India’s 9/11

Modern India has suffered from Muslim terrorist violence for almost half a century. Its people, particularly in the North, suffered under that oppression for hundreds of years before that.

The battleground states in particular, with large neighboring populations of Muslims and Hindus, such as Gujrat, have seen Muslim violence and anti-Muslim rioting in response. It’s true, India has had to varying degrees certain injustices tied to a caste system, a small Maoist insurgency in Kerala, violence from Tamil extremists, and a number of other sources of unrest. But of all the things to say in response to the recent bombings, only the pseudo-sophisticated New York Times would think it was saying something intelligent in noting that the bombs were “Aimed at India’s Well-Off.”
This is a peculiar way of characterizing the recent attacks. It’s like saying the 9/11 attacks on the US were aimed at people who work in tall buildings, at the wealthy people that worked at the World Trade Center, or at those people that had jobs in general. It was all of those things, but it was aimed ultimately at America, its values, and its opposition to militant Islam in the Middle East. India has been repeatedly attacked not ove Kashmir, which would be a nonissue if Hindu minorities had any hope of leaving peacefully under some other country’s rule. But in Kashmir as in Gujrat, Indians know that Muslim ascendency means oppression for all non-Muslims. India’s non-Muslim population has been targeted because as a people it has chosen to resist calls that it, and its Muslim denizens, live by a code of illiberal Sharia law. Such a code entails oppression and ultimately forced conversion of all non-Muslims under the aegis of the so-called “dhimmi” tax. India’s Hindu population has been targeted because it supports democracy, majority rule, and its own freedom from Muslim domination. While substantial numbers of Muslims have lived propsperously and without molestation in India under Hindu majority rule, native Pakistan has seen its population of religious minorities decline to a fraction of what they were when the two countries separated in 1947. It is now a 98% Muslim nation; its name, after all, means the “Land of the Pure.” The very presence and, worse, the rule of non-Muslims is completely anathema to a Muslim population. We’ve seen from Thailand to India to France that Muslim populations become emboldened and turbulent as soon as their numbers permit.

Hindus are sick of the oppression and attempted oppression directed against them by their Muslim minority, where parliaments have been attacked, women have had acid thrown in their faces, and temples have been destroyed and displaced. While Hinduism has historically permitted oppression of certain castes, its adherents have also shown a great willingness to come into the modern world, disposing of that which is oppressive and backwards, while retaining its spiritual and moral teachings that accord with universal values of compassion and justice. I know this because the evidence is in India’s dynamic political and economic today and in those of Indian heritage I have known personally. Hindu nationalists have undoubtedly reacted to Muslim atrocities with unforgivable atrocities of their own. But let us not forget how this cycle started; it was Muslims who invaded India with the sword under the Moguls, and it is they who threaten its culture and political life today. Of course, not all Muslims support these terrible acts committed in the name of Islam and Kashmiri nationalism; Indian Muslims are in many ways the most liberal, generous, and nonviolent of any group of Muslims on the planet. But is this because they are expressing “true” Islam or because the liberal values of their neighbors are rubbing off, in other words, they are this way “in spite of” Islam.

It obscures this fundamental tension in Indian society to reconceive these attacks as aimed at the rich or commuters or some other irrelevant characteristic of the train riders of Bombay. They were Indians and almost all Hindu. And their very presence is an affront to Muslim extremists, whose concept of religion says that they and their religion should dominate every parcel of Earth where its members have been able to establish a foothold. This kind of Manichaean viewpoint is incompatible with the natural tolerance of Indian society, a tolerance born from the nation’s substantial linguistic and ethnic diversity. Even a tolerant and liberal nation may be called to do some illiberal things to preserve its fundamental structures; so long as India’s Muslims (and the neighboring Muslims of Pakistan) do not disassociate from and denounce these kinds of acts in no uncertain terms, the rest of India is rightfully suspicious of whether they can continue to show the tolerance they’ve shown its Muslim minority until now.