Who is a terrorist?

Show a picture of a uniformed man battling a wild-looking civilian to a hundred people and ask them to identify the terrorist. Ninety-nine will po
The Jihadi


int to the civilian; one might point to the man in uniform.

It's a question of political or ideological optics: one man's terrorist can be another's perceived freedom fighter. These are the two, interlinked and often interchangeable, faces of terror. Which is why in international, or non-parochial media, the preferred word to describe an individual who resorts to indiscriminate violence against society and the state to further his own ideological or religious agenda is ‘militant' not 'terrorist'. Media professionals, no less than serious historians, are only too uncomfortably aware that today's 'terrorist' might become tomorrow's victorious champion of the downtrodden, or a martyr crucified for a noble cause.

You are the local magistrate. Brought before you by the police is a scruffy individual, of no fixed address, who not only has a chargesheet of physical assaults on prominent members of the banking profession but has also been holding public rallies alarmingly subversive of the sovereignty of the state. You would classify the accused as a dangerous extremist, a proto-terrorist if not a full-fledged suicide bomber, and deal with him accordingly. Which is what Pontius Pilate did in the case of the State vs Jesus Christ.

"What is truth?" jested Pilate, and did not wait for an answer. If he had, it might have perplexed him not a little. As it has done in the case of successive generations and governments. For Indians, Bhagat Singh was, and always will be, a tragic hero in our fight for freedom. To the British imperialists of the time he was a political criminal, a terrorist. Which is how the apartheid government of South Africa saw a guerrilla called Nelson Mandela, subsequently hailed as the African Mahatma.

It's often said that history is a partisan narrative dictated by the winning side. But yesteryear's victors — from Pilate to the British Raj — become the villains of the present, and their mortal enemies are valorised by their victimhood.

But can even the most tortuous turns and twists of history justify the killing of innocents, including women and children, as collateral sacrifices on the altar of a higher cause? In what we call India's First War of Independence - and which others still refer to as the Sepoy Mutiny - in what was then known as Cawnpore, and in other places, civilians, including women and children, were put to the sword and flame by the insurgents. Fighters for independence or mutinous terrorists? The Allies justified the atom-bombing of the civilian centres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that the alternative to ending World War II - an infantry invasion of Japan - would have cost even more lives. Justifiable act of war, or a terrorist attack on an unprecedented - and still unsurpassed - scale?

Take a look at that picture of a uniformed man combating an unkempt civilian. Imagine the uniform to be that of the Chinese army, and the civilian to be a Tibetan activist. Still sure which - invariably and unalterably - is the true face of terror?

Divisve Politics of Inida

SHASHI ON SUNDAY
Stop the politics of division
12 Oct 2008, 0102 hrs IST, Shashi Tharoor


Last week, in responding to some of the hundreds of reactions i received to my September 28 column on the anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka, i tackled the vexed question of conversions to Christianity, which many readers argued constituted a provocation for the violence. But the conversion issue is not purely a religious one: behind it lies a profoundly political question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Indian state, and indeed to the very idea of India itself.

In my original piece i argued that violence is part of a contemptible political project whose closest equivalent can in fact be found in the 'Indian Mujahideen' bomb blasts. Both actions are anti-national; both aim to divide the country by polarising people along their religious identities; and both hope to profit politically from such polarisation. In this context, the issue of conversion becomes a diversion. Because to say that conversions are somehow inherently wrong would accord legitimacy to the rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal and its cohorts - who declare openly that conversions from Hinduism to any other faith are anti-national. Implicit is the idea that to be Hindu is somehow more natural, more authentically Indian, than to be anything else, and that to lapse from Hinduism is to dilute one's identification with the motherland.

As a Hindu, I reject that notion utterly. I reject the presumption that the purveyors of hatred speak for all or even most Hindus. Hinduism, we are repeatedly told, is a tolerant faith. The central tenet of tolerance is that the tolerant society accepts that which it does not understand and even that which it does not like, so long as it is not sought to be imposed upon the unwilling. One cannot simultaneously extol the tolerance of Hinduism and attack Christian homes and places of worship.

And as an Indian, i would argue that the whole point about India is the rejection of the idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. Our nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus. To accept the idea of India you have to spurn the logic that divided the country in 1947. Your Indianness has nothing to do with which God you choose to worship, or not.

To suggest that an Indian Hindu becoming Christian is an anti-national act not only insults the millions of patriotic Indians who trace their Christianity to more distant forebears, including the Kerala Christians whose families converted to the faith of Saint Thomas centuries before the ancestors of many of today's Hindu chauvinists even learned to think of themselves as Hindu. It is an insult, too, to the national leaders, freedom fighters, educationists, scientists, military men, journalists and sportsmen of the Christian faith who have brought so much glory to the country through their actions and sacrifices. It is, indeed, an insult to the very idea of India. Nothing could be more anti-national than that.

One reader, Raju Rajagopal, writing "as a fellow Hindu", expressed himself trenchantly in describing 'terrorism' and 'communal riots' as "two sides of the same coin, which systematically feed on each other." The only difference, he added, is "that the first kind of terrorism is being unleashed by a fanatical few who swear no allegiance to the idea of India, whereas the second kind of terror is being unleashed by those who claim to love India more dearly than you and i, who are part of the electoral politics of India, and who know the exact consequences of their actions: creating deep fissures between communities, whose horrific consequences the world has witnessed once too often in recent decades."

That is the real problem here. Nehru had warned that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist. Yet, Hindu nationalism is not Indian nationalism. And it has nothing to do with genuine Hinduism either. A reader bearing a Christian name wrote to tell me that when his brother was getting married to a Hindu girl, the Hindu priest made a point of saying to him before the ceremony words to the effect of: "When i say God, i don't mean a particular God." As this reader commented: "It's at moments like that that i can't help but feel proud to be Indian and to be moved by its religiosity - even though i'm an atheist."

As a Hindu, I relish pointing out that i belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. Hinduism is a civilisation, not a dogma. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out towards God? Truth is one, Vivekananda reminded all Hindus, but there are many ways of attaining it.

So, the rejection of other forms of worship, other ways of seeking the Truth, is profoundly un-Hindu, as well as being un-Indian. The really important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers - between those who think all Indians are "us", whichever God they choose to worship, and those who think that Indians can be divided into "us" and "them". The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their own homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: this time a partition not just in the Indian soil, but in the Indian soul.

It is time for all of us to say: stop the politics of division. We are all Indians.
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