19/01/90: When Kashmiri Pandits fled Islamic terror

First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller on German intellectuals who failed to stand up to Nazi terror. Applies to our intellectuals too who have spectacularly failed to raise their voice against Islamic terror.


'Be One With Us, Run, or Die...'

Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu & Kashmir's secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.

In the following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir Valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference Government abdicating all responsibilities of the state. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans.

Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.

Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs force people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.

Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley with a recorded cultural and civilisational history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out. Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more lucid: "Be one with us, run, or die!"

'Asi Gachchi Pakistan, Batao Roas te Batanev San...'

Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan arrives to take charge as Governor of Jammu & Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling Government has all but ceased to exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect.

Throughout the day, Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.

As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: "Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai" (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); "Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa" (What do we want here? Rule of Islam); "Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san" (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the Srinagar High Court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill.

In villages and towns across Kashmir Valley, terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no Government worth its name, the administration having collapsed and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to desperation.

And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the Valley take a painful decision: To flee their homeland to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes place a 20th century Exodus.

Pandits don't live here anymore, the Valley has been cleansed of Hindus...


Srinagar, January 19, 2012. There are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Kashmir Valley; they don't live here anymore. You can find them in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. At least 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits who fled their home and hearth in 1990 have been reduced to living the lives of refugees in their own country; many have since migrated to foreign shores.

Of those who remain in India, two-thirds are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in other cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty, dependent on Government dole and charity. In these 22 years, an entire generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still remains a part of their country.

A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found high incidence of 'economic distress, stress induced diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.' Statistics reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.

And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public memory.
An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim they are the final arbiters of Jammu & Kashmir's destiny. A part of India's cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India's civilisational history has been erased.

Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' We would have made films with horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting the smallest detail.

But, this tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India's Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to India's Hindu civilisation.

Therefore, the Government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have "migrated on their own" and their "displacement (is) self-imposed"; the National Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened is 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though facts add up to no less than that, never mind that at least 300,000 lives have been destroyed.

And, our jholawallah brigade of secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.

Today, on January 19, the 22nd anniversary of the forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India's wretched history of secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation has paid at the altar of appeasement because the Indian state has, and continues to, toe the line of least resistance.

(This is a slightly modified/updated version of the first of a two-part essay that appeared on Rediff.com on January 19, 2005.)

Madman on the loose

Ahmadinejad repeats his rant!

On Thursday, Iran's Islamofascist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in full flow at the UN General Assembly which is currently in session.

Misusing the platform that is provided to all member-states of the UN, Ahmadinejad delivered, what can only be described as a hate-laden speech, spitting venom at the Christian West, Jewish Israel and 'non-believers' belonging to all other faiths.

He was not speaking on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran alone, but the entire ummah when he

. charged Americans with stage-managing 9/11
. accused the US of conniving with Osama bin Laden
. questioned the veracity of the Holocaust
. blamed 'Zionists' for the woes of the world
. virtually called for the extermination of all those he listed as foes.

A madman on the loose is a threat to the world. A madman who could soon have nuclear weapons in his arsenal is a danger to humankind and human civilisation.

Only those given to unmentionable perversions of the mind and body would find merit in Ahmadinejad's bilious speech which epitomises Islamofascism.

Those nations which value democracy, freedom, liberty and peace would shame and shun a rabid pariah like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran is welcome to have him as its President. The mullahs of Iran are welcome to their favourite boy.

But the world, including India, must deny him -- and those who support him or endorse his rant -- both legitimacy and space.

[Official version of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech in the UN General Assembly.]

Radical Islamism Down Under

Muslims must resist democracy, says Hizb ut Tahrir

The various statements and speeches made at the ‘Uprising in the Muslim World’ conference organised by Hizb ut Tahrir in Sydney on July 3, 2011, provide an insight into the radical Islamist mind that has come to dominate community discourse ever since this year’s ‘Arab Spring’. Clearly, the dislodging of long-time rulers in Tunisia and Egypt, and the effort to squeeze out the Presidents of Syria, Yemen and Libya, are not seen as the first step towards establishing democracy, but the restoration of ‘Khilafat’.

Community leaders aligned with Hizb ut Tahrir spoke on ''The Muslim World in the 20th century: Totalitarian Western oppression'' and ''Western endeavours to frustrate the Islamic revival''. The official statement issued by Hizb ut Tahrir says among others, the following point was ‘established’:

“The Muslim World wants Islam, not secular liberalism. The spin to the contrary is persistent yet hollow. Calls for ‘democracy’ have been misconstrued by some and hijacked by others as being calls for liberal democracy as we know it in the West. They may be such for the small minority of secular elite in the Muslim World, but for the vast majority of Muslims they merely represent calls against dictatorship and for representative and accountable governance. Public opinion in the Muslim World on the role of Islam in society is not a controversial matter at all. All those who are politically active on the grassroots level, as we are across the entire Muslim World, know that the people en masse are in favour of change on the basis of Islam.”

Hizb ut Tahrir is proscribed in Germany for preaching and practising anti-Semitism. Russia declared it a criminal organisation in 1999. The group rejects democracy and urges Muslims in Australia to boycott elections. A similar stance is adopted by the group in Britain.

A perusal of what was said at the Sydney conference will show how utterly wrong the Left-liberal commentariat is in its assessment of the Arab street. But the Left-libbers won’t admit that they have got it all horribly wrong. As is their wont, they will insist that they are right, never mind the evidence to the contrary.

Ironically, it is the Left-liberal intelligentsia’s adoring indulgence of their excesses that has emboldened radical Islamists around the world, including in Australia. The Left-libbers’ urge to rationalise Islamist extremities and justify their outrageous utterances as well as deeds has led us to a situation where we can only watch in horror as the vitriolic campaign of hate of groups like Hizb ut Tahrir gather momentum and gain traction.

Australia is not alien to such provocative Islamist utterances. The former ‘Grand Mufti of Australia’, Sheikh Taj al-din al-Hilali, wanted for inciting terrorism in the country of his origin, Egypt, is given to describing women who do not wear the burqa as “uncovered meat” and blaming them for “enticing rapists”.

On one occasion, while addressing the faithful after Friday prayers at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, Sheikh Taj al-din al-Hilali rose to the defence of a serial rapist, Bilal Skaf, asserting, “If I come across a crime of rape, kidnap and violation of honour, I would discipline the man and teach him a lesson in morals and I would order the woman to be arrested and jailed for life. Why? Because, if she hadn’t left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it... If one puts uncovered meat out on the street or the footpath or the garden or the backyard without a cover, then the cats come and eat it. Is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?”

[Related article: Like 'uncovered meat']

Also see my earlier post: Veil of darkness

Taliban's barbarism in name of Islam

What awaits Afghanistan

The August 9 issue of Time featured a cover story on the plight of women in those parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban enforce their barbaric interpretation of sharia’h. The magazine had a shocking picture on the cover: That of 18-year-old Aisha whose nose and ears were sliced off on the instructions of the local Taliban commander. Aisha was punished for running away from an abusive husband and parents-in-law.

UPDATE
The Taliban publicly flogged and then executed a pregnant Afghan widow by emptying three shots into her head for alleged adultery. Bibi Sanubar, 35, was kept in captivity for three days before she was shot dead in a public trial on Sunday by a local Taliban commander in the Qadis district of the rural western province Badghis. The Taliban accused Sanubar of having an "illicit affair" that left her pregnant.

Aisha’s story is symbolic of persecution of girls and women by the Taliban in the name of Islam. There are innumerable examples of young girls, some just past their puberty, being forced into marriage with members of the Taliban militia to serve as no more than sex slaves for the adherents of Deobandi Islam. Woe betide those girls who try to escape from their life of forced misery.

Jihad Watch provides a glimpse of what it calls “Unspeakable barbarism among the Taliban, the students of Islam.”
Time has raised a fundamental question: What happens if we leave Afghanistan?
That question has been posed from the American perspective, reflecting American concerns over US President Barack Hussein Obama’s plan to pull out troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. But it’s a question that should really bother democracies across the world. The issue raised by Time has several aspects involving the liberty, rights and dignity of Afghans, especially women.

If the Taliban were to regain power in Aghanistan, as it seems likely with the US preparing to hand over control over Kabul to the Generals of Pakistan, then all those who claim to stand for freedom, liberty and dignity would stand indicted of complicity in this crime.

The years when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan will be remembered for the contempt with which Mullah Omar and his men trampled upon women’s rights. Not only were young and old women made to disappear under burqas, they were virtually banished to the darkest corners of their homes. Girls were prohibited from attending school. In the joyless world of ‘pure Islam’, along with music and art, women’s rights disappeared to as they were deemed to be ‘un-Islamic’.

That period of terror came to be symbolised by the public execution of two women in Kabul’s football stadium.

That was in the past. As for the future, a glimpse of what awaits Afghanistan has been provided by AP in this news despatch from Kabul on August 16:

Taliban stone couple for adultery in Afghanistan

By AMIR SHAH

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Taliban militants stoned a young couple to death for adultery after they ran away from their families in northern Afghanistan, officials said Monday. It was the first confirmed stoning in Afghanistan since the fall of Taliban rule in the 2001 US-led invasion.

When the Islamist extremists ruled Afghanistan, women were not allowed to leave their houses without a male guardian, and public killings for violations of their harsh interpretation of the Quran were common.

This weekend's stoning appeared to arise from an affair between a married man and a single woman in Kunduz province's Dasht-e-Archi district. The woman, Sadiqa, was 20 years old and engaged to another man, said the Kunduz provincial police chief, Gen. Abdul Raza Yaqoubi. Her lover, 28-year-old Qayum, left his wife to run away with her, and the two had holed up in a friend's house five days ago, said district Government head, Mohammad Ayub Aqyar.

They were discovered by Taliban operatives on Sunday and stoned to death in front a crowd of about 150 men, Aqyar said. First the woman was brought out and stoned, then the man a half an hour later, Aqyar said. He decried the punishment, which he said was ordered by two local Taliban commanders.

The ancient practice of death by stoning has been abandoned in all but a handful of countries. It is still a legal punishment in some countries, like Iran, which justify it under Sharia’h, or Islamic law.

Last month, Iran's religious authorities called off the planned stoning of a woman convicted of cheating on her husband. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani's sentence -- which would have been Iran's first stoning since 2008 -- was lifted following a campaign around the world.

Two witnesses to the horrific double murder in the name of Islam told the BBC that the Taliban asked the villagers to attend the stoning through an announcement on loudspeakers in the mosque. "There was a big crowd of people... We were also asked to throw stones. After a while, the Taliban left. The woman was dead but the man was still alive... Some Taliban then came and shot him three times. The Taliban warned villagers if anyone does anything un-Islamic, this will be their fate.''

Anybody for ‘good’ Taliban?

Kerala’s slide into radical Islamism

Junking Indian identity for Arab garb!

There’s nothing surprising about the rash-like emergence of violent Islamism in Kerala. God’s Own Country, as Kerala was known for its natural splendour and cultural heritage, is rapidly turning into the springboard of jihad in India. This hasn’t happened overnight, nor has Islamism spread its tentacles over the past few months to make its presence felt in the most shocking manner: The attack on a professor for allegedly denigrating Islam has served to highlight the seeping terror unleashed by homegrown jihadis.

The rain-gorged verdant plains and hills along the lush Malabar coast are fast turning into the billious green of radical Islam. Roadside brick-and-mortar glass-fronted shrines dedicated to Virgin Mary with flickering candles lit by the devout and ancient temples with amazing hand-crafted brassware and bell metal utensils that once celebrated the Hinduness of Kerala are overshadowed by spanking new mosques that seem to be mushrooming all over the place. Not only are they built with Arab money — donations by Muslim Malayalees working in Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, add up to only a fraction of the cost — but they also symbolise the increasing influence of Arab ‘culture’, which is largely about visible manifestations of Islam and Islamism, that threatens to stamp out Kerala’s rich indigenous culture rooted in India’s civilisational past.

Huge billboards, advertising ‘Arab Pardha’ in English and Arabic, now jostle for space along with those advertising jewellery, new apartment blocks and investment schemes. The ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are illustrated with larger than life images of women clad in head-to-toe burqas: They look shapeless and formless, their identity smothered by black fabric and their eyes barely visible through slits. “Arab Pardha”, declares one billboard, “All pious women should wear it.” The copywriter has it all wrong; it should have read, “All pious women should disappear behind it.” For, that’s what the burqa is meant for — to make women disappear, make them invisible, deny them the right to exist as individuals. Any argument to the contrary is spurious and any religious edict cited in support of this grotesque suppression of individual liberty is specious.

But there is a larger purpose behind propagating the ‘Arab Pardha', or purdah, which is insidious and frightening for those who value freedom. This is one of the many instruments adopted by Islamists to push their agenda of radicalising Muslims and imposing their worldview on others without so much as even a token resistance by either civil society or the state. The darkness of the world in which they live is now being forced on us. Decades ago Nirad C Chaudhuri was to record in his celebrated essay, The Continent of Circe, “Whenever in the streets of Delhi I see a Muslim woman in a burqa, the Islamic veil, I apostrophise her mentally: ‘Sister! you are the symbol of your community in India.’ The entire body of Muslims are under a black veil.” The Continent of Circe was first published in 1966; forty-one years later, the community wants the black veil, the ‘Arab Pardha’, to envelope ‘secular’ India.

Kerala’s ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are a taunting reminder that in ‘secular’ India we must remain mute witness to the communalisation of culture, politics and society by peddlers of Islamism and its offensive agenda that is rooted in the most obnoxious interpretation of what Mohammed preached millennia ago. Even the economy has not been spared: Islamic banking, Islamic investments and Islamic financial instruments have surreptitiously entered this country under the benign gaze of an indulgent UPA Government whose Prime Minister spends sleepless nights agonising over the plight of Islamic terrorists and demands that all Government initiatives must be anchored in his perverse ‘Muslims first’ policy. The Prime Minister’s admirers claim he is a “sensitive person” who is easily moved by the “plight of the helpless”. Had he been moved by the pathetic sight of a Muslim woman, as much an Indian as all of us, forced to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’, his claimed sensitivities would have carried conviction. But such expression of sympathy, if not resolve to combat the insidious gameplan of Islamists inspired by hate-mongers and preachers of intolerance who draw their sustenance from the fruit of the poison tree of Wahaabism that flourishes in the sterile sands of Arabia, would demand a great degree of intellectual integrity and moral courage. The Prime Minister may be an “accidental politician”, but he is a practitioner of politics of cynicism. For that, you neither need intellectual integrity nor moral courage.

Every time there is criticism of the Islamic veil, which comes in various forms of indignity — the hijab, the niqab, the burqa, the chador — whether from within or outside the Muslim community, we hear the frayed argument: It’s a matter of personal choice; it’s an expression of religiosity; it’s culture-specific; it’s a minority community’s right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. All that and more is balderdash, not least because there is no Quranic injunction that mandates a Muslim woman to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’. Given the nature of the community’s social hierarchy and the grip of the mullahs, rarely does a woman protest, leave alone rebel. Those who do, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian activist whose book The Caged Virgin provides a revealing insight into Islamism’s warped religio-political ideology, are hounded and live in perpetual fear of losing their lives. Blasphemy is not tolerated by those who live in a world darker than the darkest burqa, a world in which even Barbie wears the Islamic veil lest her plastic modesty be compromised.

But this is not only about the denial of an individual’s liberty, nor is it about the suppression of human rights in the name of faith. It is about the in-your-face declaration of Islamists that they can have their way without so much as lifting their little finger. It is a laughable sight to watch Malayalees trying to navigate crowded streets in Kochi wearing white Arab gelabayas, the loose kaftan like dress that along with the kafeyah — or ‘Arab rumal’ — has become a symbol of trans-national radical Islam, their ‘Arab Pardha’ clad wives and daughters in tow. But it is not a laughable matter.

Increasingly, we are witnessing a shifting of loyalties from Malabar to Manipur. Faith in India is being transplanted by belief in Arabia. This should alarm those who believe in the Indian nation as a secular entity.

Sinister face of Islamism

Horrific bloodshed in Sufi shrine, mosques

Muslims kill Muslims in name of Islam!

On July 2, suicide bombers attacked Daata Darbar, an ancient Sufi shrine in Lahore, killing at least 44 people who had come to seek blessings. For the first time in 927 years, langar was stopped at the shrine. Some news reports say there were three suicide bombers, others say there were two.

Earlier, on May 28, two Ahmedi mosques in Lahore were attacked by suicide terror squads, owing allegiance to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, resulting in the death of at least 95 worshippers who had gathered for Friday prayers.

There have been similar terror attacks on mosques and shrines in Pakistan, including a mosque in Rawalpindi frequented by Army personnel and their families -- a 10 year old boy was killed, along with scores, in that attack.

Instead of looking within and coming to grips with the grim fact of Islamist terrorists turning on Muslims in Pakistan, most Pakistanis and the Government of that country continue to live in denial. The Jamaat-e-Islami blames Americans and Blackwater for killings by Islamist terrorists. Others blame India!

Arifa Moen, 32, a teacher in the central city of Multan, told the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times: "Washington is encouraging Indians and Jews to carry out attacks in Pakistan." If a teacher has such perverse views, what will Pakistani children learn? And who will save Pakistan's children from the monsters who kill so remorselessly?

And while denial rules the collective Pakistan conscience, the terrible slaying of Muslims by Muslims continues, ironically in the name of Islam.

Worse, if you dare criticise the outrages, you are labelled an Islamophobe.

Here's my commentary on the issue:

"We Muslims are one community... (my goal was to) injure people or kill people... One has to understand where I’m coming from, because… I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.” It’s unlikely the American judge presiding over Faisal Shahzad’s arraignment was quite prepared for such a candid admission of Islamism über alles by the would-be Times Square bomber. But this is not the first time that the jihadi impulse has been so baldly stated by those who believe that bloodshed serves the cause of Islam — the more horrific the bloodletting, the greater the piety of the perpetrator of what others consider to be both a crime and a sin.

The Fort Hood killer had no qualms about killing fellow soldiers; the underpants bomber was prepared to die to bring down a trans-Atlantic passenger plane, and Faisal Shahzad was comfortable with the idea of blowing up innocent people in New York’s fashionable Times Square. Before them, Mohammed Atta al-Sayeed had led a dozen hijackers on a suicide mission to terrorise America; in London, young Muslims of Pakistani origin had stuffed their backpacks with explosives and pulled the trigger in crowded compartments of underground trains.

We in India have known for long what the West has discovered to its horror after the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were felled on 9/11. Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s sophistry was useful distraction from the Muslim League’s coarse politics of separatism premised on the fundamentals of Islamic exclusivism, intolerance bordering on hatred of the ‘other’, the ummah’s presumed right to rule the world and hoist the banner of Islam atop every capital.

Tragic as the violence that accompanied partition may have been, far worse has since been witnessed. Islamists from Pakistan have struck again and again, in more ways than one, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. When excessive attention is focussed on 26/11 because it was jihad brought live on television screens, their other crimes tend to be glossed over. For instance the ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Valley. Or the subversion of the Indian Muslim’s mind.

Jinnah was given to lofty speech if not noble thought, but the lesser among the ranks must have sniggered when he declared on August 11, 1947, in a speech that is often quoted by those untutored in Islamism: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state... You will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

That state is today rapidly sinking into the quagmire of Islamist fanaticism. Pakistan’s citizens have neither ceased to be Hindus and Muslims “in the political sense” nor has the Pakistani state steered clear of religion. The degeneration began within months of the Quaid-e-Azam’s death; a decrepit, derelict Islamic Republic of Pakistan, variously described as the “most dangerous place in the world” and an “international headache”, is now engulfed in the very jihad which it thought would destroy India.

Jinnah was able to wrench out of India what he despairingly (some would say, disparagingly) described as “a moth-eaten Pakistan”; what remains of Pakistan is being gnawed at from within by those who are so consumed by hate that they find the idea of Muslims cohabiting with Muslims an intolerable idea. Nothing else explains why suicide bombers should target worshippers at Daata Darbar, an acient Sufi shrine in Lahore, drenching a saint’s dargah with the blood of the innocent last Thursday, or kill believers gathered at a Rawalpindi mosque. Since by law Ahmediyas are not considered to be Muslims in Pakistan and treated as heretics by mullahs, their slaughter while at prayer, as it happened on May 28, is considered to be nothing extraordinary in the ‘land of the pure’.

So, when Faisal Shahzad says, “One has to understand where I’m coming from,” he means one has to look at Pakistan to understand what drives Pakistanis to kill with such ferocity and cite Islam as the reason. But Pakistan alone does not breed such monsters; look around and you will find that rare is the Muslim-majority country untainted by the violence propagated by Islamism and perpetrated by Islamists. Secular Egypt thought it would render the seeds of Islamism planted by Syed Qutb sterile by executing the man who called for “offensive jihad” as the true assertion of the Islamic identity. But the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen has flourished, carrying forth Qutb’s message that “true Islam will transform every aspect of society, eliminating everything non-Muslim”, and that Islam is the “ultimate solution”.

It would be a folly to believe that every Muslim subscribes to Qutb’s interpretation of Islam or that behind every Muslim name lurks a terrorist waiting for an opportunity to strike. For evidence of the deep schism that sets Faisal Shahzad and his ilk apart from those who just want to get on with their lives and live in peace we just need to look at Pakistan. For every suicide bomber there are thousands who are repelled by his act of terror, who weep at the sight of so much blood being shed for nothing. Muslims in Mumbai, let us not forget, refused to allow the bodies of Ajmal Kasab’s slain colleagues to be buried in their graveyards. Such examples abound.

Yet, it would do us no good if we were to gloss over the reality. Islamofascism exists and those who subscribe to it are unfortunately also those who are fashioning policy and influencing society in Islamic countries — individually and collectively. The Organisation of Islamic Conference bears evidence to this: Every time it demands the criminalisation of criticism of Islamist excesses and crimes against humanity because it allegedly “defames Islam”, it strengthens those very elements whom it should be condemning before anybody else does so but won’t because it conflates Islamism and Islam and views the former as a triumphalist, faith-driven assertion of the latter.

It’s easy to demonise critics of Islamism as ‘Islamophobes’ and call for global legislation to curb free speech. But if conceded, this will embolden the Faisal Shahzads and the suicide bombers and the fanatics for whom hate is a virtue and tolerance a sin. Rather than lash out at those who find Islamism abhorrent, its champions should ask themselves a simple question: After “eliminating everything non-Muslim”, what shall happen to ‘everything Muslim’? The terrible sight of Muslims killing Muslims in Pakistan, which was supposed to be the homeland of the Indian sub-continent’s Muslims, should provide a clue to the answer to that question.

[The comment originally appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on June 4, 2010. (c)]

Thought police are powerless

Why ban doesn't work on the Internet!

There was great alarm and panic in Twitterworld across the Radcliffe Line on Friday morning when journalists, not all of them Pakistanis, found they could not log on to www.twitter.com. With Facebook and YouTube officially banned, and a mysterious disruption in BlackBerry services, they were appalled by the possibility of being denied access to Twitterworld where tweets are not just about what’s happening, but what’s happening around you.

The uninitiated may be forgiven for believing that Twitterworld is where you discover the fads and fancies of celebrities and tweeting is no more than social-networking; tweeple not given to frivolity of the variety that got Mr Shashi Tharoor into trouble with the fuddy-duddies in the Congress are increasingly using this new media platform for exchanging information and ideas and instant micro-blogging. Even before a story becomes breaking news on television channels, it is out there via a 140-character tweet. More importantly, a lot of stuff that does not find space in newspapers and news shows finds its way into Twitterworld: Dissemination is instant, without barriers and free of ‘editing’. It was, therefore, not surprising that there should have been alarm and panic when journalists in Pakistan found www.twitter.com being more difficult than it is on certain bad days.

Thankfully, the glitch proved to be temporary: Had Twitter too been banned by Pakistani authorities, it would have meant another window to the world being shut. Those who do not have to worry about their Governments snooping on them in the virtual world of the Internet, or are fortunate enough to live in liberal democracies with open, plural societies, will never be able to gauge the importance of any of the new media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogspot and WordPress, to name only a few, for those who find themselves saddled with regimes that claim to be ‘democratic’ but lack the moral courage to uphold the two essential values that define a democracy: Freedom of speech and personal liberty. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogspot and WordPress acquire a new meaning and a vastly different purpose in countries like Pakistan, Iran and China where they afford their users an exhilarating sense of freedom otherwise denied by prevailing political realities and social circumstances.

When the state blocks access to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogspot, WordPress and other such Websites, its purpose is to both play thought police as well as curb the human urge for freedom and liberty which, if allowed to take form and shape, can pose a threat to the oppressive ruling elite. But if technology is open to subversion by a repressive state, the repression is open to subversion by the very people whom the state seeks to control and dominate. Just as there is software which blocks access to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogspot and WordPress — and, in some countries, Wikipedia, Google and related services — there are proxy servers and ways and means of beating the ban.

The Communist Party of China loves to believe that the Chinese in mainland China do not have access to Facebook (and other blogging sites). The truth, however, is far removed from this belief. Similarly, dissident Iranians regularly work around officially blocked and banned sites to send out information about what’s happening in the land of the ayatollahs and their chosen rage boy called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Within hours of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority implementing the order of the Lahore High Court banning Facebook — and later YouTube — because a group of Islamist lawyers insisted these sites hosted “sacrilegious” and “derogatory” content, tech-savvy young Pakistanis abroad were tweeting to Pakistanis at home how to defy the ban.

That could be the reason for Friday’s snag in Twitter services, although applications like TweetDeck remained unaffected. Possibly the task of blocking a service accessible through multiple applications proved to be Herculean for telecom service providers. Or the fear of upsetting millions of young men and women in a country with 20 million Internet users may have held their hand. The good news, as of now, is that Twitter is working in Pakistan. The ban on Facebook and YouTube remains, but it is most likely proving notional. As one Pakistani tweeted: “What’s common to Facebook and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba?” and then replied in jest, “They are both banned in Pakistan, but Pakistanis can still find them if they want to!”

The issue, however, is less to do with the absurd order of the Lahore High Court and the knee-jerk reaction of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority — obviously at the behest of the Government headed by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, a deceitful though effete politician — and more about taking recourse to proscription as a means of perpetuating thought control and suppressing freedom of speech. In Pakistan and other Islamic countries, Islamists and fanatics unite in seeking to deny co-religionists the right to disagree and express dissent on matters of faith. The concept of blasphemy, which should really be restricted to believers of the faith that has been blasphemed, has now been expanded to include those who subscribe to other faiths or to no faith at all.

Hence, we have now reached a stage where mullahs in Pakistan feel emboldened enough to declare that American cartoonist Molly Norris is guilty of committing ‘blasphemy’ by creating a Facebook page for ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’ last Thursday and, therefore, deserves to die. That Ms Norris has denied the allegation — “Hello, I never created a Facebook page for EDMD. A stranger to me did so. Thank you, Molly” she wrote on her webpage — and that it is possible for anybody to open a page on Facebook or upload a video on YouTube under an assumed name is of little or no consequence to mullahs who in all probability do not know the difference between a mouse and a keyboard but wield terrifying power in this day and age.

It could be argued that the Pakistani authorities were wise in taking pre-emptive action rather than allow the mullahs to take to the streets and run amok as they did in 2005 following the contrived controversy over the alleged lampooning of Prophet Mohammed by cartoonists in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. More importantly, it could be pointed out, and justifiably so, that we in India, a country which takes pride in portraying itself as a democracy with a liberal, open society, are really not better off: After all, our Government too is given to banning books, films and Websites that are perceived to be ‘offensive’ to communities, especially the religious minorities. Our mullahs are no less vicious and their mindset no less regressive than mullahs in Pakistan or elsewhere.

Technology, however, is proving to be a great leveller. It is easy to ban books and films and proscribe publications. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ban Websites and digital platforms. That is today’s reality and we might as well learn to live with it. We can’t demand freedom of speech and freedom of faith without conceding the freedom to offend; ideas must be contested with ideas and not sought to be stamped out by bogus decrees. To refuse to accept this fact would be to under-estimate the power of technology — that would be both foolish and dangerous.

[This appeared as Edit Page main article in The Pioneer on May 22, 2010.]

For women, eyes must be covered

The joyless world of Deobandi fatwas

Is it necessary for a woman’s eyes to be covered while in observance of purdah? Is it necessary for her hands to be covered while in observance of purdah? Is it necessary for her feet to be covered while in observance of purdah?

The best purdah for a woman is that the palms and no part of her body and adornments are exposed, ie, the whole body is covered from head to toe. If it is possible to see through the purdah, then the eyes also should be covered... (Fatwa: 1587/1330=L/1429)

Can women wear gents clothes? Is it permissible for women to wear jeans and T-shirts?

There are some Hadith that relate curse for such women who adopt the resemblance of men. Therefore, wearing clothes of men is not correct for women. (Fatwa: 771/730=B)

Can women use perfume or ittar because they get more sweating (pasina)? Can they use or Islam doesn’t give permission to use?

Women can use perfume provided they are not passing by non-mahram in this state. While going out of house using aromatic perfume is not lawful. One should avoid using such perfumes which contain alcohol. (Fatwa: 604/L=212/tl=1431)

Is it allowed for a Muslim woman to cut and colour her hair for her husband? Is it allowed for a Muslim woman to do such style as Western woman for her husband?

It is unlawful and haraam for a woman to cut the hair of her head (even) though for her husband. But, she can colour it with colours other than black. The dye should not be thick having layers which may prevent water to reach to the surface of the hair. Imitating the Western-styled women and adopting their resemblance in matters against sharia’h is unlawful. It is not lawful even for husband. (Fatwa: 1347/1347=M/1430)

I would like to know if it is permissible for a Muslimah to work as a translator for a tribunal.

It is not a good thing for women to do jobs in offices. They will have to face strange men (non-mahram) though in veil. She will have to talk and deal with others which is fitna (evil). A father is committed to provide maintenance to his daughter and a husband is asked to provide maintenance to his wife. So, there is no need for women to do jobs which always pose harm and mischief. (Fatwa: 691/636=D/1429)

Can Muslim women in India do Government or private jobs? Shall their salary be halaal or haraam?

It is unlawful for Muslim women to do job in Government or private institutions where men and women work together and women have to talk with men frankly and without veil. (Fatwa: 577/381/L=1431)

These are but a few fatwas issued by the learned muftis, the ulema, the scholars who teach young men with impressionable minds the real, true meaning of Islam and how it governs the daily lives of the faithful. And they have been issued by Darul Uloom, Deoband. More precisely, they have been issued by Darul Ifta, which according to this Islamic seminary at Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, the second largest in the world after Cairo’s Al Azhar, “is one of the most significant departments of Darul Uloom” to which “people from across the world pose questions on religious and social matters”.

We are further informed that “Darul Uloom has issued fatwas from its inception but when questions started coming in bulk and it was hard for the teachers to reply them in their part time, Darul Uloom set up this department (Darul Ifta) in 1892”. Darul Ifta has so far issued “more than seven lakh fatwas”. The department claims, and we have no reason to disbelieve the learned men (they have to be men as women are not deemed to be learned enough to decide on theological issues; they can merely ask and must abide by the response) that fatwas issued by Darul Uloom are held in “high esteem in and outside the country; besides the masses, the law courts in the country also honour them and consider them decisive”. In brief, they are not mere advisories but binding on Muslims. At least that’s what those issuing the fatwas believe, and would like us to believe.

It would be facetious to suggest and erroneous to presume that the more than seven lakh fatwas issued by Darul Uloom, Deoband, pertain only to how women should deport themselves and live their lives according to the tenets of Islam. From Islamic beliefs to world religions, from deviant sects and groups to innovations and customs, from the Quran to the Hadith and Sunnah, from purity to prayer, from death and funeral to business and industry, from international relations to penal code, and of course women’s issues, Darul Uloom, Deoband, has a firm view on almost every imaginable aspect of our lives, including whether it’s alright to use a razor to shave the most intimate parts of our body.

Seeking guidance from Darul Uloom, Deoband, a person asks: “Is it halaal to take a policy in LIC according to sharia’h in Islam?” The learned muftis answer: “LIC policy is unlawful due to being based on interest and gambling.” (Fatwa: 565/565/M=1431) Another person seeking enlightenment writes in: “At present I am working in a private limited company as an accountant. I want to know about bank jobs. Can a Muslim take a job in a bank or insurance company?” The scholars provide their considered reply: “The job of writing and calculating interest based work in conventional banks and insurance companies is not lawful for a Muslim.” (Fatwa: 466/466/M=1431) “Dear mufti sahab,” a person who wants further clarification writes, “Is it allowed in Islam to work as a life insurance agent?” Firm and unrelenting, mufti sahab sternly replies: “Life insurance contains interest as well as gambling and both these things are unlawful as per Quran and Hadith. Therefore, working as agent of life insurance is helping in sin, so it is prohibited by sharia’h.”(Fatwa: 762/571=L/1430)

Faced with a court order, a person seeks guidance: “I had a factory which was closed down because of sealing in Delhi. Now the court has ordered me to pay compensation (on which they have charged interest) to the non-Muslim labourers who worked there. Since my financial position is not very good, I would like to ask whether I can pay this amount from the bank interest that has accumulated in my bank account or out of zakaat?” To this profound query the muftis reply: “Interest amount of bank or zakaat cannot be given to non-Muslim labourers.” (Fatwa: 1178/1178=M/1430)

Such then are the views of Darul Uloom, Deoband, which are assiduously inculcated among those who study there. These views are then propagated at the tens of thousands of madarsas where Deobandi mullahs are employed to teach young children. It would be worthwhile to remember that the Government of secular India spends taxpayers’ money on funding these madarsas.

Root cause is political Islam

The banality of TV news analysis!

Those who abhor instant coffee, even if it’s a designer brand with a fancy prize tag marketed by Nescafe, would also have a distaste for instant news analysis. As with instant coffee — you take a spoonful, stir it into a cup of hot water, add some sugar and milk, and voila, your coffee is ready — so also with instant news analysis dished out by 24x7 television news channels: Get a self-proclaimed ‘expert’, make him sit in the studio with a couple of smug journalists who obviously have too little to do and a lot of time to kill, ask the most banal questions, get some bovine replies, and presto, you have news analysis!

The day after FBI agents and New York Police detectives grabbed Faisal Shahzad as he tried to board an Emirates flight to Dubai at JFK Airport and the Pakistani American admitted to having planted the car bomb at Times Square, which was spotted by a vendor and defused before it could cause death and destruction, television channels here in Delhi were tripping over each other for a piece of the ‘breaking news’. One channel had a former senior diplomat along with a Pakistani journalist on its prime time show, analysing what the anchor described as a “shocking” and “astonishing” disclosure — by the FBI agents and the would be Pakistani bomber with an American passport.

What’s so ‘shocking’ or ‘astonishing’ about the entire episode? Why should we in India be at all surprised or amazed or taken aback that a Pakistani (or an American of Pakistani origin, if you prefer) got caught trying to bomb Times Square? After all, Islamist jihadis of Pakistani origin have bombed other places and targets in other countries in the past and have not been particularly merciful (which is quite contrary to what the religion of peace and mercy is believed to teach its followers) towards fellow Pakistanis either. Nor should we forget that Faisal Shahzad is not the first Pakistani American jihadi; that distinction must go to David Coleman Headley alias Daood Gilani, shared with Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Pakistani Canadian who ran the Chicago cell of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.

Much as Pakistanis living in denial would love to believe, it would be absurd to suggest that extra-terrestrials are to blame for the daily bloodshed in that benighted country. The suicide bombers on the prowl in Pakistan, looking for places crowded with women and children to blow themselves up, are not from Mars (or Venus, for that matter). Of course, like Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who we are now told fled with Benazir Bhutto’s stand-by car and security personnel minutes before she was assassinated, they would insist that Pakistanis who kill Pakistanis are not Pakistanis but Indians in disguise. But then, as an exasperated Pakistani journalist once told me, Mr Malik would have no compunctions about blaming India for his wife begetting children.

Recall the London Underground bombing of July 7, 2005 which was masterminded by Pakistanis based in Pakistan and executed with the help of British citizens of Pakistani origin living in Britain. Three of the Underground bombers were of Pakistani origin who had spent time at terrorist camps in Pakistan, seeking and securing guidance for becoming true soldiers of god, before they embarked on their deadly mission to further the cause of jihad. The fourth was a Muslim of Jamaican origin.

Recall also the repeated terrorist strikes in India, including the 26/11 slaughter in Mumbai (for which a Pakistani has just been sentenced to death), which were plotted in Pakistan and executed by Pakistanis, admittedly with the help of those Muslims in India who believe loyalty to the ummah and fidelity to faith necessitate treachery; our desi rage boys are known to justify their traitorous deeds by citing manufactured grievance. It would also be instructive to remember that in countries across the world Pakistanis have been either arrested for links with terrorist organisations or are under surveillance.

Ironically, most Islamic and Muslim majority countries either despise or are suspicious of Pakistanis. The ikhwan is reluctant to extend membership to the exclusive club to the legatees of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. While the ‘bad’ Taliban may find the ‘good’ Taliban useful allies in their war on innocents, it is doubtful whether they would relish the idea of breaking bread together. Variants of ‘Paki’, a term of abuse in Britain of the 1960s and 1970s popular among White racists who nursed a visceral hatred towards immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, have been adopted by Arabs in the Maghreb and Mashreq.

There is nothing to feel happy about this, not least because despite the overwhelming evidence of Pakistanis and the Pakistani political-military establishment being involved in global terrorism, there are a vast number of Pakistanis who are appalled by jihadi violence and have been forthright in disowning and denouncing those of their own who have blood on their hands. The mullah is not exactly an object of reverence in polite, decent, educated Pakistani society. To get an idea of what Pakistanis think of those who continue to fetch infamy for their country one just needs to read the editorial and opeditorial pages of the Dawn and the Nation.

An example should suffice: While media in India went into throes of ecstasy over a bogus Deobandi ‘fatwa’ against terrorism, in which everything but Islamist terrorism had been criticised and declared un-Islamic, Dawn had the gumption to call the bluff of Deobandis in Pakistan when they recently tried a similar sleight of hand. Based on my interaction with young Pakistani journalists, I would vouch for their opposition to savagery in the name of Islam. Stereotyping all Pakistanis, therefore, would be wrong and grossly unfair.

Which brings me to what the former senior diplomat had to say during the television programme hosted by the anchor who found it “shocking” and “astonishing” that a Pakistani should have been found planting a bomb in Times Square. According to him, the world should ask, and the Pakistanis should contemplate on, why all terrorists and potential bombers are from that country. Apart from being factually incorrect, his assertion also suggests that the root cause of jihad is the Pakistani identity, which is way off the mark.

Mohammed Atta, who flew a passenger jetliner into the World Trade Center, was not a Pakistani but an Egyptian. His fellow terrorists were of Saudi origin. In recent times, the underpants bomber who panicked when he saw smoke emanating from his crotch after he pulled the string, did not carry a Pakistani passport; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alias Omar Farooq al-Nigeri is a Nigerian.

If we must look for a reason, then we should go beyond nationality and delve into theology. A lazier option would be to stick labels and be done with it. Just that this won’t help deal with the menace of Islamist terrorism.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on May 9, 2010.)

Veil of darkness

Exploits of the burqa brigade

An apocryphal story is told of how an infamous smuggler who operated from coastal Gujarat in the 1970s would ensure raids on his house by the police would not result in the seizure of ‘incriminating’ material and documents. Every time the police knocked on his door, whether at high noon or sunset, he would send word that he was praying and could they please wait till his communion with god was over? Mindful of not hurting ‘minority sentiments’, the police would cool their heels on the street or sit in their jeeps while his men swiftly strapped gold biscuits, cash and hawala documents to their muscular bodies. Next, each one of them would don a voluminous, ankle-length burqa and stand around their boss. The door of the don’s den would then be thrown open to the patiently waiting policemen who would troop in, move from room to room, look under beds, sofas and cabinets, and, after failing to lay their hands on any ‘incriminating evidence’, profusely apologise before trooping out. Some 25 years later, a senior police officer who was a frequent visitor to the don’s den courtesy the raids which never led to either arrest or prosecution told me, “It was so frustrating. We knew all about his trick but there was nothing we could do about it.”

Kalimuddin Shams, who would contest West Bengal Assembly elections as a Left Front candidate and was the acknowledged mastaan of Kolkata’s Kidderpore Docks, used the same trick on the day of polling in his constituency. There would be endless queues of burqa-clad voters who would refuse to show their face or have their finger inked as that would amount to ‘intimacy with strangers’. Each one of them would step into the polling booth, vote for Kalimuddin Shams, and join the queue again. Needless to say, Hasina Bano would get to vote more than once, as would ‘her’ friends. On counting day, Kalimuddin Shams would be declared the winner with a huge margin. It’s not surprising that the CPI(M) held him in high esteem: He had mastered the art of rigging elections without leaving any tell-tale evidence behind. “They were brazen about it. You could see their lungi sticking out from beneath the burqa, their hairy arms would be visible. While standing in the queue they would casually lift the veil on their face and smoke beedis. But there’s nothing we could do,” the Chief Election Officer of West Bengal told me after demitting office. Kalimuddin Shams, who never tired of reminding officials “I am a Muslim first and then an Indian” and had once famously declared (while serving as a Minister in the Left Front Government) that “Muslims form a separate nation in this country”, was not someone to be trifled with.


The burqa has proved to be useful to others, too. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the chief cleric of Lal Masjid in Islamabad, tried to escape the July 4, 2007 Army crackdown ordered by Gen Pervez Musharraf on his jihad nursery clad in a burqa. The Pakistani commandoes proved to be tougher than the 1970s police of Gujarat and West Bengal’s polling staff, and the maulana in drag was spotted, arrested and carted off to prison. Islamabad’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, told the BBC, “The maulana came out of the mosque with a group of girls wearing a burqa and carrying a handbag. The girls protested when he was stopped. But the officers were suspicious and after a search, Maulana Abdul Aziz was identified and arrested.” According to another version of the maulana’s failed flight to freedom, put out by AFP, he was “picked out” by security officials “because of his unusual demeanour”. The agency quoted an official as saying, “The rest of the girls looked like girls, but he was taller and had a pot belly.” A third version, which was gleefully related to me by a Pakistani journalist, was far more delightful. Apparently, the maulana decided to wear women’s shoes to make his disguise as authentic as possible. After much rummaging in the dark as bullets whizzed through shattered windows and shells landed on the roof of the women’s madarsa, he found a pair of high heels, slipped them on, and tottered out with a group of women, clutching a handbag. There was a problem though. The shoes were a size too small for the him and he couldn’t quite keep his balance on the high heels. It was this comical sight that drew the attention of security officials. Gen Musharraf’s regime charged Maulana Abdul Aziz with murder, incitement and kidnapping (of Islamabad’s prostitutes). The Pakistani Supreme Court, in its wisdom, decided to let him walk free on April 16, 2009. Public memory being notoriously short, the maulana was accorded a ‘rousing reception’ when he returned to Lal Masjid.

In more recent days, one of the Taliban suicide-bombers who attacked guest houses in Kabul on February 26, killing six Indians and other foreigners, is believed to have worn a burqa to avoid detection by security guards. It was a common trick used by Palestinian terrorists when suicidebombings were a feature of daily life in Israel. Meanwhile, our Supreme Court is hearing a petition seeking exemption for burqa-clad Muslim women from getting themselves photographed while registering as voters or revealing their faces to officials at polling booths, keeping in mind their “religious sensitivities”. On March 1, Muslims ran riot in Shimoga and Hassan in Karnataka, allegedly enraged by an article published by a local daily, Kannada Prabha, penned by dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, questioning the religious basis of forcing Muslim women to wear the burqa. Taslima Nasreen has since clarified that she did not send the article to Kannada Prabha for publication. It transpires that the daily took the article from her website, but these details are not germane to the organised mob fury which resulted in the death of two persons.


Since we began with an anecdote, it would be in order to end with another. The former ‘Grand Mufti of Australia’, Sheikh Taj al-din al-Hilali, wanted for inciting terrorism in the country of his origin, Egypt, is given to describing women who do not wear the burqa as “uncovered meat” and blaming them for “enticing rapists”. On one occasion, while addressing the faithful after Friday prayers at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, Sheikh Taj al-din al-Hilali rose to the defence of a serial rapist, Bilal Skaf, asserting, “If I come across a crime of rape, kidnap and violation of honour, I would discipline the man and teach him a lesson in morals and I would order the woman to be arrested and jailed for life. Why? Because, if she hadn’t left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it... If one puts uncovered meat out on the street or the footpath or the garden or the backyard without a cover, then the cats come and eat it. Is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?”

Must we let ulema who insist “women should not be seen in public as they cause social turmoil” answer that question? What do you think?

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on March 7, 2010.]

For god and US

With Taliban gaining a strong foothold in the country's north and northwest, Pakistan faces balkanisation

By Ahmede Hussain

With half of the country about 1000 miles apart, Pakistan, at its very birth, has been a deformed baby. Its founding fathers tried, however unsuccessfully, to unite the nation on the basis of religion, which soon turned out to be futile for the nascent 'Islamic Republic'. Bengalis, which formed the majority of the country, found themselves culturally alienated from the Punjabi-dominated culture that the establishment tried to impose on them in the name of Islam. It gave birth to the Language Movement, which saw disenchanted Bengalis, once one of the driving forces behind the anti-British Pro-Pakistan movement, take to the streets to make Bengali, not Urdu the state language.

The logic behind making Urdu the national language of Pakistan was a warped one--it was seen as the mother tongue of the Muslims, contrary to the 'Sanskritised Bengali', which the Punjabi elite considered the language of the Hindus. They ignored the fact that Urdu had never been the mother tongue of anyone in Pakistan; all the major ethnicities--Bengalis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Pakhtuns, Seraikis and Balochs had their own languages; Urdu, on the other hand, was the language of the gentry in Hindu-dominated Uttar Pradesh. The Bengalis eventually broke away from the brutal, oppressive Pakistani regime through a bloody war of independence.

During Bangladesh's Liberation War, because of the struggle's Left lenience, the US helped the marauding Pakistan army with arms and military hardware. At the fag end of the war, the US sent its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal to stop the war, prompting the Soviet Union to turn up with a nuclear submarine. In fact, Bangladesh's birth has been a major blow to the US foreign policy in the region. To make matters worse, the Saur Revolution in 1978 brought Marxist People's Democratic Party to power in Afghanistan; the overthrow of friendly Shah regime in Iran had added to the increasing anxiety of the US; the war in Vietnam the US feared that the entire South Asia and Far East might turn Red.

So when some of the Afghans took up arms to fight the invading Soviet Red Army, the US poured millions on the Mujahideen cause, arming the Afghan guerrillas FIM-92 Stingers, personal portable infrared homing surface-to-air missiles, which made life difficult for the communists. The Afghan freedom fighters, as the western media portrayed them, underwent armed training in Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan was one of the biggest front states in the Cold War. The country later also became biggest casualty of the proxy war between the US and USSR. Dissemination of Jihadist ideology spread in the country fast and it refused to stop even when after the Afghan War I stopped with the brutal execution of Mohammad Najibullah, the last Soviet-backed President of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Talibans, Afghan students who took lessons in different madrasas across Pakistan, suddenly overpowered the US-backed Northern Alliance; the latter became extremely unpopular among the masses for the rapes, extortions and arsons that its members had perpetrated during its short rule. The first military offensive that the Talibans launched was in October 1994 in Maiwand, Kandahar. Within a year, the group was in control of half the country.

For the next seven years, Afghanistan never made it into the headline of any international newspaper. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001prompted the US to go to Afghanistan again to slay the monster it had so diligently created. Even though the US-led Afghan War II has ousted the Talibans from power, it has failed to neutralise most of them. Most of the Talibans went into hiding, even though the US won the war, there was no casualty on the Taliban side.
Over the last eight years when the world's attention has been focused on Iraq, the Talibans have regrouped, making a safe heaven in the North-west Pakistan, especially in the picturesque Swat valley. Their ideology knows no boundary and the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans have joined hands in their war against Pakistan, Afghan and the US armies in the region.

Encouraged by the Obama administration's policy of holding dialogues with the so-called 'moderate Talibans', the Pakistan government has held several round of talks with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Taliban umbrella group in the country. According to the deal that has been struck at that time, the Pakistan government will enforce Sharia law in the Swat valley, in lieu of which the Talibans will lay down arms. The law has been enforced in the valley, once famous for its diamond mines, but the Taliban promise of cessation of hostility has never materialised. Instead the Talibans strengthened their position in the northwest, and last week they, led by its area commander Maulana Fazlullah, ran over Buner, which is only 60 miles away from the capital Islamabad.

The group has eventually withdrawn from the area, but what the head of police of the country's Northwest Frontier Province has said last week is even more alarming: The Talibans have infiltrated deep into the country; their presence can be felt as far away as the Punjab, and they may have chemical weapons under their belt.

What is alarming about Pakistan is that because of years of militarisation and corruption all its democratic institutions have fallen apart. Pakistan is now a failed state, tittering on the verge of disintegration. Some recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan have shown that its civil and military administrations are gradually loosing control over the country, an ominous sign for the reason as in its armoury include nuclear weapons. The Pakistan army's handling of the Swat crisis has raised questions about its ability to launch a war on the Talibans.

Demographically speaking, Pakistan is now dangerously divided. In the last elections, the Muslim League (ML), which is centre of the right, has won most seats in Pakistan; the People's Party, ML's secular counterpart, won in Sindh; the Northeast Frontier Province, the hotbed of Taliban activities, has surprisingly elected the Left-leaning National Awami Party.

The US, Pakistan's long time ally, has so far limited its presence into a string of missile attacks on the country's Taliban prone areas. The policy no doubt has failed; more US intervention in the country cannot be ruled out, and it may include direct military presence. Pakistan's fate now hangs in balance--it can be Talibanisation or Balkanisation, or, worse still, both. Only a united effort by the democratic forces in Pakistan can avert the catastrophe that is literary 60 miles away.

Star Weekend Magazine, Dhaka

Barbarians at barbarians' doorstep

'No wonder that others consider Muslims barbarians'
By Humayun Gauhar
The Nation (Pakistan)
May 3, 2009


While divorce is the absolute and undisputed Islamic right of a woman, last month in Ghotki, Sindh, which is not under Taliban control, a jirga ordered that the ears, lips and nose of a woman and her parents to be cut off for demanding divorce on grounds of torture by her husband. Such punishment is completely, totally and utterly un-Islamic and no less horrendous than what the Taliban mete out. Where is the State? Where is the famous independent judiciary? Where are the human rights activists? Where are the lawyers? Where is the media? Where is the civil society? Where are the religious scholars?
Last month in a place called Kala Dhaka, NWFP, also not under Taliban control, a couple was shot dead on the orders of a jirga for the 'sin' of eloping. Is this punishment any less horrendous than what the Taliban mete out? To get married by choice is also the absolute Islamic right of any adult man or woman and no one can stop it, including parents. An English language newspaper reported on its front page: "The jirga was held on the intervention of the political administration to review its order of killing Alia Bibi and Azeemul Haq, but it upheld its decision and they were shot dead." Political Tehsildar Jamshed Khan told: 'I regret the killing, but what can I do. There is no other law except the jirga system in this area'." No other law? After 62 years? Where's sovereignty? Where is the State? Where is the newly independent judiciary and the rest of the shebang? Why have they not been able to end such barbaric practices? Because jirgas and panchayats have been made part of the system. Parliament should have struck this down for being un-Islamic but it seems that un-Islamic customs take precedence over Islam in this Islamic Republic of ours. It's legalised barbarity is no less than some of the barbaric practices of the Taliban that have been legalised in Swat and Malakand. We don't realise that while the jirgas and panchayats maintain the iniquitous status quo through barbarity, these Taliban too have a limited or no understanding of Islam and use religion as a tool for achieving power. Are we ashamed of tolerating such barbaric practices in the name of custom and for spoiling the name of Islam? No wonder that others consider Muslims barbarians.
Legalised barbarity in our rural and tribal areas has been ignored by us, the privileged, because it never touched us. But now that we imagine that Taliban barbarity might soon arrive at our doorsteps we are going hysterical. You think that such people can change society? All we can do is moan in drawing rooms and groan in seminars, columns, television and blogs wondering why our country is going to hell in a hand basket. We raise all sorts of issues but never our class's barbarity. It's because we are still mentally colonised.

Islamofascism: Muslims in denial mode

Hyderabad bombing: Killed by Islamists but Muslims won't admit it!

Islam’s enemy within
At a recent conference on radical Islam, attended by scholars from India and South-East Asian countries, it was irritating to hear professors from Jamia Millia Islamia repeating the canard about the 9/11 terrorist attacks being an elaborate conspiracy hatched by the Christians (of America) and the Jews (of Israel) to “defame Islam” and use the globally televised images of the imploding twin towers as justification for the US-led “war against Muslims”. The first time I heard this astonishing fiction was in Cairo where I had arrived soon after the terrifying attack, led by an Egyptian, Mohammed Atta, on the World Trade Center, one of the symbols of American power. The war in Iraq had not yet begun but the Taliban hoodlums, including Mullah Omar, were fleeing Afghanistan to save their lives. The fall of a ‘model Islamic state’ and the walloping the ‘soldiers of god’ were receiving from the invading kafirs had greatly distressed my friends in the Muslim Brotherhood who had wrongly believed that the flattening of the twin towers would signal the liberation of Cairo, not Kabul. Instead, they were shocked to see a tsunami of anger striking Arab shores. Rather than accept the 9/11 attacks had proved to be counter-productive, they chose the path of denial. Whispered allegations, anonymous e-mail and stories buried in the inside pages of Arabic newspapers began to do the rounds, spreading the patently false claim that the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon had been planned and executed by the Americans and the Israelis. To substantiate this absurd claim, there were further absurd claims — Jews did not report for work on that fateful day, only the Mossad could have carried out an operation of this scale, the CIA had ensured the hijackers would not be frisked, etc. I found the assertions mildly repugnant and largely amusing, attributing the fiction to the street Arab’s lack of access to facts.
Seven years later, when I hear that absurd claim being repeated, that too by those who should know better, I don’t feel amused, but irritated. And so it happened at the conference on radical Islam when a professor of Jamia Millia Islamia questioned the authenticity of events as they unfolded on September 11, 2001, two of his colleagues nodding their heads vigorously in approval. My irritation gave way to anger when he went on to suggest that analyses of video images of the hijacked aircraft being flown into the twin towers showed they were “studio-generated”. Only someone who has undergone lobotomy would say something so stupid in public. But more than being silly, there’s a sinister purpose to such comments and they should not be attributed to a lobotomised brain; Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil would vouch for this. A lie repeated again and again, as Paul Joseph Goebbels proved through word and deed, tends to be believed by the masses. Islamofascists, both at home and abroad, who peddle the myth that ‘Islam is the solution’ and thus see nothing wrong with the ghastly crimes committed in the name of Islam, would naturally take to Goebbelsian propaganda tactics like a duck takes to water. Fiction propagated slyly at conferences and seminars, mentioned between the lines in newspaper articles, and slipped into Friday sermons by mullahs after the jumma namaaz, acquires a certain legitimacy and is soon perceived as fact.
We have seen this happen on more than one occasion. When Hindus were forced to flee their ancestral homes in the Kashmir Valley by killer squads of Islamists who indulged in rapacious depredations and revelled in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, an insidious campaign was launched, pinning the blame on Mr Jagmohan, then Governor of Jammu & Kashmir: He was accused of telling the Hindus to flee the Valley. Strangely, this fiction was believed by the secular intelligentsia which, in any event, is desperate to clutch at straws to absolve Islamic fanatics of their crimes and eager to paint Islamist marauders in the most glowing of colours. Similar tactics were — and continue to be — used in the wake of the slaughter of kar sevaks in Godhra and to tar Hindus by blaming them for the violence that followed. After the bombing of commuter trains in Mumbai, killing 187 people, it was blatantly suggested by our homegrown Islamists that the massacre was the handiwork of either “Government agencies” or “Hindu organisations”.
They are now using the same tactics in their response to the jihadi attack on Jaipur on May 14, in which at least 80 people were killed and many more maimed. The Hindustan Express, a Delhi-based Urdu newspaper, pontificated in an editorial comment on May 16, “Apart from elements like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Al Qaeda or HuJI (who may possibly be involved in these explosions) why should we not think also of those international powers and agencies who are known to the Government for their discomfort towards Indo-Pak peace?” Why not, indeed! The Jamaat-e-Islami’s biweekly journal, Daawat, was nauseatingly sly in its comments on May 19, “The truth cannot be out without changing the formula for the probe into the bomb blasts. Instead of going through the formality of a probe and connecting the links, we will have to see which group of people gets political benefit out of such incidents.” The only group that stands to benefit from the bloodbath in Jaipur, the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose mullahs pretend to be as innocent as Goldilocks, needs to be told, comprises those who subscribe to the slogan, “Islam is the solution.”
These are the people who are at ease with explosives being strapped to an eight-year-old girl and the button on the remote control being pushed as she reaches out to take a chocolate from a soldier (not an American) in Iraq. They are untouched and unmoved by the sight of the blood of innocent victims, as was spilled on the streets of Jaipur, of their perverse ideology. They are fully aware of their criminal misdeeds, but they want us to believe they are not to blame. And if you dare point a finger at radical Islam and its army of Islamofascists, they will accuse you of indulging in Islamophobia.
It’s time we called their bluff. The only other option is to subjugate ourselves to those who know no mercy and meekly accept Islam as the solution.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / May 25, 2008

Islamofascism, not Islamophobia, is the problem

Our liberty and future are at stake
The resolution adopted by Muslim theologians representing the various schools of Islam at the All-India Anti-terrorism Conference organised by Darul Uloom, Deoband, ‘denouncing’ terrorism but condoning radical Islam’s ghastly excesses, apart from remaining silent on Islamist terrorism in India which continues to extract a terrible price, is of a piece with the Observatory Report on Islamophobia released by the Organisation of Islamic Conference at its recent meeting in Dakar, Senegal. Both documents seek to justify manufactured Muslim rage and lay the blame for the resultant death and destruction at the doors of everybody else but Muslims.
It is ironical that Darul Uloom, Deoband, should have taken it upon itself to preach to others the virtues of tolerance — Deobandis are known for neither tolerating others or their faith nor allowing Muslims the freedom to subscribe to modernism and its attendant values. Indeed, Deobandi madarsas at home and abroad, especially in Pakistan, are known to breed Islamofascists whose dark thoughts and darker deeds generate Islamophobia against which the OIC has demanded an international law. Of course, Islamofascism must remain unrestrained and Islamofascists must be allowed the right to practice their ideology of hate. To contest this would amount to Islamophobia, and Islamophobes, as we have now been told, have no right to exist. So, like the proverbial lamb, we should meekly surrender to our slaughter. The least we can do is believe the bogus declaration issued by mullahs who gathered at Darul Uloom, Deoband.
Here’s a confession: There was a time of innocence when I believed in the thesis that there is more than one Islam. There were those with whom you could swap ideas, share jokes and even the cup that cheers. A decade later, during which time I spent three years in Cairo and travelled more than once into the heart of Islam — well, almost, since non-Muslims are not allowed beyond Jeddah, the gateway to Mecca and Medina — I stand converted to the view that any talk of there being a moderate Islam or Islam as a religion of peace merely because of the salutation sa’laam is so much bunkum.
In any event, the ummah sees Islam as a religion that demands absolute submission, which is not really the same as a religion that is predicated on peace and equality. And although the Quran does not stress on compulsion, it does not overflow with kindness towards those who do not submit to god’s will either. The best they can hope for is to be protected by a treaty (dhimmah), which in this day and age would mean unlimited appeasement, and the privileges of the dhimmi are purchased by paying jiziya apart from humiliating conditions of subservience, for instance communal budgeting and a ‘Muslim first’ policy, as is being done in our country.
The manufactured rage over Pope Benedictine’s comments at a German university about how the Sword of Islam cleared the way for Islam’s march beyond Arabia — he was quoting from an obscure Byzantine text — revived memories of the late Aurobindo Ghosh (he spent his last years waging an intellectual battle against Islamofascism from his perch in Texas) and his painstaking research to prove that Islam and peace never co-existed; that the sword of Islam is as much a reality today as it was in the distant past. In a sense, he was right, as much as the Byzantine text the Pope quoted is correct in pitilessly stating a fact that we tend to overlook in our zeal to draw distinctions between moderate and fanatical Islam to cover up for the crimes of the latter more than anything else.
Indeed, India’s history records this fact in the most lurid colours. The mass slaughter of Hindu men and enslavement of Hindu women and children, the destruction of Hindu antiquities and temples (of which the best examples are Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura), the brutal efforts to efface Hindu tradition and the rapacious means adopted to expand the frontiers of Islamic rule — Jadunath Sarkar and RC Majumdar have chronicled how Muslim invaders, and later those who sat on the masnad of Delhi, were relentlessly engaged in waging jihad against Hindus — are too well-known to require elaboration.
The bloodletting in Jammu & Kashmir, the ethnic cleansing of the Valley to lay the foundation of Nizam-e-Mustafa, the bombings in Mumbai and elsewhere, the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh and Malaysia by preachers of fanatical Islam who have now come to dominate the centrestage of politics in those countries and the pathetic, craven approach of accommodation and concession adopted by the political class of India which was, and continues to be, reluctant to confront the truth, should fashion any honest critique of Islamism and highlight its fascist character. This is not about indulging in Islamophobia, which so agitates the OIC and its cheerleaders, but about coming to grips with the true dimensions of Islamofascism, which should be of over-riding concern for those who believe in freedom and cherish the values of modernism that collectively form the foundation of free and plural societies.
Yes, there will be strident criticism and staunch opposition to any attempt to expose Islamofascism for what it is. And the most strident criticism and the staunchest opposition will not come from the OIC and the mullahs of Darul Uloom, Deoband, but from those who wilfully ignore facts to foist fiction which encourages bigoted hate mongers to typecast those who are appalled by Islamofascism as Islamophobes. The protest will primarily come from two quarters:

• The Lib-Left intelligentsia, which continues to labour under the self-perpetuating myth that all of Islam is a religion of peace and only an insignificant, fringe minority is to be blamed for distorting the great faith that was born in the sterile sands of Arabia; and,
• The so-called moderate Muslims who till now have skilfully used doublespeak to position themselves as representatives of the ummah, more so in liberal democracies. Their status is now seriously threatened by those who have no hesitation in acknowledging the true nature of Islam both as a faith and a weapon of subjugation.

Those who believe in liberty and freedom of thought need not fear either. Being charged with Islamophobia is a small price to pay for securing our future.

April 30, 2008.