Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the totemic anti-Indian. For all practical-shall we say prophetical as well?-purposes, this fragile old man has become the Ayatollah of the Valley.
He utters the word India as if it is a satanic alien pitted against his fettered faith. A cursory look at his statements and numerous interviews will show how much he hates India, the occupying power, and how far will he go in his mobilisation against the oppressor.
He uses the rumour about the Koran-burning in America on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 as an excuse for inciting Islamic rage against defenceless infidels. As patron saint of the hate-India movement, he engineers the mind of the stone-pelting, martyrdom-seeking freedom fighters of the Valley.
We call him a secessionist, or a separatist. Why can't we call him a terrorist and treat him like one?
He is as one-dimensional as any other terrorist.
To pretend that that his struggle against his own country doesn't have a religious adjective, that money-read development-can win the minds of the freedom fighter powered by the Book, is to abdicate your national responsibility and take refuge in the deception of reconciliation-through-concession. And the only concession that will be acceptable to him is Kashmir's freedom from the coloniser.
Self-determination, he says. History tells us something else: it is an exclusivist god that determines in such disputes.
One of the biggest achievements of Indian democracy is that it has an amazing ability to live outside history. So we miss the point again and again, though the man who should have ideally been on the "wanted" list of the country misses nothing: the streets are erupting to his commands, the statistics of horror keep growing, and azadi is blending perfectly with jihad.
If terrorism in the post-9/11 context draws its power from the combustibility of fear and the nihilism of faith, Geelani must be the most indulged terrorist at work today. Indulged by his victim itself, and that is the overwhelming strangeness of it.
Geelani's freedom is matched only by the special privileges enjoyed by the so-called Maoists whose tribal bloodlust has already put India on the defensive. Here again the tiresome development argument has reduced a matter of national security to phoney social rhetoric. Here again, those who challenge the very existence of the Republic for the realisation of a sub-rural Ruritania are being treated as the orphans of our national progress. Like the god in the Valley, the one in the jungle too requires the cult of dispossession to sustain his struggle against the enemy.
They are now colour-coding terror to make it politically more feasible.
when the attacker has more political worth than the victim, no matter whether he is a soldier or a civilian, an equal distribution of terror becomes a political necessity. So "saffron" terror has suddenly become the counter-terror, as immediate as the terror whose religious colour we are too squeamish to mention lest it offend the sensibilities of those who sell that platitudinous bunkum: terror has no religion. It has a religion, and we see its endorsements not just from grainy video tapes. We saw them, in varying degrees of spectacle, in New York and London, in Bali and Madrid, in Mumbai and Jaipur, in Delhi and Ahmedabad. We see them in frightening regularity in the streets of Kashmir. You don't have to justify-or condone-the lunatic fringe of Hindutva or the isolated example of Malegaon to see the global rage of radical Islamism, its extraterritorial ambition, and India as its long suffering victim. Politically sponsored comparative studies in terror can only make the Geelanis and the Maoists safer-and India more vulnerable. No nation as terrorised as India has the misfortune of being disarmed by those who have the constitutional mandate to defend it.
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