Rage and the terrorist machine

Militants are driven by a deep sense of hatred and injustice, real or perceived

Some years ago, during my visit to a border post at the Line of Control near Kupwara, Kashmir, I managed to lay my hands on some diaries maintained by terrorists slain in encounters with the Indian army. A friendly army commander gave these diaries to me, but he had little clue about what was in them. “We have no one to read or analyse them as no one in my unit knows Urdu,” he confessed. “Besides, we kill so many of these militants trying to cross the border from Pakistan. All of them carry a diary containing radio codes and recipes for putting together indigenous homemade bombs. So how many diaries can we really analyse?” I remember him telling me then.

The contents of these diaries left me cold. I sort of felt relieved in some ways that the militants were stopped in their tracks before they were allowed to carry out their murderous agenda. They were human bombs primed to blow up once they found their targets. One such diary was written by a young militant belonging to a frontier town in Pakistan, working under the nom de guerre of Abu Humza. He seemed consumed by hatred for his country's leadership, which in his reckoning was a lackey of the Americans, and for the Indians, who he thought were corrupt and weak and did not have the strength to take on the committed Islamic militants determined to establish the rule of Islam (Ummah) in South Asia. Overthrow of these corrupt regimes and ushering of Ummah, in his reckoning, would end injustice and bring relief to the harassed and deprived masses. Though an idealist, his world was dark and deathly. For him joy and happiness was in embracing death and being transported to heaven (jannat), which was inhabited by extremely beautiful hurs (virgins).

I have written about the diaries on many occasions in the past, but so disturbing has been the import of the militant's writing that there have been enough reasons to revisit it every time there is a terror strike anywhere in the country or abroad. This time, when serial blasts happened in Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi, questions were raised in the media and elsewhere about how to stop these terror attacks.

Many of these prescriptions have displayed a naïveté about the mindset that drives many of those who choose to detonate these bombs unmindful of what it will cause in its wake. Contrary to an earlier view that terror had its origin in economic deprivation and poverty, the militants are mostly well-educated people who have lost faith in the existing world order to dispense justice. These militants draw legitimacy for their actions from the inability of the Western powers to stop Israel from humiliating Palestinians. For Pakistani militants, some of them sponsored by Pakistani intelligence agencies, the provocation for entering India and waging a war against a pluralist and secular society like ours were brutalities perpetrated by our armed forces in Kashmir. These militants got sympathy and refuge from many in the country who admired them for their idealism and had grievance against governments in Delhi that were proving increasingly incapable of maintaining a fiercely secular order and pandering to majoritarianism. The demolition of Babari Masjid in 1992, which was followed by one of the worst riots that this country has witnessed, lent support to Islamic militancy. Post-Godhra riots in Gujarat and the failure of the state to make an example of the culprits has deepened this rage among minorities towards central and state governments. People who are waging this war against the government and other institutions are highly indoctrinated and committed individuals who will not stop till they meet their objective.

Can a society where most of its leaders are corrupt and intellectually dishonest and a majority of its cops do not work till they are bribed stop these militants from carrying out their agenda?