How do you save ‘‘democracy’’ from George W. Bush? How do you save ‘‘Islam’’ from Osama bin Laden? I must have been one of the few Indians who thought that the American president’s decision to invade Iraq was, from a purely Indian perspective, a very good thing. Anything that sends thousands of would-be jihadis scurrying off to fight in Falluja rather than in Srinagar is a positive development. (‘‘Policy’’ is a product of the brain, ‘‘morality’’ of the heart; there is a reason why we speak of foreign ‘‘policy’’.) But I begin to worry when the American administration chooses to fight under the banner of ‘‘democracy’’. There are three reasons. First, battling to ‘‘make the world safe for democracy’’ has always been a recipe for disenchantment, in turn leading to isolationism. That was true when the United States entered World War I and again in the aftermath of Vietnam. (World War II was an unqualified success at least partly because the Americans went in with no better motive than revenge.) India needs an American presence in Asia because it is the only power willing to put pressure on Pakistan to clean up its act and to act as a check on Chinese ambitions. Since trying to impose democracy on Iraq — a country with a history of absolutist governance — is futile, I fear that American disengagement is just a few more deaths away. The second reason is that any attempt to force democracy down unwilling throats is not exactly the best way to make it popular. It just gives the entire concept a bad name. The White House’s case is easily refuted. Is ‘‘democracy’’ only for America’s enemies, or will the United States take up arms against some of its decidedly undemocratic allies too? Pick up an atlas, and draw a line from India westwards to the Atlantic Ocean. How many nations can you see which choose their leaders through the mechanism of free and fair elections? Will the United States ‘‘liberate’’ all of them? This leads to my third reason, which is that such hypocrisy makes it easier for Osama bin Laden to insinuate that the war in Iraq is not about democracy — or even oil — but about Islam. Raising the battle cry of ‘‘Islam in danger!’’ is the easiest way to win adherents in the Muslim world. Think about our own history. Jinnah and the Muslim League won a country for themselves with little more than that slogan. Jinnah’s opponent was Mahatma Gandhi, a man who went out of his way to win Muslim adherents. How much easier it is for Osama bin Laden when he has George W. Bush as his poster-child for recruitment! A few days after the September 11 attacks, US Secretary of State Colin Powell put the American case in a single brutal sentence to General Musharraf: ‘‘You are either with us, or you are against us.’’ Osama bin Laden is saying exactly the same thing from the other side of the fence. Al-Qaeda spokesmen are only too willing to offer proof of a world-wide ‘‘conspiracy’’ against Islam. When they get tired of ranting against the United States, they move on to Israel’s ‘‘illegal occupation’’ of Palestine, to India’s ‘‘colonisation’’ of Kashmir, to Russian ‘‘brutality’’ in Chechnya, to China’s efforts to ‘‘suppress’’ Islamic culture in Xinjiang, to the Philippines where the Moros are being ‘‘crushed’’. My Muslim friends, both Indian and otherwise, often try to persuade me that all Muslims should not be judged by Osama bin Laden. They are wasting their time. Of course, I know that there is a chasm between them and him. But try explaining that to someone in the United States. (Or, increasingly, even someone in Europe or East Asia.) Ask the average American to name an Islamic leader, and Osama bin Laden will probably be first off the tongue, with the late Ayatollah Khomeini coming a close second. There is really no point in orating about, say, Sufi doctrines, when Osama bin Laden’s guns talk so much louder. Again, the simple fact is that when you speak of the ‘‘Islamic world’’ you do not really think of the likes of Indonesia (even if its teeming millions make it the planet’s largest Muslim nation) or even of Turkey. You think immediately of the Arab world. (How many Americans, do you think, would know that Iran is not an Arab country?) And the larger Arab nations of the so-called ‘‘Middle East’’ do not, let us face it, present the most attractive face of Islam. Even American academics who loathe President Bush, I found on my last trip, regard Islam with distrust. A pair of images running across my television screen as I write tell the story. Arabs are protesting against an American Marine shooting a wounded captive inside a mosque in Falluja. Elsewhere in Iraq, Margaret Hassan, a British aid worker who has been helping Iraqis for thirty years, was executed by her kidnappers. Which image do you think will resonate more loudly in Arab homes, and which will be remembered more clearly in America and Europe? From an Indian perspective, both claims seem equally spurious — the American boast of battling for liberty and Al-Qaeda’s claim that it is fighting a Jihad. But the two are feeding off each other, and between them they are raising the stakes until ‘‘Islam vs the World’’ risks becoming reality rather than rhetoric. Is this a vicious cycle? No, it is something worse — it is a downward spiral.
