The Nice Bloodbath: A Wake-Up Call To France And India

Terror can leave a person numb — with sorrow, anger, regret, and above all with the accumulated weight of memories and nostalgia.

As a youngster studying in the UK in the mid-1960s, with a strict budget dictated by the draconian foreign exchange regime of the Reserve Bank of India, I could travel around Europe only because of the students’ concessions offered by almost all rail networks in Europe and the hostel facilities extended to foreign students by European universities during the vacations.

That is how I landed up in Nice. I still remember marveling at the blue Mediterranean – no wonder it is called the Cote d’Azur.

Our group comprised four young men of different nationalities, in addition to yours truly, with different worldviews, tastes, politics and preferences. The common factor was a limited budget and a willingness to absorb the endless nuances of France.

All of us admired the egalitarianism of the vacationing crowd on the beach. There were many people from North Africa and the Arab world; among them, the most affluent was the Lebanese-Arab contingents. As the sun set, many vacationers like us went off to their humble tourist camps or hostels, others to small pensions (budget hotels) and a few to the opulent grandeur of the Negresco and other five-star hostelries that had housed royalty and millionaires for ages.

All five of us agreed that one could not improve on the democracy of this splendid country as manifested in their public facilities and the deportment of the people. I had also heard at length from my father, who had arrived almost penniless in France in the mid-1920s to study at the Sorbonne. He had related to me stories about his low-budget (almost abstemious) vacations in many corners of this beautiful country. After my visit, I vowed that one day I would bring my family to this part of the globe when I had the resources. Thanks to the cosmic forces, this did happen, more often through the hospitality of my French friends and professional associates, rather than through my own efforts.

The holiday crowd in the Riviera and the South of France continues to be as mixed and eclectic as always. There are visitors from all over the world, and French nationals of all colours and creeds. The evening of 14th July (Bastille Day) is a particularly joyous one for all French citizens, as they gather with their families and friends to watch the fireworks that all cities large and small put up. This is the fête républicaine or the fête nationale, a happy combination of our Republic Day and Deepavali. On this day, the French Republic pays tribute to its national ethos and reaffirms its core values.

Earlier in the day, there was a spectacular military parade in the Champs-Élysées in Paris, arguably one of the most beautiful and majestic avenues anywhere in the world. In 2009, France accorded a rare honour to India by inviting the Indian armed forces to take the lead role in the 14 July ceremony. In the evening’s events the average citizen takes centre stage.

In Nice, on 14 July 2016, the perpetrator of the outrage chose a symbolic moment to carry out his abominable act of terror. His barbaric deed proclaimed to the victims and to the world at large that he was chastising the people of France and challenging the French Republic.

In the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the killers wanted to show that any criticism of their faith was a capital offence, punishable by death. In this case, their message is even more ominous – any nation or state that tries to combat Islamist terror in any part of the world is a legitimate target for attack in the most bestial manner.

A few months earlier, I had attempted in this journal to analyse why both India and France are such convenient targets of Islamist terror. I don’t want to revisit all the points but it is necessary to supplement the analytical framework to some extent.

The first issue is that the French security apparatus is not as efficient and streamlined as its image suggests. There are shades of the Indian scenario here. Just a few days ago, a leaked anonymous letter from some members of the famed GIGN (the gendarmerie unit trained in anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations) accused their chief of incompetence and inefficiency during the terrorist bombings earlier in the year.

The scenario brings to mind reports about the deficiencies in the performance of our National Security Guard, which is led by a police officer. France, too, made a serious mistake, a few years earlier, when President Sarkozy managed to impose his decision on his cabinet and transferred the gendarmerie from the Defence Ministry (which was the controlling ministry for more than a century) to the Interior Ministry. Clearly, this has adversely affected the morale of the force.

The two countries also share a fractured political structure. Many senior members in the ruling Socialist party of France have not really come to grips with the problem of Islamist terror. Their rose-tinted notion that all citizens are united by the three cardinal Republican principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity” is clearly flawed.

Their country does have a serious problem in its body politic – the enemy within continues to plan and launch assaults on the basic institutions cherished by the French. An open society is something that is abhorrent to the Islamist warriors. Many French citizens of Arab origin or Muslims from other former colonies in Africa have become completely brainwashed by Salafist ideology that has been freely propagated for many years in France.

The comparison with India is most revealing. For many decades, we have allowed the most vicious Wahabi agitprop in our country and many mosques are being used to spread this mindset. This is accompanied by the brainwashing of children that takes place in the madrasas. The Nehruvian regime (in its different incarnations) encouraged Indian Muslims for more than seven decades to send their children to the religious schools, as opposed to the state schools. No attempt was ever made to control the curriculum in madrasas. All this was carried on under the fig-leaf of “secularism”, “protection of minority rights” etc.

However, there are some differences in the situation in the two countries, too. The French media is not split on language and class lines like ours and is now firmly in the anti-terror camp, whereas our media, specially in the English language, has a mindset that is grotesque, to say the least.

It presents Islamist terror in an anodyne, bland, manner so that outrages and atrocities get thoroughly diluted and begin to look like commonplace events.

Finally, we have two critical differences between India and France that make us much more vulnerable to existential threats. Our federal structure has forced us to be a weak nation, when it comes to combating serious national threats. In a number of states, the local satraps kowtow to Islamist demands, even when they are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. The other is geography, which has led to a grave demographic assault on us.

The socio-political ramifications of this demographic invasion have been enormous; Assam, in particular, has seen a dramatic change in its population composition. In the last four-and-a-half decades, since the 1971 war, West Bengal, too, has gone through a transformation in its religious profile.

Islamist terror groups find the common values that unite France and India to be abhorrent. Nothing affronts them more than the fact that the two countries share the values of freedom, consensus, tolerance of divergences and democratic decision-making. These are dangerous principles for the jihadis.

The two countries must now take requisite steps to eliminate the scourge that confronts both of them. The time for niceties is over.