By Jamsheed K. Choksy, Guest Contributor
The political, economic, social, and religious instability that extends from Iraq and Iran through Afghanistan and Pakistan has produced an arc of terror that now is threatening the largest democracy in the world—India. Muslim militants from the Afghan and Pakistani theaters are instigating and conducting missions aimed at tearing Indian society apart along religious and ethnic lines just as they have done in their own nations.
Granted, ethnic hatreds and religious strife are not new to India. Independence in August 1947 was marked by carnage between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus that took approximately half a million lives. The tussle for Jammu and Kashmir, located in the strategic border between Pakistan, India, and China continues from then to the present – not only between the nation states but among the people living there. Other fault lines exist as well, with a Khalistan “Pure Land” separatist movement by Sikhs in Punjab and Rajasthan and a Maoist struggle by the Naxalites in Bengal and Andhra Pradesh.
Yet, the greatest threat may come from Islamic fundamentalist groups influenced by Al-Qaeda, the Tehrik-i Taliban, and their proxies like Lashkar-e Jhangvi, Lashkar-e Islam, and Sepah-e Sahaba. By inflaming sectarian tensions within Indian society, and hoping thereby to destabilize one of the world’s largest multicultural nations, Muslim militants also seek to stall the growing rapprochement between India and the U.S.
Islamic terrorist ideology and its disparate practitioners have globalized from the Arabian Peninsula during the past two decades. Having engulfed Afghanistan in chaos, those organizations are tearing Pakistani society apart. Their violence has transformed U.S. and E.U. approaches to the Middle East and Asia generally and Muslim societies specifically. Now the militants are exploiting the schisms within Indian society and between India and Pakistan just as they have in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So in November 2008, a string of attacks hit the city of Mumbai or Bombay, India’s commercial and tourist center. The targets were chosen to inflict maximum terror on entrepreneurs and travelers from the West, Middle East, and Asia and within India itself. The intent was to intimidate India’s people by immobilizing major forms of transportation, including a railway station through which thousands of middle class Indians journey to and from work every day, and by devastating popular gathering places where persons of all nationalities and backgrounds mingle each day.
Even more troubling, the targets in Mumbai served to sow fear and mistrust among many of India’s ethnoreligious communities. The Taj Mahal Hotel, Cama and Albless Hospital, and Leopold Cafe are linked in origin and administration to the Zoroastrian (or Parsi) community, well known for its major contributions to India’s economy, politics, military, and civic society. The Chabad Center connected Mumbai’s small Jewish groups to older communities of that faith who have resided in India for centuries. The Chabad Center was located in Nariman House, a building named for its earlier links to the Zoroastrians of Mumbai. Indeed, both faiths share a long history of cooperation in India, based on ties that began in ancient Iran. So, the militants got a double return on their brutality there. The Oberoi Hotel is the flagship of an industrial corporation founded by a prominent member of the Sikh community who became an Indian citizen rather than return to Pakistan’s Punjab (where he was born) when the two countries were partitioned in 1947. The university neighborhood and movie theater where fighting by Muslim terrorists occurred are popular locales where Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Jews study and spend leisure time.
Pakistan-based terrorists next focused on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. That plan materialized in deadly fashion in October 2009. The suicide car bombing there was intended to further strain already fraught relations between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It served to reinforce suspicions between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in all three nations at a time when inter-government cooperation is most needed yet requires the support of each nation’s citizens. Possible ties between the Islamic fundamentalists who assailed the embassy and Pakistan’s intelligence service revived suspicions still raw from the events in Mumbai one year previously. The attack, like those in Mumbai, refocused attention on the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where many of the Muslim terrorist groups find safe haven, recruits, training, and resources. The Kabul bombing, allegedly planned by a militant leader once associated with the CIA during the war against the Soviets and Russians in the 1980s, hurt U.S. attempts to consolidate its new ties to India as well.
The presence of Pakistani nationals among terrorists entering India continued this year with a day-long siege in early January that turned the center of Srinagar, capital of the Jammu and Kashmir region, into a battlefield. The population of Jammu is mainly Hindu, that of Kashmir is largely Muslim (both Sunnis and Shiites), while the Leh district there is divided between Buddhists and Muslims. These attacks are causing the local populations to radicalize along confessional lines and separate both physically and socioeconomically. As intercommunal ties sunder, the region falls further into strife and endangers India’s northern border that is contested not only with Pakistan but China. As in the cases of the Mumbai and Kabul conflagrations, ones in Jammu, Kashmir, and Leh can be traced back to militant Islamic terrorist organizations based in the AfPak arena of sectarian violence.
Most recently evidence has emerged that, having staged overland and maritime onslaughts, Lashkar-e Taiba is planning suicide attacks from the air across the Indo-Pakistan border. Shortly thereafter, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that interconnected extremist groups on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier were working to destabilize the entire region including India. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that Al-Qaeda is seeking a new base in south Asia, and that India has entered the terrorist organization’s target range according to the 2009 Annual Threat Assessment by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. Extending outward from their current safe havens in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Afghanistan, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and their auxiliaries have been setting up bases in Pakistan’s Punjab and Sind – including the port city of Karachi – and from there are targeting the Indian mainland. More indirect fueling of sectarian tensions is occurring as well, such as the beheading of Sikhs by Taliban in Pakistan’s FATA.
There is a clear and present danger that those NGOs of terror next will establish cells in India itself – feeding upon political distrust between India and Pakistan and upon the interfaith tensions within India’s diverse communities. At first glance, it may appear that Pakistan stands to benefit from overtly, covertly, and even tacitly encouraging terrorism against its long-standing foe. But the true beneficiaries of strife in India, as in Pakistan, and even between India and Pakistan are the terrorists themselves. Internal and bilateral fissures further the goals of Islamic fundamentalism at the expense of national identities. Both countries nations are being played by the terrorists; religious tensions are being exploited by groups seeking to dismember civil society.
So it has become more vital than ever that the leaders and citizens of India and Pakistan look beyond their historically strained relations, realize a much greater common non-state enemy confronts them, and engage jointly in defeating the Islamic militantism that threatens to infect the entire region. They must not let fundamentalist and nationalist sentiments fan inter-country tensions each time terrorists strike – as at Pune recently. Likewise, the situation in the Indian Subcontinent is much too volatile and the stakes for freedom and democracy much too high for the U.S. not to be actively engaged in facilitating recognition of and coordinated action against the shared danger.
Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Central Eurasian, Indian, Iranian, Islamic, and International studies at Indiana University.
