Editorial

There is nothing unusual in the conclusions drawn by the American researcher Prof. Robert A. Pape that Islam or religious fundamental ism has nothing to do with suicide bombers that are messing up the Pentagon’s dreams in various parts of the world. The study may amuse the naïve Americans but fails to cause any surprise in the world of Islam. Undoubtedly, the Americans may have vast amount of intellectual and material resources to squander on projects like ‘Suicide Terrorism’, the conclusions do not rise beyond the level of popular perceptions in Cairo, Damascus, Kabul, Sana’a or Tashkent.


Even a wasp stings, if stirred. The jingoistic US president Geroge W. Bush was only stretching credulity when he declared on May 1, 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Bush’s words still ring in the ears: ‘Now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country…. Decades of lies and intimidation could not make the Iraqi people love their oppressors or desire their own enslavement.’ In reality, only a battle had ended in Baghdad. War had begun to oust the new enslavers.


Now the same Americans are realizing that Iraqis are fighting against their ‘liberators’ and American forces and the puppet regime is busy constructing walls to secure the Green Zone. And as concluded by the Pape study, terrorism is proving to be the weapon of the weak and the task of resisting the occupiers has been solely assigned to the youth who dare to die for the land.


The organized Israeli and US vandalism against innocent folk in the Middle East needed no leviathan study. It was apparent that it was not faith, but land which the people were defending. Elements of faith did provide the fuel, battle cry of jihad or trigger whenever holy books came in for desecration or simply clad womanhood was paraded on the ramp. But ‘taproot of terrorism was nationalism, not Islamic fundamentalism’ as has been very rightly observed by the study. In fact, the study shows that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and any of the world religions. Evidence is marshaled from Sri Lanka where the study finds that all suicide bombers-76 of the total 462 instances studied-were from Hindu community but were adamantly opposed to religion. Lebanon provided similar results, 38 of the 41 attackers being opposed to Islamic fundamentalism. In Israel, although Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out 110 attacks between 1994 and 2003, but Islamic fundamentalism could not be found to be the driving force in 79 instances.


Americans must realize that the primary target of the lust of their rulers is oil and protection of their stooge Israel, rather than liberty for Iraqis. Bushspeak should not delude them because White House, State Department and Pentagon have largely turned into hostages in the hands of strong Israeli lobby whose bloodlust is never satiated.


American jingoism is pivotal to the suicide terrorism in the Muslim world. Few would agree with Pape’s policy prescription of ‘offshore stationing of US troops’ with a strategy of ‘fast redeployment for combat’. America needs to put peace and justice at the core of its policy and should abandon the ‘holy task’ of redesigning the Middle East to permanently secure Israel and sea lanes for oil tankers.


The study must however be interpreted as some headway in retrieving Americans from delusions, deceptions and dreams.

The judgment by Mr. Justice S. N. Srivastava of the Allahabad High Court directing the Uttar Pradesh government not to treat Muslims as a minority defies logic. Coming as it does on the spur of the Assembly election in the most populous state with a sizeable minority population, it carries an element of surprise which is open to wide interpretation.


The judgment is basically flawed as Muslims, constituting 18 per cent of the people of the state in question, fulfill all the three basic requirements of being a minority i.e., numerical inferiority, non-dominant status and distinct elements of identity which they wish to preserve. The three ingredients of minority definition have been outlined in most discussions ever since minority rights became a talking point initially in Europe but later in all other societies witnessing influx of people in the wake of economic changes. This definition was generally agreed upon in the wake of diverse pulls and pressures of assimilation and exclusion or submission and secessionism being exerted in modern democracies where power came to be defined in terms of aspiration of larger segment of people. In this context Francesco Capotorti was asked to elaborate the concept of minority by the UN Sub-Commission formulating International Covenant on civil and Political Rights. Capotorti’s report said: “A group of citizens of a State, constituting a numerical minority and in a non-dominant position in that State, endowed with ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristic which differ from those of the majority of the population, having a sense of solidarity with one another motivated, if only implicitly, by a collective will to survive and whose aim is to achieve equality with the majority in fact and in law.”


Even though no consensus has been arrived at, corpus of literature on minorities has made it evident that parameters of minority are no longer fuzzy. It is indeed surprising that the judgment makes a travesty of what is taken as agreed.