What Makes India And France Easy Targets Of Jihadi Terror?
India and France have weaknesses that Islamic terrorism can take advantage of. However, our situation is much more precarious; with all its perceived weaknesses, France will never have the sort of ceremonial send-off to a convicted mass-murderer-terrorist that we witnessed in Mumbai a few months ago.
The Indo-French love affair predated Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Romain Rolland, Sylvain Levy and Pondicherry. The beacon of the French Revolution and its soul-stirring ideology had reached Bengal by the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century. The father of modern India, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, was manifestly influenced by the inspiring ethos that emanated from France after the 1789 revolution. His attachment to the land of liberty, equality and fraternity was so deep that, en route to England in 1831 to present the Suttee Petition, when his ship was berthed in Port Said, he insisted on being carried to a neighbouring French ship that was flying the red, blue and white tricolour.
Therefore, when either country is attacked viciously by the forces of jihadi terror and darkness, the citizens of the other react in sorrow. Earlier in the year, when the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo took place, there was an outpouring of grief in our shores. A few discordant notes were struck by some insensitive yobs in the desi 4th Estate, but Indians universally condemned the barbarity.
However, the terror incidents of the 13th November were in a different league. Worldwide, the reactions were touching. Except for the Islamic countries, almost every nation in the globe rose in unison to condemn the outrageous events. In India, the overall sentiments matched those in France and the media did a commendable job in bringing the horror in Paris to its readers and viewers here. The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was categorical in what he said about the wounds inflicted on France – India stood by “the great people” of France in this terrible tragedy.
Soon, the Indian fault lines started manifesting themselves and the worms started crawling out of the woodwork. The execrable U.P. minister Azam Khan,who can always be relied upon to be an Islamic Don Quixote, opened the can and let fly his sordid world-view where there is nothing sacrosanct except his own faith and religion. Before the country and its population could recover from this onslaught, we had the Congress marionette, Mani Shankar Aiyar, spouting his more sophisticated version of Azam Khan’s obscenities. Thankfully, Abhishek Singhvi and the former Chief Minister of MP, Digvijay Singh, have not yet jumped into the fray to complete the “secular” Halloween party.
However, these incidents sadly displayed the deep fault lines that India has, when it comes to confronting Islamic jihad. During the tragic incidents in France at the beginning of the year, when another jihadi group massacred the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, we had a desi glitterati columnist, one of the secularist queen bees, pontificating that the murdered writers and cartoonists should not have had the gall to write or paint anything that lampooned Islam. However, the same woman has no compunction in penning the most scurrilous pieces on Hinduism and the Indic faiths. All her articles, of course, are written in the same nauseating chichi prose style that these people pick up in their convent schools.
This type of intellectual contortion is the first carbuncle that both our national psyches share. In France, too, there are “intellectuals” and scholars who perpetrate myths and lies in order to hide the truths about Islam and French Muslims. Many of these apologists for Islamist aggression and fundamentalism have some sort of residual guilt about France’s colonial past and its treatment of its Arab subjects during that period. What they conveniently forget is that the French Republic allowed and encouraged this mass immigration of Arabs from North Africa from the 1950s to the late 1980s and conferred on them the same rights and privileges that the native French had.
From subsidised housing to free education and health care, the Arab immigrants enjoyed the same social security benefits as the rest of the population. Indeed, the French Republic does not need to make the slightest apology or be defensive in any manner whatsoever about the way it has extended its social welfare regime to the immigrant Maghreb population.
This brings me to the issue of the critical differences in attitudes between the Indian Diaspora and the Muslim–Arab Diaspora. There is fool-proof evidence that Hindu-Sikh immigrants in the UK and the US are streets ahead of their Muslim counterparts. In fact, NRIs, embarrassingly, are far ahead of their indigenous white or Caucasian (as the Americans put it so quaintly) counterparts. The Indo-British community has done far better than their neighbours from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet, when it comes to resentment for perceived discrimination, Muslims head the table in every country in the West where they have migrated to.
France is a glaring example, where colonial residues have persisted more stridently than in other countries in Europe and North America. Admittedly, the difficult economic climate that the Western world has seen ever since the Yom-Kippur war of 1973, has made the situation even worse. Alarmingly high unemployment rates among the Arab immigrants have added to the social cauldron and made the task of the jihadi mullahs much easier. The ersatz sense of deprivation in the Arab banlieues (suburbs) mirrors the feelings in the Indian mohallas and both are fertile territories for Islamist propaganda.
In India, passions are also whipped up because of deliberate falsification and obfuscation of data by people like Sachar and his colleagues in the so-called Sachar Committee appointed by the UPA lot. One need hardly add that certain political parties like the Congress and its junior cohorts like the Samajwadi and the TMC are the primary culprits in the concoction of the deadly brew of Islamist fanaticism.
All this highlights, of course, the truth that Muslims in both the countries have sought to operate under the “victim” umbrella. There has been little attempt to turn the searchlight on themselves and their ingrained attitudes. This is no place to start a complicated debate on the fundamental differences between the Indic faiths and Islam, because such an attempt would necessarily have to be a detailed analysis. Yet, one cannot but bring up the issue, because it lurks behind all discussions like this like a ghost that lurks in the shadow and wants to come out in the open.
Every time I have visited France in the last two decades, ever since the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism reared its head in that country, all my French friends pointed out the stark and startling difference they perceived in the attitudes of the small Indian-origin population (largely from Mauritius and the old French colonial pockets in India like Pondicherry). These people were totally peaceful and civic-minded, and never clamoured for special privileges, while quietly excelling in all socioeconomic parameters.
Yet, we have this grotesque display of blatant pro-Islamist agitprop by intellectuals in both France and in India. Historically, some writers in France who were strongly anti-Jewish in their attitudes, showed a morbid pro-Arab stance in their writings. However, this is getting rare; in India, on the other hand, the sleazy corpus of “secularist” intellectuals shows no signs of easing up on their rabid outpourings. Their strange fascination and admiration for a violent ideology that wants to decimate a 5000 year old culture and civilisation continues unabated.
The other positive development in France is that some influential writers have not shied away from dealing with the dangers of Islamo-fascism. Also, unlike the British, the French establishment and the government have not had an embedded group of committed pro-Arabists like T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Glubb Pasha and company.
However, the danger signals are clear for both the countries, with the Indian symptoms being vastly more dangerous. The fault lines in our shores are not only ideological but also geographical and demographic. There are parts of India which are no-go zones for the Indian Republic and its agencies. The federal structure of our country makes this possible, unlike in France, which is a strongly unitary state. Witness the speed with which President Hollande managed to declare a state of emergency and launch the full might of the country against the forces that unleashed such violence in the nation’s capital.
Yes, India and France have weaknesses that Islamic terrorism can take advantage of. However, our situation is much more precarious; with all its perceived weaknesses, France will never have the sort of ceremonial send-off to a convicted mass-murderer-terrorist that we witnessed in Mumbai a few months ago.
To wrap up, we can only hope that the horrific crimes in the city of light and love on the 13th November will wake France and the rest of the civilised from slumber and torpor. The threat to universal human values must be eradicated. As the great Irish savant Samuel Beckett, who chose to make France his home and French his language of expression, said so movingly, “I can’t go on, I will go on”. So did poet Tagore, the last renaissance figure the world has seen.