It is
painful for all Indians to see a particular part of the country reeling
under assault from violence inspired by a certain religious ideology.
One can be eternally euphemistic in one’s public stances. However, this
commentator believes that it is time now to take the bull by the horns
and address the threat that confronts India by its proper appellation –
Islamic jihad, fuelled and financed by Pakistan and several Islamic
countries in West Asia, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. Let us be
specific – the land of the Ibn Sauds and the land of Khomeini march in
tandem to the call of Islam.
Indian
citizens have been exposed to the Kashmir inferno for quite some time
and are now well aware of what is happening in that part of the country
and are reasonably sensitised to the issues involved, as well as the
forces at play there.
However,
West Bengal is another cup of tea. Most Indians would barely be
conversant about the developments in the state in recent decades. The
general overview the country has of West Bengal (WB) is its relentless
(and apparently irreversible) economic decline and the permanent chaos
that marks life in that part of the world. Sporadically, Indians outside
WB take note of the latent cultural and literary talent of the
Bengalis. However, here too, it is largely the probashi (expatriate)
Bengalis who hit the headlines with positive news. The WB Bongs,
generally, are harbingers of bad tidings.
In the case
of the existential threat that WB is facing from deadly forces, the
rest of the country is almost clueless. This analyst has written earlier
about the grave danger that confronts WB at this juncture, and India
in the final analysis. Some other writers have also discussed the
issue.
The
country’s mainstream media, or MSM, particularly the English-language
one, is conspicuously silent about the periodic outbursts of communal
violence in WB. And, again, making a departure from “socially correct”
terminology, it must be put on record that the violence is almost always
directed primarily at Hindus, who are at the receiving end of the
lathis and swords and worse. Certain areas are notorious trouble-spots –
these include Malda, Murshidabad, Dinajpur and North 24 Parganas, to
mention the prominent ones.
All these
are Muslim-majority districts, with Malda having more than 52 per cent
Muslims as per the official Census data of 2011. It is an open secret
among the military and paramilitary forces that the ground reality may
be different. Younger officers make no bones about sharing their
experience on this issue, including the most uncomfortable scenarios.
This pertains to the situation in certain parts of WB that have become
virtual no-go areas for the local law-and-order forces.
In any
case, the police in WB have been soft, for many decades, on illegal
immigration from Bangladesh and rampant crime in the border areas. The
Communist Party of India (Marxist) started this policy of turning a
blind eye to these issues for more than three decades. The All India
Trinamool Congress (TMC) has merely gone ahead and fine-tuned this
abdication of state responsibility. The strategy of the present WB Chief
Minister is very simple, though it may be toxic for the nation’s
security – if the TMC can routinely garner the bloc votes of the
Muslims, she can win a disproportionately large number of seats in the
constituencies that have multiple candidates trying to tap the residual
non-TMC voter base. Here, too, she counts on the former lumpen CPM cadre
who have switched their loyalties to Mamata’s party.
Of course,
the TMC candidates need not all be Muslims – all they have to do is to
keep the Imams and the Muslim seniors in their support base happy. In
contrast, the Hindu electorate has no effective leadership or programme.
The residual influence of the CPM’s now-discredited ideology ensures
that the West Bengal Hindu is still hesitant to combat Islamic
theological politics in a determined manner.
To return
to the theme of the relentless attempt to use demography as a political
weapon, it is worthwhile to look at the way Yugoslavia was destroyed. I
studied this and explained it to my readers in the article of January
2016 cited earlier. It is not necessary to repeat all the facts in that
essay, but it would be helpful if the process of a demographic coup
d’etat is spelt out once again.
The paradigm works out as follows:
The first
step is to ensure a major change in the demographic composition of a
province or part of a federal country. This is effected through
immigration (mostly illegal or sub rosa) of a particular group
(religious, ethnic or linguistic) from a neighbouring country or through
significantly higher birth rates domestically.
The next
stage is to cause law and order/public security problems in the relevant
areas for the federal/central authorities and administration of the
country.
This is
followed by the terrorisation or even subjugation of the erstwhile
majority (now reduced to a minority). Thereafter, the victims are
compelled to leave their original homelands, as was done in Kashmir in
1990 and as may be attempted in WB in the next few years, if the TMC
continues in power.
The objective is to give rise to civil-war conditions or tensions in the province/region.
Now comes
the very sensitive part of the exercise. This involves the
internationalisation of the conflict and the involvement of other
regional and global powers.
Historical rivalries are also leveraged to invite physical foreign intervention.
In the case
of Kosovo, in the final act, the international Islamic lobby was
utilised to finance insurrection and procure arms to combat the
federal/central forces, as well as to also canvas the secessionist
“cause” in international organisations and platforms.
Our babus
and netas on Raisina Hill are not particularly well-versed in history.
Otherwise, they would have observed that the above process was also
followed, more or less exactly, by Nazi Germany when it destroyed
Czechoslovakia in 1938, through the terrorist violence of the minority
Sudeten Germans in the western region of that model democratic country. A
minority that works from inside to destroy a federal country can also
be a linguistic/cultural one and not necessarily a religious one.
In the case
of Germany, the people of that country seemed to have learned their
lesson after their catastrophic defeat in the Second World War. On the
contrary, international political Islam has learnt nothing from the
losses it has had in the last twelve-odd centuries. If anything, the
defeats and debacles, whether in Seville or in Poitiers or Vienna, are
looked up to for inspiration. Just search for the Islamic laments on the
fall of Seville and Cordoba and you will get an idea about what drives
Islamic revanchism.
In this
convoluted intellectual war that political Islam is waging, Bharat or
Hind, to be more precise, occupies a very special place. The
Lutyens-zone secularists can cry themselves hoarse from the roof-tops
that this is all a conspiracy of “right-wing Hindu nationalists”, but
Ghazwa-e-Hind is not a fantasy conjured up by some “bhakts” in various
parts of the country. There is sufficient evidence that the Pakistani
armed forces teach this doctrine in some form or the other in their
courses.
There is
also credible feedback that some Islamic places of worship in India have
also started mentioning this concept during their prayer meetings.
Tarek Fatah’s recent essay on the subject created an uproar in the desi
secularist circles, but the powers that be in Delhi would be most unwise
if they dismiss Fatah’s well-meant warning to India.
Returning
to the latest developments in WB, what should be the response of the
union government? The Bengal Governor’s perfectly justified decision to
ask the state administration to explain the riots and violence in a
strategically located area and to take adequate measures to protect all
citizens seems to have touched a raw nerve in the Chief Minister. She
has stooped to new lows in her reaction and this probably shows that she
is on very weak ground this time.
Admittedly,
WB is not yet ripe for President’s Rule, since there is no overall
breakdown of law and order throughout the state. However, this writer is
in favour of invoking the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in
WB after declaring certain districts as “disturbed areas”. The centre
has full powers since 1972 to declare certain areas as “disturbed” and
there is a clear need to categorise at least four or five districts of
WB as “disturbed”. Raisina Hill must summon the necessary resolve to
take this step; just the invocation of the Act and the categorisation of
certain areas as “disturbed” will suffice at this stage. WB is not as
terminally sick as the Kashmir Valley and this writer’s surmise is that
necessary corrective measures, as advocated here, will work now. If
Delhi hums and haws, Bengal will need much more stringent and drastic
action in the years to come."
by
No comments:
Post a Comment