India’s newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently told Commonwealth lawmakers in Canberra that Australia was firmly at the centre of his nation’s gaze. Meanwhile, our national broadcaster has announced it is closing its New Delhi bureau. And most Australians wouldn’t have much of a clue about the world’s second-most populous nation or its neighbours.
India doesn’t just want our uranium and coal; Modi has pledged to work with Australia to fight what he describes as the “menace of terrorism”.
But what does terrorism mean in India? Do publications like The Times of India or The Hindu or Caravan see terrorism as purely a Middle Eastern or Islamic problem?
The 2013 Global Terrorism Index placed India at sixth in the world when it came to number of terrorist attacks. Above India were Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria. These countries accounted for some 80% of all terrorism deaths. India experienced the largest increase in terrorist attacks, with deaths almost doubling (238 to 404) from 2012-13.
Yes, there certainly are jihadists operating in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. But the GTI Report states what most Indians already take for granted:
“In 2013 around 70% of attacks were non-lethal. Communist terrorist groups are by far the most frequent perpetrators and the main cause of deaths in India. Three Maoist communist groups claimed responsibility for 192 deaths in 2013, which was nearly half of all deaths from terrorism in India. Police are overwhelmingly the biggest targets of Maoists, accounting for half of all deaths and injuries.”
The Maoist insurgency has much to do with farmers in impoverished tribal areas being forced off their land. The uprising has been going since 1967, with the Naxal movement operating in 20 of India’s 29 states. Terrorism doesn’t happen in an economic or political vacuum.
Perhaps the most dangerous form of extremism can be found in the Indian ruling coalition. Before being elected Prime Minister in a landslide, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat province in the north-west of the country. Gujarat was also the home state of an eccentric barrister named Gandhi, who was once labeled a terrorist by Her Majesty’s government.
Far from engaging in violence, Gandhi preached a novel form of non-violent resistance with a view to securing independence for India. He was assassinated by a small cabal of extremists from his own Hindu faith, people who did not share his cosmopolitan vision for a multi-confessional India.
This coalition of theocrats has been quite happy to use violence and terror to put religious minorities — especially Catholics and Muslims — in their place. They include people within the current PM’s inner circle as well as convicted religious terrorists. They were behind some of India’s worst violence in its post-independence history.
And when it comes to violent Hindutva theocracy, guess which side the current Indian PM belongs to.
Indians (and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans and Nepalese) take this stuff for granted. But rarely will you read or hear or see much use of words like Hindutva or Naxalite in our own media.
India is trouble waiting to happen – and native Muslims are the last ones to be instigators, more often the victims.
Given the unresolved inequities of traditional hinu society,the shameful caste system (see Arundhati Roy), the rape culture and general misogyny (ironic given the obvious sensuality of the original Vedic worship (see Wend Doniger), the poverty that cannot even be comprehended by most non Indians, and the imminent ecological collapse due to the increasingly erratic monsoons, disappearing Himachel snow and the soil degradation due to centuriesd of burning cow pats for domestic cooking fires, one wonders why anyone would even want, never mind, to attempt to rule India.
It will be a short, rough ride.
“But rarely will you read or hear or see much use of words like Hindutva or Naxalite in our own media. ”
That is not all that one fails to read in our media, including in this context the singular fact. demonstrated in a number of reputable studies, that the world’s greatest terrorist nation, by a very large margin, is the United States. The US has, since the end of WW2, invaded, attacked, or undermined in various ways, more than 70 nations including the violent overthrow of many. Conservative estimates put the number of people killed as a result of these policies at more than 40 million.
At the present time alone there are tens of thousands of people being killed in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and the Ukraine. Our media will not even acknowledge that the current Kiev regime was installed as a result of an American inspired and financed coup. It is not by chance that only three countries, the US, Ukraine and Israel voted against and then think about how Australia’s best interests are being served by an ongoing close alliance with what Pepe Escobar aptly calls the Empire of Chaos.