Why we are a soft target for terrorists

While the rest of us waited impatiently in a queue that got longer by the minute the Muslim gentleman was questioned and questioned again. His passport was examined first by one official, then another, then some sort of supervisor poured over it frowningly. The veiled ladies, meanwhile, were escorted to a hidden chamber and kept there for what seemed like half-an-hour and it was only at the end of all this that they were allowed to enter Britain. Exhausted though I was from my long flight I watched the proceedings with interest because it made me realise how political correctness in our own fair and wondrous land makes us an even softer terrorist target than we already are.

If a Muslim family had been treated this way at an Indian airport there would have been a case in the Human Rights Commission against the immigration department. Political correctness, particularly in the media, makes us nearly always give terrorists rather than the police the benefit of doubt. A recent example is the case of the Mumbai college girl who was killed in a police shootout with alleged terrorists.

Every newspaper I read painted the dead girl out to be a model of virtue who could not possibly have had anything to do with terrorism or terrorists. Almost nobody asked what she was doing in a car filled with armed men allegedly on a mission to assassinate Narendra Modi. And, speaking of whom may I say that in the campaign to demonise him (of which I totally approve) what puzzles me is the absence of clamour from our hyperactive civil rights groups about the fate of those Muslims in Gujarat who are still unable to return to their villages. Modi’s crime was not just that he allowed violence against people he was supposed to protect but that after the violence was over he did nothing to help the victims return to their homes. There are thousands of Muslims in Gujarati villages who continue to live in terror because the killers remain unpunished. Nobody speaks for them just as nobody speaks for the victims of other riots who continue to fight their lonely battles for justice.

This peculiarly selective approach to human rights discredits the cause just as the absence of firm measures to deal with Islamic terrorists, and the institutions that breed them, ends up discrediting all Muslims. The root cause is political correctness carried to such absurd lengths that we in the media do not even dare point out that young Muslims are being misled onto paths of violence by half-literate, half-witted mullahs whose influence has grown dangerously ever since political Islam began its confrontation with the West. Civil rights groups must share the blame because quick though they are to point out the evils of ‘‘saffronisation’’ they rarely pick up on the tirade against ‘‘infidels’’ that carries on in Muslim religious and educational institutions. It is these institutions that are the breeding grounds of terrorism but not even a BJP government was able to do anything for fear that it would be seen as an attack on Muslims.

It is an issue that will have to be addressed if we are to stop the poison spreading. There is no harm in Islamic schools and religious institutions teaching knowledge of the religion but if that is all a child is taught from its first day of learning to its last it grows up thinking of those who are not Muslims as infidels. From this exclusivity comes the desire to kill unbelievers as enemies of the faith. Whatever Islam’s grouse against the West it cannot be used as an excuse for terrorism in India and yet we have been dealing with Islamic terrorism longer than any Western country.

Kashmir’s ‘‘freedom movement’’ was hijacked by radical Islamists in the early nineties and the first beheading of a Westerner was that of that poor Norwegian tourist in Kashmir in 1995. Nobody even found out what happened to the others who were abducted along with him and then we saw the advent of Omar Sheikh and Azhar Masood who were in India to recruit troops for the cause. So hopeless were our anti-terrorism measures that we kept these two evil men in our jails for several years before graciously exchanging them for the passengers of IC-814 in Kandahar.

Incompetence and an absence of political will are part of the reasons why we have been unable to deal with terrorism but political correctness is almost as much to blame because its pressure forces our political leaders to turn a blind eye. Political correctness to such a degree that we cannot say Islamic terrorism without being accused of communalism. We can, though, say Hindu fundamentalist and Sikh terrorist without anyone protesting. What does that tell you?

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com