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Views of world crisis from the Middle East, South Asia Impact of the war on India, Pakistanby Maya Jhansi While India and Pakistan jockey over the chance to be the U.S.'s favored ally in its so-called "war against terrorism," the ramifications of this war spell out nothing but disaster for the whole of South Asia. The situation has already heightened communal tensions throughout India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indian officials are engaging in provocative talk of war, and on Oct. 15 India fired hard into Pakistani positions at the border. Pakistan fired back, and though the firing has ceased for the moment, both countries stand poised at the brink of an impending war. Already Pakistan is teetering on the brink of civil war. The streets, not only of towns and villages in North Pakistan, but also Karachi and Islamabad have been filled with Islamic fundamentalist protesters upset with Musharraf's decision to drop the Taliban, which it nurtured and supported, in favor of the U.S. If the Northern Alliance takes over Kabul or plays any major role in the overthrow of the Taliban, the situation in Pakistan could get out of control. With Musharraf at one pole and fundamentalists on the other, Pakistani peace activists and leftists find themselves in a real bind. On the one hand, security agencies have been preventing peace activists from holding anti-war rallies, and on the other hand, some religious groups have been attacking non-governmental organization (NGO) offices for their supposedly "westernized" ideas. Many NGOs in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and elsewhere have reported being attacked by unruly mobs in recent weeks, and Musharraf's government has done little to protect them. This is not hard to believe, since Musharraf, a military dictator who ousted the corrupt Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif two years ago and recently gave himself the title of President, is hardly a democratic leader. Although he has replaced the openly pro-Taliban leaders in the army and the Inter-Service Intelligence, his hold on power in Islamabad is precarious to say the least. Tensions rise in India In India, this crisis has likewise fired the flames of communal and religious tensions. While the central government has been headed for the last few years by the right-wing Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the power of the Hindu Right had been held in check by the politics of coalition building. But the Hindu Right is using this moment to push forth its anti-Muslim agenda with impunity by raising once again the issue of building a Hindu temple at the site where, in 1992, a frenzied mob tore down a mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodhya. That act of terrorism resulted in the death of over a thousand people, and is today one of the most volatile issues in the country. The Indian government also banned and then arrested 300 members of the Student Islamic Movement of India, an Islamic fundamentalist group with alleged ties to Osama bin Laden, and it has done its best to suppress anti-war protests called by Muslim leaders. An anti-war movement in India is very vocal, however. In Kolkata, over 100,000 people marched to protest the U.S. war on Afghanistan. In South Asia, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism are symbiotic-each grows when the other grows, and right now, we are witnessing a growth in both. While they claim to oppose one another, in fact they are united in the attempt to erase and suppress the rich, diverse and multidimensional histories and cultures of South Asia. This is most evident in the attempt to blot out the unique and hybrid cultures that arose out of contact between religions and ethnic groups. This is particularly true of Kashmir, which is caught in the crossfire between Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism and brutal repression by the Indian army. Since Kashmir acceded to India in 1949, India has chipped away at Kashmir's autonomy to the point that the BJP, in its election platform, proposed taking out Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which guarantees Kashmir its autonomy. Since 1989, however, the movement for Kashmiri self-determination has been increasingly infiltrated and taken over by Islamic fundamentalist tendencies that are foreign in origin and in ideology. In Kashmir, as everywhere else, people are being increasingly hemmed into old dualities. Bush and bin Laden are trying to force the issue into the false duality of "Islamic" terrorism or U.S. "democracy." Kashmiri people are hemmed into a false choice between terrorism and the repressive Indian state. All of it is a battle for the minds of humanity-both in Afghanistan and around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Asia where the threat of disastrous destabilization is very real. To the Hindu fundamentalist, Islam is a foreign invading enemy embodied in the Mughals. They forget that Islam came to the subcontinent centuries before the Mughal invasion, through the spread of Sufism throughout South Asia as early as the 11th and 12th centuries. The Hindu fundamentalist is united with the Islamic fundamentalist, especially of the Taliban persuasion. It is true that the reactionary Zia Ul-Haq-the military dictator that the U.S. funded to help in its support of the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1970s-is the one who fostered the growth of the madrassas (religious schools) that trained the Taliban. Today there are over 4,000 madrassas in Pakistan. One of the first madrassas, however, was in Deobandh, India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, established in 1867. This madrassa spread the teachings of Muhammed ibn abd al Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, an Islamic fundamentalist tendency most widespread in Saudia Arabia and the ideology of Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are called Deobandi Muslims because of this connection. Wahhabism arose as a self-proclaimed reform movement against the impurities indulged by certain Muslims, particularly Sufis. Wahhabism was strongly against mysticism, praying to saints (a practice common in Sufism), making pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, lighting incense and votives at tombs or mosques. It sought to get back to the essential oneness of god, to get rid of any intermediary, such as a saint, between god and the believer. Wahabbism accepts the authority only of the Quran and the Sunna-it rejects all reinterpretation of the Quran and Sunna by the reform movements of the late 19th and the 20th centuries. And they insist on a literal reading of the Quran. Wahhabism arose in the mid-18th century in large part as a reaction to the mystical, humanistic and tolerant Sufism practiced by the masses. Today the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by the likes of bin Laden and his sympathizers seeks to impose a monolithic world view on Muslims in different parts of the world, and thereby erase the multiform and diverse Muslim and hybrid cultures around the world. The Hindu fundamentalists in India would like nothing better. We cannot fall into the false rhetoric of "Islam vs. the West" that bin Laden is trying to propagate. If it were not for Arab culture, we would not have "Western" culture and civilization as we know it. And we cannot allow fundamentalists or the U.S. war machine to limit the contours of our imagination. As Rumi, the great Sufi poet of the 13th century, tells us: You own two shops, |
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