Swaminathan Aiyar is a senior columnist at The Sunday Times of India. He wrote the following article on Jul 23, 2006. Much water has flowed down the bridge, but the hangover of all terror in the world being the sole handiwork and monopoly of Muslim still persists.
Swaminathan faults India's Mainstream Media as blindly and sheepishly following western media and its anti-Muslim propaganda in its demonizing of Muslims and even Indian Muslims.
However, a few days back, Indian National Congress General Secretary, Digvijay Singh, on exposing Hindutva hand in a series of bomb blasts at Muslim religious sites, has come out with a different take on the old slogan - All Hindus are not terrorists but most terrorists in India belong to Sangh Parivar.
To recall back the entire gamut of 'terrorism' and its latest face, it is time to flash back to the very thought-provoking summation by Mr. Aiyar.
Times have changed but the pressure on Muslims is still most suffocating and there is no sign of any let up by world media to try and present an objective assessment of its Islamophobia.
The great failing of India's main secular political party, the Indian National Congress, is that it has overtly or covertly caused the arrest of hundreds of innocent Muslims, in bombings in their own Muslim religious places, be that Masjids or Dargahs or passenger trains carrying Muslim passengers to Pakistan.
The recent Judicial confession by a mastermind of the entire series of bomb blasts, Swami Seemanand owning up the crime, has clearly exonerated all innocent Muslims who are incarcerated in Indian jails.
Indian government, police, media should all magnanimously acknowledge their mistake, deliberate or inadvertent and swiftly move to free the innocents and grant them full pardon and generous compensation, so that India's head be held high in the comity of nations of the world as a moral force for the good of all.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
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Terrorism is not a Muslim monopoly
BY SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR -TNN
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‘‘All Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.’’ This comment , frequently heard after the Mumbai bomb blasts implies that terrorism is a Muslim specialty, if not a monopoly. The facts are very different.
First, there is nothing new about terrorism. In 1881, anarchists killed the Russian Tsar Alexander II and 21 bystanders. In 1901, anarchists killed US President McKinley as well as King Humbert I of Italy. World War I started in 1914 when anarchists killed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. These terrorist attacks were not Muslim.
Terrorism is generally defined as the killing of civilians for political reasons. Going by this definition, the British Raj referred to Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and many other Indian freedom fighters as terrorists. These were Hindu and Sikh rather than Muslim.
Guerrilla fighters from Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro killed civilians during their revolutionary campaigns. They too were called terrorists until they triumphed. Nothing Muslim about them.
In Palestine, after World War II, Jewish groups (the Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang) fought for the creation of a Jewish state, bombing hotels and installations and killing civilians. The British, who then governed Palestine, rightly called these Jewish groups terrorists. Many of these terrorists later became leaders of independent Israel — Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon. Ironically, these former terrorists then lambasted terrorism, applying this label only to Arabs fighting for the very same nationhood that the Jews had fought for earlier.
In Germany in 1968-92, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang killed dozens, including the head of Treuhand, the German privatisation agency. In Italy, the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, former prime minister.
The Japanese Red Army was an Asian version of this. Japan was also the home of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist cult that tried to kill thousands in the Tokyo metro system using nerve gas in 1995.
In Europe, the Irish Republican Army has been a Catholic terrorist organisation for almost a century. Spain and France face a terrorist challenge from ETA, the Basque terrorist organisation.
Africa is ravaged by so much civil war and internal strife that few people even bother to check which groups can be labelled terrorist. They stretch across the continent. Possibly the most notorious is the
Lord’s Salvation Army in Uganda, a Christian outfit that uses children as warriors.
In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have long constituted one of the most vicious and formidable terrorist groups in the world. They were the first to train children as terrorists. They happen to be Hindus. Suicide bombing is widely associated with Muslim Palestinians and Iraqis, but the Tamil Tigers were the first to use this tactic on a large scale. One such suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
In India, the militants in Kashmir are Muslim. But they are only one of several militant groups. The Punjab militants, led by Bhindranwale, were Sikhs. The United Liberation Front of Assam is a Hindu terrorist group that targets Muslims rather than the other way round. Tripura has witnessed the rise and fall of several terrorist groups, and so have Bodo strongholds in Assam. Christian Mizos mounted an insurrection for decades, and Christian Nagas are still heading militant groups.
But most important of all are the Maoist terrorist groups that now exist in no less than 150 out of India’s 600 districts. They have attacked police stations, and killed and razed entire villages that oppose them. These are secular terrorists (like the Baader Meinhof Gang or Red Brigades). In terms of membership and area controlled, secular terrorists are far ahead of Muslim terrorists.
In sum, terrorism is certainly not a Muslim monopoly. There are or have been terrorist groups among Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists. Secular terrorists (anarchists, Maoists) have been the biggest killers.
Why then is there such a widespread impression that most or all terrorist groups are Muslim? I see two reasons. First, the Indian elite keenly follows the western media, and the West feels under attack from Islamic groups. Catholic Irish terrorists have killed far more people in Britain than Muslims, yet the subway bombings in London and Madrid are what Europeans remember today. The Baader Meinhof Gang, IRA and Red Brigades no longer pose much of a threat, but after 9/11 Americans and Europeans fear that they could be hit anywhere anytime. So they focus attention on Islamic militancy. They pay little notice to other forms of terrorism in Africa, Sri Lanka or India: these pose no threat to the West.
Within India, Maoists pose a far greater threat than Muslim militants in 150 districts, one-third of India’s area. But major cities feel threatened only by Muslim groups. So the national elite and media focus overwhelmingly on Muslim terrorism. The elite are hardly aware that this is an elite phenomenon.
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