LEADER ARTICLE
A Creed Apart: Terror is its Own ‘Religion’

Two simultaneous images, one from Kashmir and another from Gujarat, confronted viewers as the TV screens beamed the evening news on September 24. The first was of mostly Muslim voters, braving terrorist gunfire and death threats to reach the polling booths. The second was of mostly Hindu devotees, hurt, maimed and killed in the Akshardham terrorist attack.
The juxtaposition of the two frames served to highlight a truth that, post-Gujarat, many in this country had willed themselves to disbelieve. That terrorism is terrorism. It is not Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Tamil. Terrorists who kill in the name of one community/ religion will wantonly kill members of the same community/religion. Inevitably, the intra-community targets would be those who advocate moderation. But often, as in Kashmir, even the suggestion of resistance can invite brutal terrorist reprisals.
It was a Hindu assassin who gunned down the Hindu Mahatma. Two Sikh bodyguards pumped bullets into Indira Gandhi. But the Khalistanis killed many more Sikhs. Harchand Singh Longowal paid with his life for signing a peace accord. Punjab chief minister Beant Singh was admittedly not the most popular of leaders. Yet, under him a semblance of democracy returned to Pu-njab; two successive local elections in 1992 and 1993 saw large turnouts. He was killed by the Babbar Khalsa. The extremist Sikhs eliminated moderate Sikh politicians, kidnapped Sikh businessmen, imposed a code of conduct on ordinary Sikhs and made disobedience punishable with death (Taliban?).
The record for killing the maximum number of Sri Lankan Tamil leaders is held, not by the Sri Lankan government, but by an organisation that has been the loudest in proclaiming the Tamil cause — the LTTE. Over the years, the LTTE has systematically finished off the moderates among Tamil politicians: Among them, at least a dozen MPs who represented Jaffna, a score of Tamil ministers, TELO leader Sabaratnam, TULF chief Amrithalingam, EPRLF leader K Padmanabha, and most recently (in 1999), TULF vice-president Neelan Thiruchelvan.
J&K’s travails of the past decade and more are well known. Yet, there are certain truths about Kashmir (and Jammu) that are not so well known, that belie the stereotype of the Muslim terrorist and the Hindu victim. In the popular perception, Islamic terrorists always kill Hindus: They segregate bus passengers according to religion, they attack Hindu villages, they target the Amarnath pilgrims. What is often forgotten is that in Kashmir, Muslim moderate figures are far more vulnerable than Hindus. From Mirwaiz senior to Abdul Ghani Lone to countless young faces in the Abdullah government, the terrorist fire has claimed many, many Muslim lives. The J&K government has figures that tell a most interesting story: Out of 12,400 civilians killed by militants in the past 12 years, 11,000 were Muslim. Today, as Kashmir goes to polls in the face of the bloodiest assault by terrorists, political murders and assassination attempts have become chillingly commonplace. Sakina Itoo, J&K’s 30-year-old tourism minister, has faced four murder attempts in the past one month.
Anil Nauriya writes in Mainstream that militants have killed literally thousands of National Conference workers in the past decade. To quote, “This political formation (NC) in J&K today faces the prospect of physical destruction, not necessarily at the hustings, but in the form of elimination of its cadres who have been subjected to political assassination on a scale whose enormity the average Indian is hardly aware of...� Nauriya argues that the NC workers, who form the traditional Kashmiri Muslim political leadership, are being murdered because they stand for a composite and secular India.
Thanks to the return of much-needed political sanity in Gujarat, the Akshardham attack saw no devastating aftermath aimed at Muslims. The BJP and the RSS have shown exemplary restraint. Nare-ndra Modi has determinedly dismissed suggestions of local involvement in the attack. Perhaps, there is no further political mileage to be extracted from rioting, from communal polarisation. But look at the wonders that have been achieved. The common people have followed the path shown by the political bosses: No war cry for revenge, no letters to the editor demanding apologies from one community, no talk of showing ‘them’ their place.
This is as it should have been. This is as it could have been — after Godhra. The priests at the Akshardham temple were a picture of equanimity after the Sept 24 attack. They would not blame anyone. That is true community service, not incendiary speeches aimed at provoking violent reactions.
It is perhaps time to understand that at different points different religions have been linked to terrorism. In the ’80s, the Sikhs were made to take responsibility for what the Khalistanis did. And the Khalistanis did a lot, almost as much as their Islamic counterparts today. They killed innocent civilians. Over 10,000 Khalistani youths took a pledge in the Golden Temple to lay down their lives. Bhindranwale and his men laid a long siege to the Golden Temple. The Akali Dal passed the separatist Anandpur Sahib resolution. Finally, thousands of Sikhs perished in the 1984 riots.
Today, there are no tensions between the two communities. What happened might never have happened. We could make another beginning — by learning to separate Muslims from ‘Muslim’ terrorism.