The Indian subcontinent is still a captive to its past. It is infected with the menace of terrorism as a legacy of its past. There is no sign that it has redeemed itself from its harrowing past or is willing, either. Therefore the politicized mechanism to fight is also motivated by history rather than ground reality.
Mumbai attacks of November 26, 2008, were at first thought unique for being quite new in aspect, dimension and preparation. However, if you look closely the serial blasts of March 1993 were also of the same dimension and preparation and so was the aspect of RDX imported and used in attacks.
Muslims essentially in India figure as perpetrators (and also victims, like their fellow countrymen). That the terrorists were Pakistanis and not Indians makes no difference in perception as far as November 26 attacks are concerned.
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What actually happened?
Basically, revenge against atrocity has powered one sort as the Anand Math has done the other. The incidents of Bankum Chand Chatterjee’s novel depict the terrifying Sanayasi rebellious terrorism of the early 1700s against the Muslim rule in Bengal. Today India is ruled neither by the Mughals or their descendants nor by the crusaders.
Whether India survives or not our gods must is the trickster’s fancy as it is premised upon the belief that we lost Kabul, Peshawar and Lahore through terrorism because our gods also lost space there. Another inference of this new Anand Math approach is that since only 6 Muslims lost life in the Malegaon blast of September 29, it is, nationally speaking, not as material as the Mumbai attacks. More so because in the latter case all the ten terrorists were Muslims while all the eleven accused in the former are of a different faith who cannot be terrorists thanks to their faith.
Equally nefarious and potentially dangerous is the next inference that India paid a heavy price for diverting attention to Malegaon in order to cater to a vote bank rather than maintaining focus on the recent bomb blasts in Ahmedabad, Delhi, etc. This latter course would have turned the screw on ‘the enemies of the nation’ while the former course (in which Hemant Karkare had found a Sadhvi and a Shankaracharya and a serving lieutenant colonel, etc as perpetrators) was politicized as it turned on the lawbreakers who were not Muslims.
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How RSS is involved in all of this?
There is a good deal of talk about Hindutva terror or Sangh Parivar terror since the arrest of the sadhvi, the swami and the lieutenant colonel. However, like all other terrorism, this is not new. Digamber Badge (one of the accused in the Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination case) was just like a sadhu (a foil of Guru Golawlker) when he peddled arms and carried some to VD Savarkar to inspect when he went to meet that ‘revolutionary’ along with Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte.
RSS member Madanlal Pahwa had joined the 1000 strong private army of RSS volunteers of Dr Dattatraya Parchure of Gwalior and would attack Muslims who were leaving Bhopal on the way to newly created Pakistan. Was his murderous violence any less kind of terror? Indeed it was so terrifying that no other than Gandhiji himself forced the ruler of Gwalior to reign in Parchure. That so disgusted Madanlal that he left Parchure’s militia and came to Mumbai and continued the terrorist attacks in hotels and on hawkers.
From there he went to Ahmednagar and threw a grenade at a Muslim procession and ran away and took refuge in the Deccan Guest House of fellow RSS member Vishnu Karkare. Was this not terror? Attacking Gandhiji with bombs and bullets was exactly terror. There was motivation and propaganda in it. So the whole talk of extremist Hindus taking to terrorism in recent years does not match with the historic facts given above.
The origin of the word assassin comes from Arabic and its historic incidents in Turkey are as stark terror as the Kurds there using terrorism for their different ends today. The terrorists from the other side of our borders design it their duty to speak for the Muslims of the country whom they consider as victims of Hindu extremism without bothering to know that their every act enhances the excruciating suffering of the increasingly ghettoized Muslims of India.
Read more: Looking at the terrors that continue to haunt Kashmir
The much-debated jihad terrorism is also not new
What is new about the Mumbai attacks of November 26, however, is the divergent responses including the rage the people feel against Pakistan, Indian intelligence agencies, the politicians (remember the attacks coincided with the assembly election in BJP ruled Madhya Pardesh and ended with the election in Delhi).
If this rage motivates the people and the government in the right direction we can begin to redeem ourselves from the bondage to the past. Nevertheless, we run across a blockade, the triangular complexity of still-shrouded-in-mystery connectivity of the juggernaut to stymie the investigation into the Sanyasi terrorism as Malegaon went through of the sadhvi, the swami and the lieutenant colonel, the assassination of Hemant Karkare and the looming 60-hour long attack in Mumbai.
The monk in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code also practices Sanayasi terrorism. Or, what else was it? The monk’s assassination of the key members of the mysterious Christian order, the Masonic order, too, was terror. The challenge is how to decode and who is to do it. Sophia’s grandfather Saunier was the custodian of the museum and was steeped in it, as was Hemant Karkare in the codes of the Sanayasi-Sadhvi: “Singh has sung” and “the cat is out of the bag”.
But the assassination of the trio, Hemant Karkare, Salaskar and Komte, is reminiscent of another sensational drama of yesterday involving three murders. On November 22, 1963, President John F Kennedy was assassinated. His assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was spotted walking in a deserted street, as deserted as the back streets of Cama hospital and Metro cinema, a police officer tried to arrest him but he shot the officer dead. Afterward, Oswald went to a cinema where the police arrested him. But two days later a mafia man called Jack Ruby (an Orthodox Jew, a nightclub owner, whose real name was Jacob Rubinstein) shot Oswald dead shouting, “Jews have guts”. Some also blamed that the Masonic order got the President killed.
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In the present case of Mumbai, the ten terrorists had come to the Chabad house where the Orthodox Jew Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg lived with their wife Rovla. The terrorists sent the servant to buy 100 kilos of chicken and 25 kilos of dry fruits. Israeli rescue and recovery organization called Zaka says that the bullets of the terrorists did not cause the death of the rabbi. But the next day the Israeli government denied it fearing its special and strategic relationship with India would be jeopardized. It claimed that the rabbi died by bullets fired by the terrorists. It is interesting to remember how the email of the Indian Mujahideen was allegedly sent from the computer of another orthodox evangelical order to which Kenneth Heyward belonged in Mumbai and Bangalore. The dead cannot tell their tale, who can?