Politics over terrorism

Digvijay Singh is playing to the Islamist gallery

The confidence with which the Gandhi family loyalist and Congress general secretary Mr Digvijay Singh has been targeting Hindus as the perpetrators of recent terror attacks suggests that the Congress is game for jihadi politics like the power-brokers and rabble-rousers in Pakistan. Despite the rebuttal by the widow of slain Mumbai Anti-Terror Squad chief Hemant Karkare of the Congress leader’s claim that Karkare had confided in him the threat to his life from Hindu radicals hours before the 9/11 attack on Mumbai in November 2008, Mr Singh vouches for his inflammatory assertion.

He wants the Union Ministry of Communications & Information Technology to furnish his call records as proof. Whether such evidence emerges or not, his public pronouncements are clearly anti-national as they seek to deflect the blame for the killing of Karkare and, by extension, others in the Mumbai attack two years ago, from Pakistani ISI-backed mercenaries to Hindutva activists, whose raison d’etre is nationalism. The ploy really amounts to treason as it seeks to weaken India’s fight against Islamist terror and insurgency.

And why would a leader, who is a Congress general secretary, and was formerly a Union Minister and the longest serving Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, try to throw a red herring in the way of investigators, probing terror attacks? The answer is indirectly provided by a WikiLeaks cable, credited to former United States Ambassador to India David Mulford, and dated December 20, 2008. Summing up the Congress’s “crass political opportunism”, in the context of the then Minorities Affairs Minister AR Antulay’s insinuation that Karkare’s death owed to his investigating the suspected role of Hindu radicals in the September 2006 Malegaon blast, Mr Mulford stated that the Congress was prepared to “stoop to old caste/religious-based” politics after 26/11. That is, the party — whose kow-towing to Muslims, as a numerically dominant minority group and vote bank, gave rise to the term ‘minorityism’ — was actively spreading the view of Hindutva activists having orchestrated the Mumbai attack.

That was not all. The cable further notes: “The Congress party, after first distancing itself from the comments, two days later issued a contradictory statement which implicitly endorsed the conspiracy.”

Though the Congress eventually made an effort to distance itself from the controversy, Mr Singh has resurrected it, and that too, shortly after the second anniversary of the Mumbai attack. This is shameful. No senior party leader has bothered to condemn his claim of the threat to Karkare’s life from Hindu radicals. Such statements, by seeking to obfuscate the truth, serve as an invitation to enemies to further target India.

They can act behind the smokescreen, created by politicos, bent on appeasing Muslims, to launch more attacks with impunity. However, Muslims, as much as Hindus and persons of other faiths and nationalities die in terror attacks. The global dimension of the problem also means that compulsions of vote-bank politics must necessarily be subsidiary to the concerted fight against Islamist terrorism.

The Congress or other parties that have long indulged in minorityism cannot any more expect to white-wash incidents of violence and conflict, involving Muslims, when these have a bearing on the security and business interests of other countries, belonging to the free world. Ground realities have changed dramatically since the 9/11, 2001 attack on the US, with India’s stand on ISI-sponsored terror gaining credibility even as Pakistan’s emergence as the epicentre of Islamist terrorism is acknowledged by western intelligence agencies and policy-makers.

Thus, Mr Singh and his ilk are out of sync with the times when they resort to the old Congress line of Muslim appeasement. It will not work if the issue at stake is Islamist terror since the ensuing panic, fear and instability adversely affect global business operations in the new world order. This explains the angry tenor of Mr Mulford’s cable as the attack on Mumbai, India’s premier commercial hub, also hit people from the West, and jeopardised transnational business operations.

In terms of global commerce, India’s security is of utmost important now for First World countries that have huge financial stakes here. Instability is the last thing that these powers would want in India, as one of the nations, driving the recovery from the economic recession that struck the US, the UK and Europe. Moreover, with Pakistan failing to prove itself to be a reliable ally in the fight against terror, western powers are increasingly looking towards India for strategic partnership and support in this ongoing battle.

In the circumstances, the policy of Muslim appeasement, at the cost of national security, can only antagonise our western allies and investors. So far as the US-led axis is concerned, Islamist terror is a frightening reality, with the potential to destabilise the whole world. But Hindu terror, if it exists, is a bogey, deployed by politicos to play the minority card.