric against
Muslims is just what they need to help incite riots and reach out to alienated
Muslims to expand their local support networks. It also is no coincidence that
the last three attacks in Karnataka, Gujarat and Rajasthan were all in
BJP-controlled states.
There is also greater
potential now for these groups to enflame political tensions between New Delhi
and Islamabad. What all these militant groups have in common are links that can
be traced back to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which
has long had its hands in inciting Islamist militancy in its Hindu-majority
neighbor. Though the ISI links are probably on every Indian politician’s mind,
the ruling Congress party has still refrained from pointing blame at Pakistan
or even hinting at a foreign hand in the attacks. There appears to be a
consensus among Indian policymakers that automatically blaming Pakistan every
time something goes boom has damaged New Delhi’s credibility. Instead, as in
the recent Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul, the Indian government has made a
point to wait a few days before it starts lodging accusations.
Though the Indian
government is showing some restraint in throwing blame at Pakistan, it has a
politically expedient opportunity to enflame tensions across the Indo-Pak
border should it choose to do so. Pakistan is already under heavy pressure from
the United States to quit pussyfooting around the issue of getting a grip on
its jihadist problem. The United States has in the past utilized India in its
pressure campaigns against Pakistan by raising the specter of Islamabad getting
double-teamed by both Washington and New Delhi. If the political pressure piles
up enough for Congress at home, it could start to take a stronger stance
against Pakistan in order to demonstrate its toughness on terror, particularly
at a time when skirmishes across the Kashmir border are becoming more and more
frequent.
But the Pakistani
calculus in this mix is still quite murky. The groups carrying out attacks in
India have links to the ISI, but as the latest brouhaha in Pakistan over who
controls the ISI revealed, there is still a lot of debate over whether or not
these attacks can be as clearly traced back to the Pakistani establishment as
before. Moreover, in these latest attacks, the militants are using commercial
and improvised explosives, unlike the trademark military explosive RDX that
India has consistently used to point out an ISI link. It could be that these
militants are using commercial explosives and ammonium nitrate as a way to
better disguise a Pakistani hand in their attacks, or it could simply be a
response to stronger countermeasures by the Indians in clamping down on the
supply of such explosives. But even if it is more difficult these days to walk
the cat back to Islamabad in investigating these attacks, India can still point
the political rhetoric in whatever direction it sees fit.
Thus far, India has
shown a great deal of restraint in its relations with Pakistan, still
preferring to go through the motions of scheduled “confidence-building
measures” as part of the ongoing peace process. But with Pakistan facing
pressure from the United States over its jihadist insurgency and India’s ruling
party facing pressure from political opponents in an election season, an
explosive situation has emerged that Islamist militants in India have every
intention of exploiting.
The BJP first managed
to form a government in 1998 and again in 1999. It is one of the many fronts of
the RSS, a `cultural' organisation set up in 1925 by
Dr. KB. Hegdewar. Its aim was to promote India as a
Hindu nation where minority religious groups would be subordinate to Hindus. M.S. Golwalkar, who
became chief of the RSS in 1940, laid down the RSS ideology in We or Our
Nationhood Defined. He wrote:
[I] n Hindusthan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the
Hindu nation.... The foreign races in Hindusthan must
either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in
reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification
of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation and must lose their
separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country,
wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment - not even citizen's rights.
(1939: 62)
Initially (pre-1992),
the Indian Muslim community in contrast to Pakistan had, little to no
connections with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or with Pakistan and its
clandestine operations in Kashmir. As a large minority, their principle objective
seems only to retain a degree of cultural control over their social and
personal life. Yet for a large number of Indians, particularly those
sympathetic to the agenda of the BJP and its family of organizations (known as
the Sangh Parivar), Muslim militancy in Kashmir was in their view the work of
the Muslim "fifth column" represented by the 140 million Indian
Muslims. Although transnational connections to Hindu-Muslim violence have
existed since independence, these have compelled the Indian Muslims to in fact
renounce ties with Pakistan or Kashmir.
The destruction of
the sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya,
Uttar Pradesh in 1992 however,
was the result of 60,000 Kar Sevaks being trained by retired Indian
military officers prior to the December 6, 1992 onslaught on the Babri Mosque
in Ayodhya.
The visual pictures
of Kar Sevaks destroying the mosque with pick-axes where proved to be
inflammatory - all over India, but especially in Mumbai, according to public
reports, these were spontaneous reactions.
Riots are not
insurgencies however (in the nature of civil wars), and also do not lead to
wars with foreign powers. The Kashmir insurgency for example, could not be
sustained as we suggested earlier on this website, without support from the
Pakistani government. In fact while insurgencies are against a state and
usually about territorial control or denying the same to the state, riots are
almost always localized and move along a different ladder of escalation
compared to insurgencies and wars. Riots are far from controlled events in that
even those who initially trigger riots may lose control over the chain of
violent retaliations.1
At the same time,
riots are not as spontaneous as reported in the press, some element of
organization even if it is a jerry-rigged alliance of riot specialists and
musclemen.2
In the wake of the
nation-wide campaign to mobilize Kar Sevaks, the Hindus in Mumbai, particularly
in strongholds of the extreme Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena
(Army of Shiva) political party, had already begun celebration rallies,
shouting of anti-Muslim slogans, and aggressive displays of religious rituals
in mixed neighborhoods. pitch ... propaganda unleashed by Hindu communal
organizations and writings in newspapers like 'Saamna'
and 'Navakal.’ 3
These riots thus
could have been prevented had the initial killing been exposed as an act by criminals
and firm action taken to prevent second-stage retaliation. Hence the
Human Rights Commission report on Gujarat 2002 went beyond the recommendations
made by the SKC, and urged international donors to make all aid
conditional upon implementation of many of the above recommendations.4
Where local dynamics
are paramount, community perceptions might become linked to national
ideologies. The resulting violence then becomes symbolic of a community's
identity and its vengeance. But while common interests will put a brake on
violence and destruction of property, the connection between economic interests
and peace has been tentative at best. Building a violence control system that
extends vertically through state and national government as well as
horizontally into civil society and party organizations, seems the best
solution.5
Greater minority
representation in state-level ministries and cabinets as far as S. Asia
concerns, is not effective in itself. Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have a
far higher percentage of Muslims in the government and ministries but have far
higher levels of violence than in Kerala and Bengal where the comparative
percentages of Muslim ministers are much lower. Yet Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -
were highly successful in preventing violence when clear orders were issued by
political leaders to act forcefully. For example Steven Wilkinson, comments
that in 1995, "most strikingly the coalition BJP-BSP government
successfully prevented a repeat of the Ayodhya
violence by restricting VHP plans to mobilize around another disputed religious
site at Mathura." 6
Unfortunately one
cannot always easily obtain' the kind of political demography and party
politics Wilkinson requires for a cross-cutting cleavages to work. Plus his
argument that political leaders will hesitate to trigger or encourage riots if
minority voters occupy significant position in electoral calculations, presumes
the presence of a minority community in significant numbers in a state to be
able to make a difference in elections. In addition, this minority had to be
united and well organized in a solid bloc to become a swing vote. This combination
of factors is present only in some parts of India today. In other places, one
would have to fall back on state protection, unbiased policing, political
parties and leaders committed to minority rights, and policies that work to
ensure a sense of safety and well-being for the vulnerable population. That is,
rely on a coalition of anti-riot interests activated well before sporadic
violence becomes a full-scale riot.
Elsewhere, Paul R.
Brass underscores the importance of anti-riot coalitions in which the state
forges a partnership with the civic associations and anti-violence
constituencies.7 Brass's fieldwork also found that when his
interviews respondents were asked why they refrained from second-stage
retaliation, the answer invariably was that they felt a sense of trust in the
state government and in the local authorities that the situation would be
brought under control.8
It thus follows that
if the police act with speed and dispatch - banning processions, preventing
emotionally charged public rituals, and quickly arresting
"troublemakers" (who are the riot specialists to use Brass's term) -
the chain can be broken. In other words, the police, the parties, and the state
at both local and national level must be involved in stopping the violence. If
the local authorities fail, the federal authorities must rapidly step in to
fill the power vacuum and watch over the actions of local authorities. Who will
make them do this? This is where the horizontal coalition of anti-violence
interests and constituencies become critical. They will make the political
parties, state authorities, and even federal government pay the price for
neglect.
Where democracy is in
itself highly desirable, the procedures of democracy have an ambiguous
relationship with violence at least in South Asia (and the Middle East, recent
example Iraq). Frequently, democracy has meant more competition for office,
power, and control over resources of the state. Democracy then tends to be
contentious and in a segmented society’s such can lead to conflict and
violence.
As for the by
now famous Godhra ‘incident’, it is clear that Home Minister Advani should
have refrained from erroneously (before even an investigation had been
launched) linking it with Pakistan and its intelligence agencies the day after
the burning of the rail compartments and simple was the result of an accident.
For Mark Juergensmeyer, Ashis Nandy, and Partha Chatterjee if
true, the Indian state and its politics are artificial, predatory, and operate
in a spiritual vacuum.9 According to the three
cited authors India 's modernist secular declaration prevents it from drawing
on the embedded traditions of tolerance and coexistence rooted in the
subcontinent's life and society. And a modem urban, middle class Indian as a
result, would be ready fodder to the communal nationalism, whether Hindu or
Islamic.
It seems however that
Gandhian politics wanted to combine rational thought with traditional values of
cooperation not competition, tolerance not conversion, sacrifice not
aggression. In fact this understanding might have derived from the fact that “
India ” is a conglomeration of many conflicting factions and interests.
In addition, the
Reddy Commission appointed after the September 1969 Ahmedabad riots identified
the state government's lack of purpose and clear orders, rather than any lack
of state strength, as the key factor prolonging the violence. Evidently a
similar pattern of negligence explains the delays in deploying force when
riots occurred in Ranchi (1967), Bhagalpur (1989), and Mumbai (1992-93).
Of course where some
elements of the state and its agencies may be biased others that are
capable of imposing law and order may simple be confused rather than complicit.
In this case building a coalition of interested segments that would support
reform and checkmate local riot systems by joining other segments within the
state that are opposed to the weakening of political institutions could be
effective.
For a coalition of
anti-riot forces - official and civic – to become stronger than those
benefiting from riots and currently in power, furthermore might depend on the
system of incentives and rewards that the anti-riot network is able to provide.
In other words, the purpose of state and party patronage needs to be
reoriented, rewarding those who stand up in a sustained manner for peace as
opposed to those who perpetrate violence in pursuit of immediate interests. But
might still not work, when the local and central state belongs to the same
political party with an agenda (see Gujarat 2002). Riots may not then be
prevented in every instance but they can be localized and isolated and
prevented from spreading in many more instances than is the case at present.
Even such coalitions need nurturing and constant repair to make the pieces fit
and work well.
The concern over
international image, which is important for a steady flow of global capital, in
this case is not sufficient to compel cities and towns to close down riot
systems and compete with each other to earn a reputation for probity,
prosperity, stability, and efficiency. For as shown in case of the
Gujarat riots of 2002 these links can be pernicious. Where the previous decade
and a half, expatriate Gujaratis and diasporic Indians, had been investing in
real estate and other businesses in Gujarat, and not to suggest by terrorizing
the Muslim population they hoped to pick up cheap real estate, a large number
among them did supported the BJP and its family of Hindu militant
organizations. This also means that state capacity ought to be measured in how
efficiently a state is able to resolve conflicts before they go beyond
electoral politics.
For as we have seen,
institutional capacity to solve tensions at the point where they originate will
prevent escalation. Given the coalition strategy proposed above it is limited
by the alignment of political and ideological forces at a given time, cannot
guarantee peace, it still can prove to be an important learning process even
when it fails.
In fact a
combination of events thus also brought Pakistan, to the forefront on Monday,
casting light on the complexity of the problem that the United States faces in
attempting to stabilize operations in Afghanistan and pressuring Islamabad to
reassert control over the jihadists operating on its side of the
Afghan-Pakistani border.
In Washington,
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani met with President George W. Bush,
while in Islamabad, U.S. Central Command chief Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey met with
Pakistan’s top generals, Ashfaq Kayani and Tariq Majid. In both negotiations,
tensions ran high, with the Americans warning that they are growing
increasingly impatient with lawlessness on the border and the Pakistanis
replying that they are doing everything within their power to stop it.
Two incidents served
to ratchet tensions even higher as the U.S.-Pakistani talks took place. First,
the government in Islamabad retracted its decision on July 26 to bring the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency under civilian control. The ISI fiasco
helps to explain the jihadists’ ineradicable involvement in Pakistan’s state
structures, since the agency is notorious for having operatives with hidden
links to jihadists. The prospect of bringing the ISI under the civilian
government’s supervision was never actually feasible because the military — the
real source of power in Pakistan — opposed it. Later came news that a U.S.
unmanned aerial vehicle had fired missiles at a religious school in South
Waziristan, killing six civilians on Pakistani soil and fueling Pakistani hostility
toward their own government and the United States.
The ISI incident and
the airstrike exemplify both the internal and the external challenges facing
Pakistan. If it is to rein in the jihadists, Pakistan must consider three basic
strategies for fighting such an insurgency. The first strategy involves using
its military’s brute force to stamp out the threat, as Egypt, Syria and Libya
have done in the past. The second consists of allowing the United States
unilaterally to quell the insurgency, as it has attempted to do in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The third strategy entails trying to resolve the conflict solely
by means of negotiations and diplomacy. These strategies are clearly inadequate
on their own, however, and only a clever combination of negotiation and force
has a chance of arresting the conflict’s downward spiral.
Such a combination of
strategies is precisely what Saudia Arabia employed,
beginning in 2004, to shut down its jihadist insurgency. Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia are drastically different countries, but what they share is the
potential to host thriving Islamist movements, emerging among the Wahhabis in
Saudi Arabia and the Deobandis in Pakistan, that exist at radical variance with
the U.S.-supported, conservative central governments. These religious movements
create a wide social network that lends support to militant jihadist groups
that define themselves in contrast to the regime and the United States.
Saudi Arabia, like
Pakistan, was an ideal breeding ground for jihadist militants, but the Saudis
were able to dampen homegrown militant ideology through a full-fledged security
crackdown enabled by dependable intelligence, under-the-table politicking and
bribes to gain the cooperation of various factions, and deliberate engagement
with the religious establishment to promote nonviolent alternatives. For a
time, the Saudis also sent jihadists to join the fray in Iraq, further
whittling down the movement’s ranks, though the United States soon put a stop
to this practice just as it is attempting to do with the Pakistani militants
funneling into Afghanistan. By 2005, Saudi Arabia had dramatically trimmed its
radical Islamist fringe, with either militants botching their attacks or
security forces pre-empting them.
Yet the Saudi analogy
only goes so far, in fact, it contrasts so starkly as to make the challenges of
Pakistan even clearer. Pakistan’s mountainous terrain makes it difficult to
scour the whole country as easily as Saudi security forces scoured theirs, and
Pakistan never had an official religious hierarchy like the Saudis’ ulema,
capable of exerting organizational control over masses of believers while
working in tandem with the government. Also, crucially, the Saudis had petro-dollars to throw at the problem, while Pakistan must
rely on U.S. aid to fund its civilian activities.
Moreover, while Saudi
Arabia’s jihadist movement emerged out of resentment of U.S. foreign policy,
that policy has a harsh and direct bearing on Pakistanis today, which disposes
them against playing into the United States’ hands. As the United States has
grown more frustrated with Pakistan’s inability to control its rogue elements,
it has taken more strident and independent military actions, occasionally
harming or killing Pakistani civilians and thus generating sharper resistance
within Pakistan. A distinct danger of U.S. military operations in Pakistan is
that as anger with the United States grows, the possibility of driving people
toward sympathizing with the jihadist factions increases.
Furthermore, the
United States has limitations on how much pressure it can apply on Pakistan’s
military. Since the military is the sole guarantor of order in Pakistan, a
nuclear-armed country, the United States needs it to stay in a strong and
stable position. It cannot push too hard to have its way without making the
military vulnerable to reaction by popular forces within Pakistan that oppose
it.
As the U.S. military
draws closer to tying up the loose ends in Iraq, the complications of the task
awaiting it in Afghanistan seem to multiply. Pakistan is the source of much
uncertainty and contingency in this theater, and there is no clear solution to
the mess there. If the United States and its allies are to succeed, they will
have to do so despite exceedingly narrow constraints.
1) The last major
attack in Hyderabad occurred May 18 when Kashmiri militant group
Lashkar-e-Taiba, working with the Student Islamic Movement of India, carried
out a bomb attack against the Mecca Mosque. That attack - reminiscent of
jihadist tactics in Iraq - was revealing of a strategy by these groups to
strike at Muslim targets in an attempt to incite communal riots between Hindus
and Muslims. However, Hyderabad’s Muslim community failed to take the bait and
instead turned increasingly hostile toward these militant groups, further
threatening their support base.
The idea of Muslim ssuspects, attacking fellow Muslims to incite riots is
anomalous in India, though not completely unprecedented. In September 2006, a
series of coordinated explosions killed 37 people and injured more than 125 in
a Muslim cemetery next to a mosque in the northern town of Malegaon (about 180
miles northeast of Mumbai) in the state of Maharashtra. Most of those killed
were Muslim pilgrims who were attending Friday prayers on the Shab-e-Baraat
holy day. After a series of arrests and investigations, Maharashtra police
reported that the attack was the work of the Students Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI). India's Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) then reported in November 2006 that
the main perpetrator of the attack, whose nom de guerre is Shabbir Batterywala, is a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who was working
with SIMI member Raees Ahmad. Another member of SIMI, Noor-ul-Huda, reportedly
admitted after his arrest that he organized the attack.
These militant
Islamist groups have traditionally focused on Hindu targets to provoke
extremist Hindu groups into retaliating against Muslims across India, along the
lines of what happened in 1993 in Mumbai and 2002 in Gujarat when Hindu mobs
went on violent rampages against Muslims, resulting in some of the deadliest
communal riots in India's history. However, Indians have largely become inured
to these militant attacks and have failed to provide the wide-scale, violent
response the Islamist groups hope for.
The lack of a Hindu
response could have led to a shift in thinking among the Kashmiri Islamist
groups operating in India, who might have decided to risk alienating local
support by staging attacks against Muslims in hopes of reigniting Hindu-Muslim
tensions in locations that have a history of deadly communal violence. (It is
important to note that these groups are rooted in Wahhabi doctrine, which
justifies attacking mainstream Barelvi and secular
Muslims.)
1. See Rajat Ganguly, Kin State Intervention in Ethnic Conflicts, New
Delhi, 1998.
2. Judy Barsalou, "Lethal Ethnic Riots: Lessons From India and
Beyond," Special Report 101, United States Institute for Peace, Washington
DC, February 2003, p.1.
3. "Bloody
Aftermath," India Today, December 31,1992,58-61.
4. Smita Narula, "'We Have No Orders to Save You' State
Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat," HRW Report
14, no. 3, Human Rights Watch, April 2002, p.11.
5. National
Commission for Minorities, Second Annual Report, FY 1994-1995, Government of
India, 1997, 111-12.
6. Wilkinson,
"Putting Gujarat in Perspective," Economic and Political Weekly 37,
no. 17, 2002, p. 1579-83.
7. Brass, Theft of an
Idol, Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence, Princeton
University Press, 1997, p.257.
8. Brass, p. 258.
9. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism
Confronts the Secular State, 1993; Nandy, "The
Politics of Secularism and Recovery of Religious Tolerance," in Mirrors of
Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia , ed. Veena Das,
1990, 69-93; Partha Chatterjee, "Secularism and
Toleration," Economic and Political Weekly 29, 1994, 1768-77.
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