Don’t Slot Us, Please

Don’t Slot Us, Please A terrorist and his community are not synonymous Harinder Baweja Illustration: ANAND NAOREM IT IS often said that terrorists don’t have a religion. I firmly believe that to be true, for no religion allows the severing of limbs and torsos in blast after horrendous blast. No religion advocates violence; all advocate peace. No maulvi, granthi or pujari will sanction the killing of unsuspecting women and children. But having said that, there is a question that has been cropping up in my mind, again and again: to what extent can you separate your religious identity from what is happening around you? Should religion condition our response to violence, in the first place? I was a young reporter, covering the militancy in Punjab, when I was first made conscious of being a Sikh. Actually, I was precisely 23-years-old — old enough to know something about religion; but had grown up in air force camps across the country, oblivious in so many ways, to the real, hard, even brutalised world that then began to consume me professionally and personally. The ‘moment of consciousness’ came in 1984, during the anti-Sikh pogrom. My father — then a serving air force officer — had to take his turban off and wear a helmet to get past the enraged, rampaging mobs who were looking for anything in a beard and a turban. He reached home, shaken and angry; angry that he had to disguise his identity. Angry, that the uniform counted for nothing; that a fauji’s duty to the nation meant nothing; furious that the community was being clubbed with the two fanatical bodyguards who pulled the trigger on Indira Gandhi. That was the crucial point — it is dangerous to typecast and demonise a community. It is worse when the realisation — of being a Sikh (in 1984), a Muslim (in 2008) and a Christian (in Orissa and Karnataka, 2008) — comes through extreme violence. Sikhs were checked, down to their bone, when they tried to enter Delhi during the Asiad; similarly, Muslims are being demonised now. As journalists we have seen how men in uniform tend to get communalised; we have seem them dangerously taking sides — the CRPF sympathising with the Hindus in Punjab, the BSF terming all Kashmiris as militants and the police officer in Kandhamal having the gumption of not picking up the medical report of the nun who was raped in Orissa for an entire month. The police sided with the rioters in Delhi in 1984 and the Gujarat police did much the same in 2002. The targeting of a community fed the cycle of violence in Punjab and the members of the Indian Mujahideen claim to have been incensed by the deliberate subversion of justice in Gujarat. The state needs to ponder this: is the potent concoction — that dangerous mix of religion and politics that they have learnt to brew and use to expand their constituencies — now also being imbibed by the men in uniform? Is blatant inaction and that helpless feeling that comes from justice being denied, then adding to the ranks of terrorists? Are we, by slotting, typecasting and demonising, pushing a few — even if its only a few — towards the men who have no religion? Operation Bluestar taught some lessons to the men in uniform. The widespread alienation that followed the storming of the Golden Temple in 1984 then led to the clinical, only-target-the-terrorists Operation Black Thunder, that was conducted in full media view in 1988. Nobody from the community protested the second time round. But that was in 1988 and the Indian state has clearly not learnt. Gujarat, Orissa and Karnataka inspire little confidence. Terrorism, the world over, is begging for social and political responses. In India’s multi-religious, multi-cultural society, the challenge is even greater. Political classes need to wake up to the perils of typecasting. Get the terrorists. Don’t target the community. From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 41, Dated Oct 18, 2008