India gains new respect in Muslim world
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Muslim diplomatic circles in Delhi are abuzz with new excitement. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's recent trip to Syria at a time when it is the target of attack from India's two closest allies, the United States and Israel, has convinced them that New Delhi is once again determined to pursue a foreign policy independent of the American worldview. Throughout his trip to Russia, Tajikistan and Syria, Vajpayee left no one in doubt that India has serious reservations about Washington's new foreign policy orientation of unilateral and illogical preemptive strikes in the Middle East.
While breaking their day-long fast at numerous Iftar parties in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Muslim, and particularly Arab diplomats, are privately musing with some surprise that contrary to apprehensions from a Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, India's relationship with the Muslim world has not only not worsened, it has actually improved. Indeed, it is thanks largely to consistent efforts made by this government that India can today count as friends and allies almost all the countries in the Muslim crescent that constitute the membership of the Organization of Islamic Conference.
If Arab diplomats are enthused at India's new-found non-alignment, following nearly three years of almost blindly following the US's lead in foreign affairs, they have a reason to be so. Coming as it did after the US-led war in Iraq and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visiting India a few months ago, the visit acquired particular significance as it triggered a lot of apprehension about Indian foreign policy orientation in the Arab mind.
Traveling as he was during Ramadan, a sacred month of fasting during which the Arab world comes to a virtual standstill, Vajpayee was something of a rare guest in Damascus, the Syrian capital. Naturally, the high point of his visit was a lavish Iftar banquet hosted by the young Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Vajpayee's mere presence in a Muslim country that the US has designated a sponsor of terror and Israel had attacked with missiles not long ago had its own significance. This courageous vote of confidence by traditional ally India in an Arab world that considers itself under siege was of tremendous significance for them.
Vajpayee's Syria visit affirmed that India and Syria want the United Nations to play a major role in Iraq, where the priority must be to restore security. A joint statement issued on Sunday said it was "vital that the Iraqi people take charge of their own destiny", and for the UN to "play a large role in the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq". India and Syria also called for the "implementation of a just, global and lasting peace in the Middle East", with Vajpayee stressing "India's support for the Palestinian and Syrian causes". The two countries also urged "effective cooperation in the struggle against international terrorism", adding that terror must not be linked to one religion in particular, apparently meaning Islam.
India and Syria also signed bilateral accords on technology, industry, culture and education, emphasizing that they are both keen to facilitate cooperation in information technology and biotechnology. The state-run Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC-Videsh) is expected to collaborate with Syrian companies to prospect for oil.
Before visiting Syria, Vajpayee went to Tajikistan on his present trip, stressing the high significance India attaches to Central Asia now. His visit has further strengthened India's strategic ties with Tajikistan. New Delhi's equation with President Emomali Rakhmanov's Tajik government is important in dealing with developments in Afghanistan and countering Muslim extremism in the whole of Central Asia. The visit follows Defense Minister George Fernandes' earlier Central Asian visit to build bridges with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, too, was in Tashkent earlier this month. His brief in Uzbekistan - spearheading the discourse on Central Asia organized by government-funded think tank Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis.
India's strategic foothold at the Aini air base near Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, is now confirmed. Fernandes had clinched the formal agreement on upgrading and use of the air base on an earlier visit to Tajikistan in April 2002. After Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, the Tajik facility at Aini is India's first air base outside its frontiers. It has now secured contracts in the Trincomalee harbor and Palaly airfield in Sri Lanka. Vajpayee recently proposed the extension of the link road from Chabahar Port in Iran to Kabul and thence via Kunduz in Badakshan (Afghanistan) to Tajikistan. This would give India additional access to Central Asia and Afghanistan.
One of the surprises that the Vajpayee administration has thrown at the diplomatic corps in Delhi is its ability to deal with Muslims of all hues and establish strategic ties with them. Be it secular Turkey or fundamentalist Iran, secular Malaysia or moderately Islamic Indonesia, India has not had difficulty in establishing and strengthening close strategic ties. Vajpayee and even Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani have traveled to a number of Muslim countries promoting India's traditional ties with them. And so have Sinha and Fernandes, among other senior ministers.
The ease with which the BJP leaders have dealt with Muslim leaders in various countries is astonishing to those who are aware of their background as alumni of the Rashtriya Swayamewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor and progenitor of all Hindu fundamentalist organizations in India. RSS ideologues have long believed in and have been waiting for the clash of civilizations. Almost 90 years before Samuel Huntington wrote his famous essay on the impending clash of civilizations and later developed it into a book with the same title, and decades before even the RSS was formally organized in 1925, Bipin Chandra Pal, a Hindu nationalist leader of India's freedom movement, had foreseen this clash among various civilizations and predicted that Hindu civilization will side with the Judeo-Christian West in its war against Islamic and Chinese civilizations.
Pal's essays and articles written almost a century ago make fascinating reading. A genuine thinker and visionary, Pal propounded his theories despite the fact that he considered the West as the greatest danger to humanity and was a great admirer of Islam's spiritual values. He thought that Islam was going to conquer large parts of the world, through its power of propaganda and not through war. He considered this inevitable. He was, however, scared of Islam's political manipulation. He foresaw the dangers of political Islam, which he considered an aberration. For, in his view, Islam is not only "extra-territorial" in its ideology, but also "extra-political".
In order to appreciate better the mindset and intellectual training the BJP leaders have received, we can do nothing better than read brief excerpts from some of Pal's original writings. Despite the archaic early 20th century prose style, these passages are quite exciting. In a collection of his essays entitled "Nationality and Empire", Pal writes under the sub-head Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism:
"This Pan-European combination [that we now call the West] will be a very serious menace to the non-European world. It will be bound to come into serious conflict with both Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. If Europe can settle her internal jealousies betimes, she will be able to dominate easily both the Islamic and the Mongolian world. Nothing will prevent in that case the parceling out of the Muslim lands on the one side, and of China on the other. But that is not very likely. It will take, at least, as long a time for the European chancelleries to forget their past jealousies and present rivalries, as it will take for China, now that she has awakened from the sleep of ages, to put her own house in order and organize her leviathan strength to hold her own against all the world.
"The same thing is likely to happen in the Islamic world also; and the fall of Turkey in Europe will hasten this combination. It will not be an organized confederacy like that of China and Japan, but a far more dangerous, because more subtle, combination of the hearts of countless hordes who hold nothing so dear, neither land nor life, as their religion. And the real strength of this Pan-Islamic outburst will come from Egypt and India [which then included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh], where it will be safe from the crushing weight of the Pan-European confederacy. England will not allow her European confederates to interfere with her own domestic affairs; such interference would break up the confederation at once. She will have to settle this Pan-Islamic problem, so far as it may affect her own dominions, herself."
Then describing where the danger for India will come from, he writes under the title "Our Real Danger". "And it is just here that our safety from this possible Pan-European combination also lies. Because of the British connection, India will have nothing to fear from any possible combination of the European powers. The same is also true of Egypt, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Our real menace will come not from Europe but from Asia, not from Pan-Europeanism but from Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. These dangers are, however, common, both to India and Egypt and Great Britain. To provide against it, Great Britain will have to find and work out a satisfactory and permanent settlement of the Indian and the Egyptian problem, and we, on our part, will have also to come to some rational compromise with her. British statesmanship must recognize the urgent and absolute need of fully satisfying the demands of Indian and Egyptian nationalism, and India and Egypt will have to frankly accept the British connection - which is different from British subjection - as a necessary condition of their national life and freedom. To wantonly seek to break up this connection, while it will only hurt Great Britain, may positively kill every chance and possibility of either Indian or Egyptian nationalism ever realizing itself."
Predicting and pleading the need for the alliance of the West and India, he writes under the sub-head "Our True Safety". "Indian nationalism in any case, has, I think, really no fear of being permanently opposed or crippled by Great Britain. On the contrary, the British connection can alone offer its effective protection against both the Pan-Islamic and the Pan-Mongolianism menace. As long as we had to consider Great Britain alone or any other European Power for the matter of that, while thinking of the future of Indian nationalism, the problem was comparatively simple and easy. But now we have to think if China on the one hand, and of the new Pan-Islamic danger on the other. The 60 millions of Mahomedans in India, if inspired with Pan-Islamic aspirations, joined to the Islamic principalities and powers that stand both to our West and our northwest, may easily put an end to all our nationalist aspirations, almost at any moment, if the present British connection be severed.
"The four-hundred millions of the Chinese empire can, not only gain an easy footing in India, but once that footing is gained, they are the only people under the sun who can hold us down by sheer superior physical force. There is no other people who can do this. This awakening of China is, therefore, a very serious menace - in the present condition of our country, without an organized and trained army and a powerful navy of our own - to the maintenance of any isolated, though sovereign, independence of the Indian people. Even if we are able to gain it, we shall never be able to keep it, in the face of this Pan-Islamic and Pan-Mongolian menace. And when one considers these terrible possibilities of the world situation as it is slowly evolving before one's eyes, one is forced to recognize the absolute need of keeping up the British connection in the interest of Indian nationalism itself, for the very simple and sufficient reason that there is absolutely much greater chance of this nationalism fully realizing itself with rather than without this connection."
That politicians trained in this paranoid school of thought are finding it possible to come to terms with not only the Muslim world, but also China, is a tribute to their flexibility and adaptability. What has happened in the last year to bring about this metamorphosis in BJP leaders' mindset? Until last year they were pursuing a policy dictated by their political philosophy - wary of China and the Muslim world, they were simply kowtowing the West.
I do not presume to know the answer. But I can hazard a guess. What may have apprised them of the reality of the situation and expunged the influence of ideology is the world's reactions to the events in Gujarat. About 2,000 Muslims were killed and a 100,000 rendered homeless, the whole of central Gujarat cleansed of their presence, following the killing of 59 Hindus in a train compartment that was burned down, presumably by Muslims. From all accounts these anti-Muslim massacres were either organized, or at least encouraged by the BJP government of Gujarat.
This was the first large-scale mass murder in India in the age of electronic media and human rights activists. Word and images wend around and the world came to know of it. A strange thing happened. From the RSS point of view, neither China nor a single Muslim country protested. BJP politicians had to face a lot of flak. But all of it came from the West, either European governments or Western and Third World liberals trained in the West.
This may have shattered in the Hindutva mind the myth of a Muslim ummah, a world Muslim community. This myth had persisted in their mind against all evidence to the contrary presented to them by scholars from around the world. This may have also removed from their minds the fear of a clash between an alliance of Islamic and Chinese civilizations on the one hand ranged against the Hindu and Judeo-Christian civilizations on the other. If this is indeed what has happened, Gujarat may well have served a good purpose. Good can indeed come out of evil too.
India gains new respect in Muslim world
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Muslim diplomatic circles in Delhi are abuzz with new excitement. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's recent trip to Syria at a time when it is the target of attack from India's two closest allies, the United States and Israel, has convinced them that New Delhi is once again determined to pursue a foreign policy independent of the American worldview. Throughout his trip to Russia, Tajikistan and Syria, Vajpayee left no one in doubt that India has serious reservations about Washington's new foreign policy orientation of unilateral and illogical preemptive strikes in the Middle East.
While breaking their day-long fast at numerous Iftar parties in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Muslim, and particularly Arab diplomats, are privately musing with some surprise that contrary to apprehensions from a Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, India's relationship with the Muslim world has not only not worsened, it has actually improved. Indeed, it is thanks largely to consistent efforts made by this government that India can today count as friends and allies almost all the countries in the Muslim crescent that constitute the membership of the Organization of Islamic Conference.
If Arab diplomats are enthused at India's new-found non-alignment, following nearly three years of almost blindly following the US's lead in foreign affairs, they have a reason to be so. Coming as it did after the US-led war in Iraq and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visiting India a few months ago, the visit acquired particular significance as it triggered a lot of apprehension about Indian foreign policy orientation in the Arab mind.
Traveling as he was during Ramadan, a sacred month of fasting during which the Arab world comes to a virtual standstill, Vajpayee was something of a rare guest in Damascus, the Syrian capital. Naturally, the high point of his visit was a lavish Iftar banquet hosted by the young Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Vajpayee's mere presence in a Muslim country that the US has designated a sponsor of terror and Israel had attacked with missiles not long ago had its own significance. This courageous vote of confidence by traditional ally India in an Arab world that considers itself under siege was of tremendous significance for them.
Vajpayee's Syria visit affirmed that India and Syria want the United Nations to play a major role in Iraq, where the priority must be to restore security. A joint statement issued on Sunday said it was "vital that the Iraqi people take charge of their own destiny", and for the UN to "play a large role in the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq". India and Syria also called for the "implementation of a just, global and lasting peace in the Middle East", with Vajpayee stressing "India's support for the Palestinian and Syrian causes". The two countries also urged "effective cooperation in the struggle against international terrorism", adding that terror must not be linked to one religion in particular, apparently meaning Islam.
India and Syria also signed bilateral accords on technology, industry, culture and education, emphasizing that they are both keen to facilitate cooperation in information technology and biotechnology. The state-run Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC-Videsh) is expected to collaborate with Syrian companies to prospect for oil.
Before visiting Syria, Vajpayee went to Tajikistan on his present trip, stressing the high significance India attaches to Central Asia now. His visit has further strengthened India's strategic ties with Tajikistan. New Delhi's equation with President Emomali Rakhmanov's Tajik government is important in dealing with developments in Afghanistan and countering Muslim extremism in the whole of Central Asia. The visit follows Defense Minister George Fernandes' earlier Central Asian visit to build bridges with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, too, was in Tashkent earlier this month. His brief in Uzbekistan - spearheading the discourse on Central Asia organized by government-funded think tank Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis.
India's strategic foothold at the Aini air base near Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, is now confirmed. Fernandes had clinched the formal agreement on upgrading and use of the air base on an earlier visit to Tajikistan in April 2002. After Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, the Tajik facility at Aini is India's first air base outside its frontiers. It has now secured contracts in the Trincomalee harbor and Palaly airfield in Sri Lanka. Vajpayee recently proposed the extension of the link road from Chabahar Port in Iran to Kabul and thence via Kunduz in Badakshan (Afghanistan) to Tajikistan. This would give India additional access to Central Asia and Afghanistan.
One of the surprises that the Vajpayee administration has thrown at the diplomatic corps in Delhi is its ability to deal with Muslims of all hues and establish strategic ties with them. Be it secular Turkey or fundamentalist Iran, secular Malaysia or moderately Islamic Indonesia, India has not had difficulty in establishing and strengthening close strategic ties. Vajpayee and even Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani have traveled to a number of Muslim countries promoting India's traditional ties with them. And so have Sinha and Fernandes, among other senior ministers.
The ease with which the BJP leaders have dealt with Muslim leaders in various countries is astonishing to those who are aware of their background as alumni of the Rashtriya Swayamewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor and progenitor of all Hindu fundamentalist organizations in India. RSS ideologues have long believed in and have been waiting for the clash of civilizations. Almost 90 years before Samuel Huntington wrote his famous essay on the impending clash of civilizations and later developed it into a book with the same title, and decades before even the RSS was formally organized in 1925, Bipin Chandra Pal, a Hindu nationalist leader of India's freedom movement, had foreseen this clash among various civilizations and predicted that Hindu civilization will side with the Judeo-Christian West in its war against Islamic and Chinese civilizations.
Pal's essays and articles written almost a century ago make fascinating reading. A genuine thinker and visionary, Pal propounded his theories despite the fact that he considered the West as the greatest danger to humanity and was a great admirer of Islam's spiritual values. He thought that Islam was going to conquer large parts of the world, through its power of propaganda and not through war. He considered this inevitable. He was, however, scared of Islam's political manipulation. He foresaw the dangers of political Islam, which he considered an aberration. For, in his view, Islam is not only "extra-territorial" in its ideology, but also "extra-political".
In order to appreciate better the mindset and intellectual training the BJP leaders have received, we can do nothing better than read brief excerpts from some of Pal's original writings. Despite the archaic early 20th century prose style, these passages are quite exciting. In a collection of his essays entitled "Nationality and Empire", Pal writes under the sub-head Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism:
"This Pan-European combination [that we now call the West] will be a very serious menace to the non-European world. It will be bound to come into serious conflict with both Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. If Europe can settle her internal jealousies betimes, she will be able to dominate easily both the Islamic and the Mongolian world. Nothing will prevent in that case the parceling out of the Muslim lands on the one side, and of China on the other. But that is not very likely. It will take, at least, as long a time for the European chancelleries to forget their past jealousies and present rivalries, as it will take for China, now that she has awakened from the sleep of ages, to put her own house in order and organize her leviathan strength to hold her own against all the world.
"The same thing is likely to happen in the Islamic world also; and the fall of Turkey in Europe will hasten this combination. It will not be an organized confederacy like that of China and Japan, but a far more dangerous, because more subtle, combination of the hearts of countless hordes who hold nothing so dear, neither land nor life, as their religion. And the real strength of this Pan-Islamic outburst will come from Egypt and India [which then included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh], where it will be safe from the crushing weight of the Pan-European confederacy. England will not allow her European confederates to interfere with her own domestic affairs; such interference would break up the confederation at once. She will have to settle this Pan-Islamic problem, so far as it may affect her own dominions, herself."
Then describing where the danger for India will come from, he writes under the title "Our Real Danger". "And it is just here that our safety from this possible Pan-European combination also lies. Because of the British connection, India will have nothing to fear from any possible combination of the European powers. The same is also true of Egypt, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Our real menace will come not from Europe but from Asia, not from Pan-Europeanism but from Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. These dangers are, however, common, both to India and Egypt and Great Britain. To provide against it, Great Britain will have to find and work out a satisfactory and permanent settlement of the Indian and the Egyptian problem, and we, on our part, will have also to come to some rational compromise with her. British statesmanship must recognize the urgent and absolute need of fully satisfying the demands of Indian and Egyptian nationalism, and India and Egypt will have to frankly accept the British connection - which is different from British subjection - as a necessary condition of their national life and freedom. To wantonly seek to break up this connection, while it will only hurt Great Britain, may positively kill every chance and possibility of either Indian or Egyptian nationalism ever realizing itself."
Predicting and pleading the need for the alliance of the West and India, he writes under the sub-head "Our True Safety". "Indian nationalism in any case, has, I think, really no fear of being permanently opposed or crippled by Great Britain. On the contrary, the British connection can alone offer its effective protection against both the Pan-Islamic and the Pan-Mongolianism menace. As long as we had to consider Great Britain alone or any other European Power for the matter of that, while thinking of the future of Indian nationalism, the problem was comparatively simple and easy. But now we have to think if China on the one hand, and of the new Pan-Islamic danger on the other. The 60 millions of Mahomedans in India, if inspired with Pan-Islamic aspirations, joined to the Islamic principalities and powers that stand both to our West and our northwest, may easily put an end to all our nationalist aspirations, almost at any moment, if the present British connection be severed.
"The four-hundred millions of the Chinese empire can, not only gain an easy footing in India, but once that footing is gained, they are the only people under the sun who can hold us down by sheer superior physical force. There is no other people who can do this. This awakening of China is, therefore, a very serious menace - in the present condition of our country, without an organized and trained army and a powerful navy of our own - to the maintenance of any isolated, though sovereign, independence of the Indian people. Even if we are able to gain it, we shall never be able to keep it, in the face of this Pan-Islamic and Pan-Mongolian menace. And when one considers these terrible possibilities of the world situation as it is slowly evolving before one's eyes, one is forced to recognize the absolute need of keeping up the British connection in the interest of Indian nationalism itself, for the very simple and sufficient reason that there is absolutely much greater chance of this nationalism fully realizing itself with rather than without this connection."
That politicians trained in this paranoid school of thought are finding it possible to come to terms with not only the Muslim world, but also China, is a tribute to their flexibility and adaptability. What has happened in the last year to bring about this metamorphosis in BJP leaders' mindset? Until last year they were pursuing a policy dictated by their political philosophy - wary of China and the Muslim world, they were simply kowtowing the West.
I do not presume to know the answer. But I can hazard a guess. What may have apprised them of the reality of the situation and expunged the influence of ideology is the world's reactions to the events in Gujarat. About 2,000 Muslims were killed and a 100,000 rendered homeless, the whole of central Gujarat cleansed of their presence, following the killing of 59 Hindus in a train compartment that was burned down, presumably by Muslims. From all accounts these anti-Muslim massacres were either organized, or at least encouraged by the BJP government of Gujarat.
This was the first large-scale mass murder in India in the age of electronic media and human rights activists. Word and images wend around and the world came to know of it. A strange thing happened. From the RSS point of view, neither China nor a single Muslim country protested. BJP politicians had to face a lot of flak. But all of it came from the West, either European governments or Western and Third World liberals trained in the West.
This may have shattered in the Hindutva mind the myth of a Muslim ummah, a world Muslim community. This myth had persisted in their mind against all evidence to the contrary presented to them by scholars from around the world. This may have also removed from their minds the fear of a clash between an alliance of Islamic and Chinese civilizations on the one hand ranged against the Hindu and Judeo-Christian civilizations on the other. If this is indeed what has happened, Gujarat may well have served a good purpose. Good can indeed come out of evil too.
India gains new respect in Muslim world