Why Islamic Extremists Hate India

Posted October 11, 2009

In the current conflict in Afghanistan, India does not have a single soldier operating under NATO command. India is not part of the coalition the United States and its allies have put together to aid the Afghan government’s efforts to defeat the Taliban. In fact, India has turned down proposals within India and in the U.S. that it should participate in peacekeeping efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet, suicide bombers have struck the Indian Embassy in Kabul once again. In 2008, nearly 58 people died, including three Indians. On Friday, the toll was smaller, though the device used was more sophisticated. Most of the dead were Afghans, and nearly all were civilians. The Taliban has kidnapped Indian workers and engineers in the past.

There are several reasons why India merits such special attention from the terrorists. They are rooted in the country’s troubled past as well as the present; some are philosophical, others, more fundamental.

The immediate plausible reason is that India’s development assistance in Afghanistan legitimizes the local government and, in its small way, helps the NATO win hearts and mind in Afghanistan. If those hearts and minds are won by building roads, healthcare clinics, and primary schools, Indian engineers, Indian officials working at the Embassy and with international organizations, are doing some of that. As those efforts begin to bear fruit, Afghans will experience a semblance of normalcy. And it is that sense that the extremists want to shatter, because their aim is to delegitimize the Karzai Administration and the NATO presence. The extremists – the Taliban, Pakistani operatives, or other shadowy organizations – want to unnerve India.

There is also deeper animosity. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, India initially criticized the Soviet action, but then stopped doing so, once the occupation was in place. While India did not welcome Soviet presence in Kabul, it was also alarmed by the flow of arms into Pakistan to assist the mujahideen, which boosted not only fundamentalist forces in the region, but also bolstered the military dictatorship of Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan. Just as the U.S. was willing to ally with the mujahideen because that short term partnership was more important to achieve the strategic objective of bleeding the Soviets, India despaired, fearing that the weapons Pakistan was receiving may be used against India some day. The Taliban now represents the ugliest face of the mujahideen, and they are no fans of India. Taliban has strong links with Pakistani intelligence, which has long believed in low-intensity warfare with India. For the Taliban who want to settle historical scores, India remains a target, because from their perspective, India sided with the Soviets.

Then there is the Indian soft power, which can corrode the kind of austere lifestyle the Taliban would like to impose again in Afghanistan. Afghans like Bollywood films – Jon Lee Anderson’s reporting from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul for the New Yorker magazine showed how young Taliban conscripts carried photographs of Bollywood stars, and some even played Bollywood songs on their cassette players. Cricket is another passion the Afghans share with Indians; the Afghan cricket team is making impressive strides internationally. For the stern Islamist view that the Taliban holds, Indian influence is wrong. The imams fulminate against the West and its decadence; India, to its East, represents similar hedonism, is closer, makes films in a language Afghans understand, and must be shunned.

But more than anything else, India is a danger because by its pluralistic nature it is a real threat for Islamic extremists. Not only does India have the world’s third-largest Muslim population (Pakistan finally overtook India recently), despite domestic differences with the majority Hindus, Indian Muslims have remained loyal to the Indian state, and have fully embraced democracy. While many Muslims live in poverty in India, so do other Indians, including Hindus. And Muslims alone are not victims of human rights abuses in India. What’s more, talented Muslims have often reached the top of Indian corporations, judiciary, armed forces, bureaucracy, and other fields, entirely on merit. They are able to express their grievances through the democratic system. It is no surprise, then, that of all the recruits al Qaeda has been able to attract around the world, barely a handful of Indian Muslims have been swayed by al Qaeda’s nihilist ideology.

This is not an accident; it is the result of India’s democratic structure. Despite all its flaws, and despite the failure of the Indian system to bring to justice those who have been implicated in horrifying religious riots in the past, the Indian system works. And while its two large neighbors – Pakistan and Bangladesh – have elected governments at the moment, both have suffered long bouts of military dictatorships or other unrepresentative governments. Except for the brief period of 19 months under the Emergency in the mid-1970s, when Indira Gandhi suspended key provisions of the constitution, detained opposition leaders, and imposed press censorship, India has been democratic. (Indeed, voters threw out Gandhi’s government in 1977, and like any other flawed democrat, Gandhi left office, returning to power only after she had regained electoral support in 1980).

Many in Pakistan – and Bangladesh – value democracy as much as do Indians. But in Pakistan’s case, the troika of corrupt politicians, fundamentalist mullahs, and military commanders with a disproportionate sense of self-importance, have never allowed real democracy to take root. At the time of India’s independence in 1947, the rationale of dividing India along religious lines was based on the assumption that Muslims in the Indian subcontinent would not be able to live peacefully under Hindu domination. Muslims wanted that homeland; the Congress in India did not want the country to be divided initially, but later agreed to the partition. But six decades after that, despite several bloody riots, Indian Muslims have thrived in secular, democratic India; Pakistan has veered towards being declared a failed state.

But not a complete failure: it is powerful enough to meddle in Afghan affairs, provide “moral” support to separatists in Kashmir, and Pakistani individuals have carried out spectacular terrorist attacks in India – as with the siege of Mumbai last November. Many in Pakistan would like to see a more democratic nation where minority rights are respected, where governments change hands in an orderly way after peaceful elections, where the press is free, where the judiciary acts as a watchdog, and where citizens’ rights are respected. They resent it when it is pointed out that they are describing India.

The division of India and Pakistan cannot be undone. But if countries in the region adopt the ways in which India governs itself, South Asia will be a safer place. Its 1.5 billion people deserve no less.

Salil Tripathi is a free-lance writer based in London and a former correspondent of the REVIEW.