| Bangladesh terrorism, Indian anxieties and threat to both Terrorism is entrenched in inadequate governance and incomplete policies, writes Afsan Chowdhury INDIAN media has reported that there is an assassination attempt in the works against Sheikh Hasina. Indian Daily Express has also mentioned that the recent 'unscheduled' visit by the Indian foreign secretary was also in this connection and the purpose was to warn the Bangladesh government and its chief of the threat. This has been confirmed by Bangladesh official sources. Bangladesh is a victim of multiple vulnerabilities to which has been added the new one of terrorism as understood in contemporary parlance. Indian anxiety is also obvious because Bangladesh could actually export more terrorism to India than even Pakistan due to the high border traffic and proximity. It also seems that 'terrorism' is being perceived in the region as a dominantly law and order threat existing independently of political economy of the states. It is not seen as a matter which is part of a larger expression concerning inter-state relationship and democratic governance in the region. The South Asian response has largely been modelled on conventional western models although the conditions are different. India's extremist problems THERE are at least three trends of extremism in India. The largest by far is the Maoist trend which is active in most parts of India but heavily in Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, etc. The Maoists have control or influence over several million people and were described once by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as India's 'prime security threat'. The Maoists operate in those parts of India which have been forgotten by the engines of Indian prosperity pulling people to the consuming middle class. Poverty and failure to response to it has created its own brand of terrorism and its echoes can be seen as well in Nepal and Bangladesh too. India's second terrorist problem is in the northeast where the ethnic populations are violently resisting central authority and ULFA is a top example. The government describes them as insurgents, separatists, etc but the people there feel they are fighting for their rights across the range. The people there feel they too have been left out by the Indian state entitlements and the land exploited for its natural resources. These people have generated a great deal of violence covering a variety of political, ethnic and cultural identities. The third extremist or terrorist forces come from what has been called the Islamic jihadists. The principal source of conflict is Kashmir where many feel they are victims of Indian 'state terrorism'. To this is added Pakistan's support for such militancy. One result of this has been a sense of alienation of many Indian Muslims who are also demonised by many Indians who consider the Muslim population as pro-Pakistani and they are expected to prove their loyalty to India regularly. All these factors have created a sense of insecurity for all but large sections of Muslims feel left out. As is obvious, most of the extremist movements are located in unresolved issues of identity seeking and denial generated by that identity which is always a great contributor to violence. However, what we call terrorism doesn't have a monolithic face. A state's inability to provide an inclusive nation-building framework always enhances this aggravation. The failure of India and Pakistan to resolve their disputes with each other have reached a critical point because Pakistan creating the Taliban in the hope of greater instability in Kashmir backfired. As a result, Pakistan is collapsing and remains propped up largely due to artificial lungs provided by the US to serve US interests in the region where it fights multiple wars and is not doing well at any. Pakistan is unable to protect its own people and has even handed over Swat to the extremists. The same army which committed 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh against the innocents now runs away when confronted by the Taliban, its own child. India has also not been very successful in managing poverty or ethnic, communal and social discord. Kashmir provides a good channel to vent and funnel pent up feelings within. Both have internal and external crisis combining to what can be called the 'terror situation'. India's problems as far as Bangladesh is concerned are two. One is that the past governments have given shelter to the north-eastern extremists in Bangladesh. This has been done by Bangladeshi governments as a sort of bargaining chip hoping to use it to counter what they had seen as India's domineering positions on matters of trade, territory and natural resource issues. However, this had worked only partially because there is no record of the advantages gained from this strategy till now without paying a price within too. The other issue is that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance government of 2001-2006 allowed the Islamic extremists to grow and spread, thinking it was to their advantage. They thought it was to its advantage, both internally and across the border, as they were actively playing the Indian card, a matter made easy by short-sighted Indian policies. It didn't do too well though as events have shown. However, jihadists in Bangladesh aren't only an internal phenomenon but also part of the growing global jihadist movement. The Islamist radicals were also contesting Bangladeshi law and order and even the state, at whatever level that may be. To jihadists, a woman leader is unacceptable which may explain why Khaleda Zia may have been a target of their wrath around 2008 election time. Of course, Sheikh Hasina has already been targeted, their main enemy in Bangladesh. Bangladesh's terrorist situation BANGLADESH too has two extremist threats. The first are the Maoists and the second are the jihadists. Records show that more people have been killed by the Maoists in the last five years or since records were kept than the Islamics. And, of course, many more Maoists have been killed too. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, which runs an ideologically conservative but a well-informed website, dismisses the Maoist threat as disorganised but records death figures that show a wider threat than thought of in Dhaka circles. The reason why the Maoist threat looks weak is because it is local in nature, fragmented into many groups and central cities are not attacked by them. The jihadists are national even when their actions are local as they are deemed to be a challenge to the state. Plus the jihadist movement in the region involves cross border partners. The connection to international al-Qaeda networks gives them international interest too. However, the Islamic threat in Bangladesh is weak compared to what exists in either India or Pakistan. India's situation is more precarious because most militants are entrenched in the Kashmir valley and have developed support bases within some segments of the disgruntled Indian Muslim population. They are also often aided by Pakistan as the latest Mumbai incident shows. India's Kashmir problem and Pakistan's Waziristan or Swat problem, basically the traditional tribal areas, are also a militant response of the extremist element of the people there who see the state as an oppressor and in Pakistan as an ally of the US, the original source of their oppression. But Bangladesh doesn't have such an internal situation, certainly not anywhere near in scale or resentment level. The closest it came to was the Chittagong Hill Tracts crisis which has been contained through a variety of methods including some peace building and India has stopped doing what Bangladesh had done to the north-easterners in the hope perhaps that Bangladesh would reciprocate the honours. Barring that, the most oppressed population group in Bangladesh is the Hindus but they are not into militancy. They are keener to move to India than fight back oppressing members of the majority which keeps Bangladesh safer than it realises. There are many groups in India who could easily fund and arm them making Hindu extremist threat a major issue here. The members of the jihadists in Bangladesh comes from the lower class, people who study in madrassahs and are from birth denied entry to the mainstream. Just as many second-generation Pakistanis in the west turn to religious identity and sometimes extremist politics as they grow up marginalised from birth as migrants and are given no space in the mainstream, these Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh and other group members rarely come from the middle class and thus feel outcasts from birth. In this age and time, for many people, especially in the rural areas, the language of resistance is found in the supposed words of religion though many find it in Mao too. In Bangladesh, the Maoist movement like in India and Nepal are essentially rural movements which fail to draw attention of urban analysts. The roots of both movements are in socioeconomic denial. As some part of the global resentment is being expressed through religious extremism, many follow that. Once, for the same reason, many followed Mao all over the world and many still do. What is permanent is denial and that resentment is fuelled by religious or secular ideology. It should be remembered that people of this region have always been part of religious radicalism though the social content was much higher before and anti-colonial in nature. This is a rebellious society where the holy books of revolution and revelation have always found some willing ears. The extremists are now being linked to the incident at the Bangladesh Rifles headquarters too and that would expose the vulnerabilities of the Bangladesh state. Indian anxiety is heightened as they know that a run-over attempt of the state would have spill-over impact of high intensity for India. If the pirates emerging out of the disintegrated state of Somalia which the west tried to control by force and then allowed it to collapse can hobble international shipping using only small arms, the threat to India from Bangladeshi Islamic militants can be understood, especially if it gets actively linked to international al-Qaeda. What motivates Bangladeshi jihadists is hatred of Hindus and India, to them, is a Hindu state. Perhaps that's what bonds them to Pakistan too who have had fingers in several anti-India actions coming out from Bangladesh and also the religious parties including Jamaat-e-Islami whose rabid anti-Indian position is on record, the reason they give for opposing Bangladesh's independence war. The options in front of India and Bangladesh IT DOES seem that both states favour military approaches to this security issue and wish to meet the militants' security threat with force following conventional practices elsewhere. But that usually goes only so far and as the US experience shows can pull any state down. Till now, India has not experienced al-Qaeda activism but that of Kashmiri militants who are loosely linked. The Lashkar-e-Taiba is interested in Kashmir first and then in the rest of the world and its main support comes from Pakistan and not Osama bin-Laden. It's Pakistan who faces al-Qaeda and as reports show is doing very poorly at that. India deals with Pakistan as part of each other's 'regional instability' programme centring on their failure to solve the Kashmir question. In that case, it's Pakistan which may have an interest in encouraging Islamic militancy in Bangladesh too in the hope of causing India some discomfort. As long as Kashmir remains a sore point the chances of Islamic militancy disappearing from the region is slim. In Bangladesh, India is not a popular country and it isn't popular with any of its neighbours for various reasons. Indian action also does feed into resentment elsewhere and that will continue to provide the social platform for more instability. India has also not done well in balancing its relationship with its neighbours although it's the largest of them all, part of it in its denial that any of its policies could be wrong. The western response to terrorism is limited and even the richest country is severely ailing trying to pay costs for this approach. In this region, Pakistan's situation tells us what can happen when it tries to fight this unwinnable war. The fact that Swat had to be practically handed over to the Pakistani Taliban is a striking example of the shrinking state. While India will certainly fare better, how much better that will be is a question. Bangladesh simply cannot afford to deal with any large-scale militancy. At some point, if the situation worsens, India may have to do inside Bangladesh what the US is doing in Pakistan to control the border areas which will be disastrous for both India and Bangladesh. Or it may have to develop policies that address key issues that cut across cross-border resentment and hostility, something it hasn't done very well or isn't interested as much in doing so. For Bangladesh, the dangers are obvious. For the moment, it looks the situation is somewhat under control but everyday the media reports arrests and actions showing how quickly an alternative imagination is fomenting a section. What breeds terrorism beyond a point and it becomes a threat is when its platform is social inequity. That is there. Bangladesh also has to keep al-Qaeda away and to do that its needs to have far more inclusive social structure and a more functional state management. If it doesn't see the need to have a better government, no number of visits informing of terrorist plans can protect the country and its people. Nor its neighbours, big or small. |
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