When 13 grenades were thrown at an Awami League rally in Dhaka on August 21, killing 20 persons, injuring up to 300 and coming within a whisker of wiping out the entire top leadership of the Awami League, our first reaction was to breathe a sigh of relief that it happened somewhere else. Eight months earlier, when Gen Musharraf escaped two successive attempts on his life within a week, we experienced the same secret relief. Such things didn't happen in India, we said to ourselves. They were fruits of the ambivalence the two governments had displayed towards terrorism in the past. Some even went so far as to say that having made their bed, it would serve Pakistan and Bangladesh right if they had to sleep in it.
Such complacency is utterly unwarranted. What nearly happened in Bangladesh and Pakistan has already happened here: thirteen years ago we lost a much loved former prime minister to a suicide bomber. And lest public memory be short, only last year a terrorist cell in Maharashtra committed no fewer than five major acts of terror that took more than a hundred lives before it was finally broken. The truth is that South Asia is not immune from the special brand of terrorism spreading across a large part of the globe. A new breed of intolerance feeds it. And it is thriving on the abundant supply of the most lethal small arms that the world has ever known. Its epicentre—an austere religious establishment in Saudi Arabia which feeds large sums of money into madrassas that propagate its form of Islam. A handful of these have become breeding grounds for terrorism.
But in the final analysis, this new brand of terrorism has been able to make inroads into all three countries mainly because of indecision among political leaders over whether to ride the tiger of religious intolerance or confront it. Pakistan is the most obvious example. During the Afghan war it played host to the Arab mujahideen who later became the backbone of Al Qaeda. After the war, it inducted some of them into terrorist operations in Kashmir. This served as a green signal to other Islamic fundamentalist organisations, notably the LeT, to recruit and collect funds at will so long as they send some cadres to do the government's bidding in Kashmir.
The Faustian pact turned Pakistan into an epicentre of global terrorism in the '90s. Worse still, by serving a national purpose in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Afghan mujahideen built solid bases within Pakistan's security establishment. It is this connection that enabled LeT, Jaish and other terrorist groups belonging to the notorious Brigade 313 to make a bid on Musharraf's life.
The attack on the Awami League shows that a combination of political expediency and religious ambivalence may be taking Bangladesh down the same road. The ruling Bangladesh National Party (BNP) made what would otherwise have been a sagacious political move when it decided to fight the 2001 elections in tandem with the Jamaat-e-Islami. This was because the Jamaat was stronger in the western fringes of the country where the BNP was the weakest. But the Jamaat is no ordinary party. It had for years been trying to propagate an intolerant arabicised brand of Islam that was alien to Bangladesh's secular culture. This alliance therefore forced the BNP to give ground on crucial issues like banning Ahmadiya texts and introducing a law against blasphemy—Pakistan style.
These compromises made by its leaders (a large number of whom fought against precisely the kind of cultural colonialism that the Jamaat espouses, 33 years ago) have inflamed a violent fringe both outside and at the edges of the Jamaat itself. The BNP too is learning, therefore—as the Pakistani establishment has done—that there is no half-way house in accommodating fanaticism.Its leaders may well be right when they claim that by bringing the Jamaat into the government they have brought it into civil society. But the compromise has empowered a violent intolerant fringe that now threatens the very existence of democracy and civil society in Bangladesh. What is worse, it has given this fringe just enough legitimacy in the eyes of the security forces to paralyse them and abort the rule of law. That may be one reason why although twelve days have passed since the bombing, the police and intelligence agencies have not arrested a single person in connection with it.
India has no record of ambivalence towards Islamic—or to be precise self-proclaimed Islamic—terrorism. But over the past six years, the bjp too established a not-too-creditable record of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. Throughout that period, A.B. Vajpayee left no one in doubt that he sternly disapproved of any manifestation of Hindu exclusivism and prejudice. Advani frequently gave him valuable support—so much so that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad labelled both of them as pseudo-secular. But when the party had to choose between defending the secularism of the Constitution by cracking down on the lunatic fringe of the Sangh parivar and looking the other way, it chose the latter. Gujarat was of course the most blatant example and fittingly cost the NDA its hold on power.
The near-catastrophe in Bangladesh should serve as a salutary warning to all three countries. There can be no compromise with absolutism in any form. We therefore need to work together to prevent it from taking root in the South Asian soil. This requires profound changes in all countries both on domestic issues and towards each other.