07-08-2007, 03:33 AM
<b>The danger of deep religosity</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not known for public displays of either human emotion or political dexterity - the reasons why he survives in his job. Consequently, in deviating from a dreary script to complain about a sleepless night worrying about the troubled parents of a terror suspect, he wasn't falling back on spontaneity. Nor was he trying to be too clever arousing the motherly instincts of women journalists who had been invited to high-tea.Â
<b>Manmohan's apparent insomnia is an affliction of convenience. It is aimed at reassuring the angst-ridden brotherhood that India wasn't going to walk that extra mile to help Prime Minister Gordon Brown confront the jihad in Britain</b>.
<b>The Prime Minister didn't lose sleep over those youngsters at a club in London's Haymarket who escaped being fire-bombed because a syringe failed to work; he didn't lose sleep over those Scots who were traumatised by the suicide attack on Glasgow airport. Whether it is 250 people being blown apart in Mumbai last year, farmers committing suicide because they couldn't pay off loans, and the institution of the presidency facing disrepute because of a colossal political misjudgment, the Prime Minister has never lost sleep. He is the living personification of Alfred E Neumann - unfazed, untroubled and, when expedient, unaware.</b>
The shocking revelation that the Glasgow bomber was a Bangalore-bred, professional Muslim from a well-heeled family and holding an Indian passport has punctured many self-serving myths.
<b>First, it has destroyed the bogus theory that Indian democracy is permanent firewall against Islamist extremism. "No Indian has ever been a part of Al Qaeda"</b> was a boast that every second politician was fond of repeating at international fora. <b>Now there is evidence that links Indian Muslims to the network of global terror.</b>
Second,<b> Kafeel Ahmed was no neo-literate member of the underclass who took to terror because previous governments had not made provisions for Muslim quotas. He was well-off and well educated.</b>
Third, the bomber was not someone socially crippled by the supposed "alienation" of Asians in Britain. <b>He did not fit the stereotype of the maladjusted, British-born Asian Muslim from the North of England who embraced radical Islamism as a form of social protest.</b> Kafeel and his brother, from all accounts, couldn't give a damn about the multicultural hiccups of British society. Like Dhiren Barot, the Gujarati convert to Islam who wanted to bomb nightclubs in London because they were frequented by "slags", the Ahmeds insulated themselves from their environment and retreated into a mental ghetto.
Finally, the initial evidence points to a disturbing phenomenon:<b> Deep religiosity as the base on which subsequent political extremism rests. </b>The media has reported the attachment of the Ahmeds to an austere version of Sunni Islam which is popular throughout South Asia. Other studies suggest a correlation between terrorism and those Muslims who are already conditioned by regressive religious currents.<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'> In other words, terrorism stems from sustained propaganda and an insidious variety of religious evangelism. </span>
The most important lesson for India to emerge from Glasgow is that our political and security establishments are living in denial. We have heard Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil and countless secularists bore us to tears over terrorists having no religion. We have heard with surprise the Prime Minister almost pleading to the West to typecast Indians with Pakistanis - and both as terrorists.
At the same time, the lived experience points to terrorists not only possessing faith but having a rather enhanced sense of it. Experience also tells us that the stereotyping of all Indians as potential terrorists is, ironically, being egged on by Indian secularists and British multiculturalists who are seeing their pet theories of victimhood being exposed as humbug. Kafeel Ahmed was about as much a victim of injustice as the middle-class Egyptian Mohammed Atta was. Both became suicide bombers out of a fanatical commitment to an ideology of conquest and hegemony. It is that ideology Britain is targeting and which India has to target. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>If this involves also pumping Manmohan Singh with sedatives, we shouldn't run away from the experience. </span>
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<b>Manmohan's apparent insomnia is an affliction of convenience. It is aimed at reassuring the angst-ridden brotherhood that India wasn't going to walk that extra mile to help Prime Minister Gordon Brown confront the jihad in Britain</b>.
<b>The Prime Minister didn't lose sleep over those youngsters at a club in London's Haymarket who escaped being fire-bombed because a syringe failed to work; he didn't lose sleep over those Scots who were traumatised by the suicide attack on Glasgow airport. Whether it is 250 people being blown apart in Mumbai last year, farmers committing suicide because they couldn't pay off loans, and the institution of the presidency facing disrepute because of a colossal political misjudgment, the Prime Minister has never lost sleep. He is the living personification of Alfred E Neumann - unfazed, untroubled and, when expedient, unaware.</b>
The shocking revelation that the Glasgow bomber was a Bangalore-bred, professional Muslim from a well-heeled family and holding an Indian passport has punctured many self-serving myths.
<b>First, it has destroyed the bogus theory that Indian democracy is permanent firewall against Islamist extremism. "No Indian has ever been a part of Al Qaeda"</b> was a boast that every second politician was fond of repeating at international fora. <b>Now there is evidence that links Indian Muslims to the network of global terror.</b>
Second,<b> Kafeel Ahmed was no neo-literate member of the underclass who took to terror because previous governments had not made provisions for Muslim quotas. He was well-off and well educated.</b>
Third, the bomber was not someone socially crippled by the supposed "alienation" of Asians in Britain. <b>He did not fit the stereotype of the maladjusted, British-born Asian Muslim from the North of England who embraced radical Islamism as a form of social protest.</b> Kafeel and his brother, from all accounts, couldn't give a damn about the multicultural hiccups of British society. Like Dhiren Barot, the Gujarati convert to Islam who wanted to bomb nightclubs in London because they were frequented by "slags", the Ahmeds insulated themselves from their environment and retreated into a mental ghetto.
Finally, the initial evidence points to a disturbing phenomenon:<b> Deep religiosity as the base on which subsequent political extremism rests. </b>The media has reported the attachment of the Ahmeds to an austere version of Sunni Islam which is popular throughout South Asia. Other studies suggest a correlation between terrorism and those Muslims who are already conditioned by regressive religious currents.<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'> In other words, terrorism stems from sustained propaganda and an insidious variety of religious evangelism. </span>
The most important lesson for India to emerge from Glasgow is that our political and security establishments are living in denial. We have heard Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil and countless secularists bore us to tears over terrorists having no religion. We have heard with surprise the Prime Minister almost pleading to the West to typecast Indians with Pakistanis - and both as terrorists.
At the same time, the lived experience points to terrorists not only possessing faith but having a rather enhanced sense of it. Experience also tells us that the stereotyping of all Indians as potential terrorists is, ironically, being egged on by Indian secularists and British multiculturalists who are seeing their pet theories of victimhood being exposed as humbug. Kafeel Ahmed was about as much a victim of injustice as the middle-class Egyptian Mohammed Atta was. Both became suicide bombers out of a fanatical commitment to an ideology of conquest and hegemony. It is that ideology Britain is targeting and which India has to target. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>If this involves also pumping Manmohan Singh with sedatives, we shouldn't run away from the experience. </span>
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