DIALLING wrong numbers has always been the prerogative of an unaccountable media. Yet, it is humbling to occasionally acknowledge that clever attempts at instant prophecy can lead to hideous miscalculations.

Four years ago, around the time Kabul was liberated from Taliban rule, I wrote an article in this publication gloating over the civilised world’s ‘triumph over Islamism’ (Seminar 509, 2002). ‘A vision of Islamic supremacy centred on the glorification of barbarism,’ I wrote with embarrassing certainty, ‘has received a crushing blow. It may yet recover, but never with the same degree of certitude and cockiness. Like Nazism, radical Islamism was routed because civilization showed great resilience, acted with determination and insisted on an unconditional surrender.’

That people like me who entered 2002 with bubbling overconfidence were awfully wrong, hardly needs reiteration. Beginning with the controversial invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the ideological war against Islamism has been mired in military and political setbacks. The grandiose plan to transplant western-style parliamentary democracy in Iraq has been turned into a complete mockery by rival Shia and Sunni militias. For the Anglo-American expeditionary force, the war against the militias has become virtually un-winnable. With President George W. Bush crippled by his loss of control over Capitol Hill and British Prime Minister Tony Blair about to bow out of political life, the evangelical momentum which sustained the war on terror is on the verge of being dissipated. With allusions to the debacle in Vietnam and the Suez misadventure setting the stage, the agenda before policy-makers in Washington and London is how best to minimise the damage from an ignominious withdrawal.

The situation is not so precarious in Afghanistan. Yet, the reverberations from Baghdad are being felt in Kabul. The ragtag Taliban which had retreated into the caves of Tora Bora and crossed the Durand Line into Pakistan have regrouped, and are posing a serious threat to the NATO-led forces in eastern Afghanistan. Military strategists suggest that the war is so delicately poised that even an impression of imminent NATO withdrawal into safe garrisons could see some 70 per cent of Afghans, presently sitting on the fence, switch their emotional allegiance to the Taliban. A few strategic miscalculations and Mullah Omar may well be presiding over another bout of vandalism.

If the demoralising effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been confined to the military establishments of the USA and Britain, the wider battle against Islamism would not have suffered grievously. Unfortunately, the domestic controversies over the elusive weapons of mass destruction and human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay have very effectively undermined public support for the larger war.

 

The mood in the US, for example, is drifting in favour of building a protective homeland security wall around the country’s borders and, at the same time, minimising contentious ventures abroad. There is a real possibility that the ‘isolationist’ turn in American foreign policy between the fall of Saigon in 1974 and President Ronald Reagan’s assumption of office in 1980 may well be replicated. Islamism will, of course, remain a threat to American values and the American way of life, but as long as the ubiquitous Al Qaeda keeps its grubby paws off American soil there will be a marked temptation to see the ideological conflict as someone else’s problem – as long as the Arab oil economies are not threatened.

Britain, needless to say, faces a more ticklish problem. Islamism has become an internal British problem too thanks to the bizarre discovery of self by large numbers of ghettoised Muslim youth, usually of Pakistani origin. The disconcerting realisation that those who were nurtured by the generosity of the British welfare state have absolutely no inhibitions in killing their own neighbours has, predictably, come as an eye-opener to the liberal establishment.

 

There has been an overdue backlash against the vulgar excesses of multi-culturalism and even a feeble attempt to rediscover Britishness rooted in Britain, but overall, no clear trends are visible. In his own way, Blair tried to re-establish a meaningful British role in the world by playing a supporting role to President Bush. If the idea of an imperial America is repudiated by Americans themselves, it is unlikely that Blair’s foreign policy activism will outlive Blair. Circumstances favour the likelihood of Britain looking to other members of the European Union, notably France and Holland, to forge a common defensive stance against Islamism.

For India, the portents are not very encouraging. At the time of 9/11, there was no meaningful Islamist terrorist threat in India outside Jammu and Kashmir. Apart from the 1998 serial blasts in Coimbatore which targeted the BJP leader L.K. Advani and the dubious activities of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and some clerics in Uttar Pradesh, Islamist activism was by and large linked to the so-called movement for azadi. And even in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, Islamism was just one of the competing currents in the separatist movement.

This is not to suggest that Islamism in India is exclusively an import from Afghanistan and the theological ghettos – aided when expedient by state power – of Pakistan. A strand of Islamic irredentism centred on the ultimate recovery of political power has existed in India since the mid-19th century. William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal has, for example, provided interesting details of the autonomous role of the ghazis and jihadis in the uprising of 1857. Other historians have also spelt out the importance of the movement launched by Shah Waliullah and the Deoband seminary in the construction of a political Islam throughout the world. The Pakistan movement too benefited from this subterranean current.

 

In the aftermath of Independence, when the Muslim community suffered from an absence of leadership, Islamist energies were focused on the defensive act of maintaining the separate identity of Indian Muslims. Hence the disproportionate importance attached to the preservation of Urdu and separate personal laws based on the Shariat. What has come to be known as the ghettoisation of Muslims wasn’t merely an outcome of the benign neglect by successive Congress governments; it was simultaneously encouraged by a clergy which was fearful of the larger secularisation process. After 1973, the process was helped by the generous inflow of funds, mainly from Saudi Arabia, intended ostensibly for the renovation and construction of mosques. It is perhaps no coincidence that the increasing involvement of Muslims in electoral politics – but more as voting fodder rather than securing greater Muslim representation in the legislatures – dates back to the post-1973 flow of petrodollars to the Muslim clergy.

The events of 9/11 and the subsequent transformation of Osama bin Laden into a folk hero had a profound effect on a ghettoised community. Apart from being an inspirational focus, radical Islamism with its yearning for a new Islamic Caliphate, provided an antidote to the perceived political powerlessness of Muslims in India. With the balance of power in the Kashmiri separatist camp tilting away from the territorial separatists to those committed to a more Islamic way of life, a section of Muslim opinion in Hindu-majority states veered to the view that religious identity offered something in life more purposeful than perfecting the art of tactical voting. Just as the 7/11 London bombers believed that suicide bombing would alleviate the drudgery of underclass anonymity, activists of the by-now banned SIMI took inspiration from groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, both based in Pakistan, but with an eye to fuelling Muslim discontent all over India to begin a bout of militant activism.

 

The process was assisted by two autonomous sets of developments. By the beginning of 2005, it was painfully apparent that the US-led war on terror was faltering, particularly in Iraq. The traditional exponents of anti-Americanism who had retreated into the margins after 9/11 and the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan got a massive fillip with the upsurge of anti-war sentiment throughout Europe. Yet, this aesthetic disdain for President Bush’s gung-ho style of taking on his enemies would never have had a multiplier effect in society had the much-vaunted Democracy Project actually showed signs of success in Iraq. The failure of the Anglo-American forces to tackle the post-Saddam insurgency not only resurrected the latent anti-Americanism in India but enabled the radical Islamists to take shelter behind a larger and infinitely more respectable movement.

 

Those who observed the series of demonstrations throughout India in the wake of President Bush’s visit in March 2006 would have been struck by the strange alliance between Red and Green. While Communist leaders were nominally at the helm of the protests, the mobilisation of the predominantly Muslim crowds was effected through the network of mosques and theological seminaries. The fusion of anti-American and pan-Islamic energies – reinforced once again during the protests against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 – has the potential of steering mainstream Muslim politics in a more militant and even Islamist direction.

The groundwork for this drift to militancy was laid, ironically, by Indian Muslims playing the game of electoral politics with spectacular finesse. The unexpected defeat of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government in the general elections of 2004 was, in hindsight, blamed on resentment caused by the India Shining hype. That may well be substantially true. Yet, a significant credit for the BJP defeat, particularly in northern and eastern India, must be attributed to the silent, en bloc Muslim vote against NDA candidates.

It has been suggested that the determination of Indian Muslims to vote against the NDA was a reaction to the Gujarat riots of 2002. There were reports of some rather stark video recordings of the riot victims being discreetly shown all over the country to exclusively Muslim audiences to motivate them into voting en-bloc against the NDA. True or not, the Muslim mobilisation was spectacularly low-key and unpublicised. The NDA never anticipated the Muslim backlash and, in fact, was horribly misled into believing that a campaign based on the promise of economic prosperity and peace with neighbouring countries would paper over communal divisions and even secure it a share of the Muslim vote. My own interaction with defeated NDA candidates after the elections suggested that they were quite unprepared for the silent Muslim consolidation. Consequently, they took absolutely no steps to trigger a countervailing Hindu consolidation.

The inevitable consequence of the 2004 general election was the recognition by the ‘secular’ parties, particularly the Congress, that victory would have been impossible without the solid support of the Muslim community. Determined to preserve this support at all costs, the Congress-led UPA government undertook measures that have proved far-reaching in their impact.

 

The most significant of these was the decision to go slow on the erstwhile NDA government’s crackdown on the so-called ISI modules operating throughout the country. Under the pretext of sparing ordinary Muslims the ignominy of harassment by over-zealous intelligence agencies, the remnants of the outlawed SIMI were given the space to regroup, particularly in states such as Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra. There was a fond belief that the changed political environment of the country, not least of which was the impression of disarray in the BJP, would encourage errant Muslim activists to return to the path of constitutional politics. This was also the strategy adopted initially to cope with the Naxalite insurgents in states such as Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Had Muslim activism been driven exclusively by events in India, this kid-glove approach may well have stood a chance of success. Unfortunately, radical Islamism has a marked international dimension – as the well-meaning multiculturalists in Britain have belatedly discovered. Consequently, it has become impossible to detach terrorism from radical Islamism and the yearning for a new Caliphate.

 

Beginning from 2005, India has witnessed a sharp rise in spectacular acts of terrorism outside Jammu and Kashmir. There was the audacious attack on the makeshift Ram temple in Ayodhya, the pre-Diwali blasts in crowded markets of Delhi, the blasts in Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan temple, the carnage on the commuter trains of Mumbai and the explosions outside a crowded mosque in Malegaon. While it is routine for intelligence agencies to immediately point a finger at Pakistan and the ISI, all the incidents suggest that the explosives experts – even assuming they were sent from Pakistan – had the backing of local Islamist cells, as opposed to the Mumbai underworld which played a leading role in the blasts of 1993.

In other words, India now possesses significant, locally-bred Islamist networks – nominally attached to LeT or JeM – which can either undertake terrorist operations on their own or, more likely, play facilitators to squads of mujahedeen who come from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There was a time when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and others used to boast that there was no Indian Muslim to be found in the ranks of the Al Qaeda. Today, particularly after the Mumbai blasts, such claims have abruptly ceased.

The emergence of local jihadis is a development that has both alarmed and embarrassed the UPA government. The government is painfully aware that terrorism is generating Hindu resentment which can, in the long run, be politically advantageous to the BJP. At the same time, a crackdown in the Muslim ghettos, from where the Islamists operate, can generate fierce Muslim resentment. The alacrity with which the Maharashtra government abandoned the mass interrogation of Muslims after the July 11 Mumbai blasts suggest that it is mindful of the political damage anti-terrorist operations can cause. At the same time, the Hindu consolidation in favour of the BJP in the towns of Uttar Pradesh during last November’s municipal polls point to the pitfalls of being seen to be ineffective in the war on terror.

 

For the moment, the UPA government hopes that dollops of welfare schemes and even a measure of state-sponsored reservations for Muslims will contain the Islamist challenge. The strategy centres on two assumptions, one true and the other false. The first assumption – quite true – is that extremism is still a fringe phenomenon and that most ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with fanciful notions of jihad. The second assumption is based on the belief that Islamist radicalisation, like Naxalism, is born of economic deprivation. If Muslims can be assured better living conditions, the extremists will be isolated and marginalised.

It is the second assumption which is problematic. There may well be some peripheral economic underpinnings of Islamism but all the indications are that Islamist grievances are essentially based on the yearning for political power and the creation of a ‘pure’ Islamic state. This is as true of the fledgling Palestinian state, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as it is of India. There is an inherent and irreconcilable contradiction between Islamist political aspirations and the realities of a modern, plural, democratic state which cannot be resolved by welfare sops and affirmative action.

 

Of course, the extent to which radical Islamist urges shape Muslim opinion is not predetermined. In September 2001 it appeared that Osama bin Laden had bitten off much more than he could chew by mounting unprovoked attacks on civilian targets in mainland America. The subsequent collapse of the Taliban regime seemed to have set the stage for the retreat of Islamism into the lunatic fringes of Muslim societies. However, by over-extending itself in Iraq, the Anglo-American alliance facilitated Islamism’s restoration of self-esteem.

Having taken on and beaten the Soviet Union in the Afghan jihad, Islamism seems set to force the world’s only remaining superpower into backing off from Iraq. Every last ounce of propaganda dividend stemming from President Bush’s larger failure – in which western liberal opinion played an equally significant part – will be extracted by those who passionately believe that the world belongs to an austere and purified Islam which has no space for the trappings of modernity.

The fallout will not be confined to the proverbial Arab street; it is bound to reach every nook and corner of the ummah. India cannot hope to be insulated from the process. More so if there is a Taliban revival in Afghanistan and jihadi energies are diverted to Kashmir and the rest of India.

Of course, like my previous exploration of Islamism, I can go horribly wrong again. I hope so. Not least because Hindu India doesn’t seem ready to either face up to challenges or fight to uphold the virtues of an easy-going India.