This is strikingly similar to the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument that the Bush Administration used to invade Iraq, with one big difference: there was no WMD in Iraq, whereas Pakistan is replete with terrorist groups some of whom have declared jihad against India. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the Head of the LeT, and Osama Bin Laden have publicly tagged Hindu India on to the axis of the infidels along with the Crusaders, Zionists and Western Christians. They not only challenge India’s position over Kashmir but also envisage restoring Islamic rule over India.

Yet, it would be a bigger mistake for India to undertake a military response targeting terrorist groups in Pakistan than the now acknowledged American blunder of invading Iraq. While India and Pakistan have had border skirmishes over Kashmir sometimes bordering on wars as in 1947 and 1965 (the 1971 war was primarily over the liberation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, from Pakistan), there was no jihad dimension to these clashes. The jihad dimension in Pakistan is the result of the Afghan contagion, and in India it is creating the potential for a Hindu counter-jihad. A new war between the two countries will not be limited to the two armies at the border but will ignite violence throughout the two societies. There is the even graver risk of triggering the use of the nuclear warheads that the two countries possess.

The Congress government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, unlike the Bush Administration in less provocative circumstances, has shown tremendous restraint in the face of opposition criticism and public outcry for retaliatory action. Their restraint has been vindicated, for now, by the election results from four Indian States, New Delhi, Rajasthan, Mizoram and Madhya Pradesh that were held after the Mumbai attacks. Even while the Mumbai attacks were on, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political flagship of Hindu nationalism, took out front page newspaper advertisements ridiculing the secular Congress’s ineptitude against Islamic terror and asking the people to ‘vote BJP’ to rebuke the Congress. The voters did not agree.

The Congress Alliance won in three of the four States, registering its third successive victory in the capital State of New Delhi to the huge disappointment of the BJP. BJP’s only victory, in Madhya Pradesh, was a victory for the incumbent BJP Chief Minister who showed competence in governance after disastrous performances by his Hindu nationalist predecessors, one of whom was a female Hindu fanatic. The results augur well for an even broader endorsement of the policy of restraint in the national elections due in May 2009. The BJP will have to reconsider its strategy of using Hindu nationalism as its main campaign plank, and the Congress has time to regroup itself nationally and demonstrate to the Indian people that India could deal with Islamic terrorism without succumbing to Hindu nationalism.

The new Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, has declared that the Congress government will respond with “resolve and determination” to the Mumbai attacks. But in dealing with Pakistan, India cannot afford to risk alienating the Pakistani people who are helplessly fed up with the virtual takeover of their country by mostly non-national jihad forces. Simultaneously, India should spearhead a regional solution to what has become the South Asian contagion of terrorism and violence.

Jihad and non-Jihad violence in South Asia

Jihad in Arabic literally means struggle and Islam recognizes four different forms of jihad – struggle against the self, of the tongue, of the hand, and of the sword. According to many Muslims and Islamic scholars, jihad of the sword has been misappropriated by Islamic fundamentalists to justify acts of terrorism. Jihad violence in South Asia emerged only after the regional destabilization following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its withdrawal. After the Soviet departure in 1989, the vacuum was filled by the Taliban regime and thousands of young men from forty countries, all trained mujahideen (jihad soldiers) ready to spread the cause of radical Islam. The Lashker-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), the group reportedly responsible for the Mumbai attacks, was founded in 1990 with Saudi money, under the tutelage of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

According to Hussain Haggani, Pakistan’s US Ambassador, the group was created during General Zia-ul Haq’s military dictatorship as the instrument of Pakistan’s “state sponsorship of jihad against India” in Kashmir. It was given a sprawling 200 acre premises near Lahore and a network of Madrassa seminaries, hospitals, mobile clinics and markets throughout Pakistan. Its forays into Kashmir began in 1993, and as many as 750 estimated members, mostly foreign mercenaries, have been operating in Kashmir. LeT and other jihad groups have established links with Indian Islamists and have Islamic networks in Bangladesh and Maldives.

The emergence of Hindutva in India is less a response to Pakistan’s state-sponsored jihad against India and more a reaction to India’s state-sponsored secularism within India. Although an assertive Hindu ideology has existed for most of the 20th century, its political traction began only in the 1980s as a reaction to perceived favoured treatment of Muslim and Christian minorities by the Indian State, legislature and the judiciary. At one level, Hindutva ideologues rail against the smug secular superciliousness of the Congress Party and the Indian Left, and identify the Indian subcontinent as the homeland of the Hindus. They want India to be a Hindu Nation rather than a secular state, and support a more aggressive Hindu response to the Islamic jihad in Kashmir.

At another level, Hindutva storm troopers foment violence against Muslims and Christians. Unlike mob riots of the past, the violence against Indian Muslims is now more organized. A shocking new development is the attack against Christians, about 600 of whom have been killed in the last eight years, in retaliation against Christian conversion of lower caste Hindus. More ominous is the recent exposure of ties between Hindutva groups and sections of the Indian military in organizing attacks against Muslims. The exposure came with the arrests of Lt. Col. Srikant Purohit and retired Maj. Ramesh Upadhya for alleged involvement with Hindutva groups to carry out attacks against Muslims.

The Hindutva phenomenon, notwithstanding the international network of its organizations, is mostly confined to India in its agenda and activities. The BJP is the main political front of the movement striving for power both at the Centre and State levels based on a broad Hindu unity cutting across webs of caste and regional differences. The BJP was in power nationally from 1998 to 2004, and while pursuing a fundamentalist agenda within India, it worked to improve relations with Pakistan.

South Asia is also the site of several non-religious forms of violence and terrorism. Sri Lanka is in the throes of renewed fighting between government forces and separatist Tamil Tigers. The island has seen much violence in the last thirty years. Nepal’s long experience with Maoist insurgency recently ended with the abolition of the monarchy and the assimilation of the Maoists into democratic politics. India has the largest number of incidents of political violence and terrorism. According to one estimate, 231 of India’s 608 administrative districts have active insurgent, terrorist or fundamentalist groups. The number of deaths due to political violence is second only to Iraq. In 2006, 2765 died due to political violence in India compared to 1470 in Pakistan. Although more than 1000 of the 2765 deaths were in Jammu-Kashmir involving Hindu-Muslim conflicts, there are many non-religious sources of political violence in India – remnant and isolated Maoist and Agrarian insurgent groups operating in several parts of India, as well as ethnic separatists active in the northeastern state of Assam and surrounding areas and occasionally spilling over into Bhutan and Bangladesh.

None of these groups, however, have regional implications and even their impact on India’s national stability is minimal given the isolated and spread-out nature of their activities, not to mention India’s behemothian size. However, the human dimension of the rural and agrarian problems and the impacts at the State and local levels are not insignificant. More than 16,000 Indian farmers have been committing suicide annually since 1997, and the State of Maharashtra has been registering 4000 farmer suicides every year for the last three years. Farmer suicides have also been reported with disturbing frequency in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Despite these heartrending numbers, farmer suicides are not sensational to attract world media attention, nor do they preoccupy South Asian religious fundamentalists and nationalists.

A South Asian solution

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, its subsequent implosion and the end of the Cold War have had two separate and contradictory consequences for South Asia. During the Cold War India and Pakistan were respectively aligned with the Soviet Union and the US with a quiet containment of South Asian differences. The main exception was the 1971 dismemberment of Pakistan (into Bangladesh and present Pakistan); after 1971, India emerged as the dominant regional power. The onset of globalization and India’s gravitation to a market economy have brought India closer to the US in foreign policy, economic priorities and, more recently, in nuclear policy.

The inter-governmental relations between India and Pakistan have been improving after the Cold War, and were supplemented by growing cordiality at the popular and civil society levels. Cross-border televisions contributed to this cordiality and so did tourism and the increasing number of cricket encounters between the two countries. India also began to make conscious efforts to accommodate the interests of its smaller neighbours within the framework of the South Asian Regional Cooperation (SARC). The Gujral Doctrine formulated by Inder Kumar Gujral, India’s Foreign Minister and Prime Minster during the late 1990s, codified the new nuances that India was trying to follow in its neighbourly relations. Countering these positive developments, as I have been discussing in this article, are the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and the forces of jihad unleashed after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

A third development in South Asia during the Cold War with continuing hangovers is what the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad, onetime Kerala Chief Minister and longtime General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), used to call the “internal component” of the Indian national question, but which is equally applicable to Pakistan and Sri Lanka. India has had quite a few manifestations of this internal component after independence. It successfully addressed the early eruptions in the South, in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. The more violent secessionist demand of the Sikhs of Punjab is also reasonably settled. As I noted earlier, ethno-territorial violence haunts the northeast parts of India, but Kashmir is the real thorn on the sides of both and India and Pakistan. The Kashmir question has been a continuing crystallization of the vicious fallouts from colonialism and partition, the Cold War, and now the Afghan imbroglio.

[The proper solution to the war in Sri Lanka is Thamizh Eelam, says a placard carried by the protestors opposite the Sri Lankan Deputy High commission in Chennai in Sep 2008-pic:TN]

Pakistan’s national question has its own internal components involving the ethno-territorial conflicts among the Punjabis, the Sindhis and Pashtuns. But their conflicts are mostly submerged by Pakistan’s overwhelming problem of Islamic fundamentalism and the related sectarian infighting between the Sunnis and Shiites. The Sri Lankan crisis has proved itself to be internally intractable although it has minimal regional or extra-regional security implications. This is notwithstanding India’s implication in the crisis on account of its past involvements and the new outcry in the southern State of Tamil Nadu that has linguistic and cultural affinities with Sri Lankan Tamils, over the plight of Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire.

Nonetheless, the three South Asian developments – post-Cold War, post-Afghanistan, and post-colonial hangovers, are interconnected although not uniformly or consistently. As I have been arguing, the post-Cold War development of somewhat improved relationship among South Asian countries is being undermined by the jihad fallout from Afghanistan, with Kashmir providing the fault line between the two. The aftermath of Mumbai is that more jihad attacks from Pakistan targeting India will only provoke belligerent Hindu fundamentalist calls for retaliation. It should be commonplace that jihad attacks from Pakistan and military retaliations by India will feed each other in an endless vicious circle of violence. The question is how to prevent the two countries and the rest of South Asia getting trapped in this vicious circle. The answer, it would appear, lies in a coordinated approach comprised of bilateral, multilateral as well as South Asian regional elements.

There are reasonably encouraging signals from Pakistan even though India may want Pakistan to do more and a lot sooner. Despite the official insistence on Indian proof that the Lashkar group masterminded the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan’s President in a rare op-ed article in the New York Times has acknowledged Pakistan’s predicament in dealing with the terrorist fallouts from the Afghan imbroglio. He has asked India to show patience and understanding, and for India and others to help Pakistan overpower the forces of fanaticism, install democratic infrastructure and rebuild its economy.

India would do well to take President Asif Ali Zardari at his word and hold him to it. Ordinary Pakistanis, civil society activists, professionals and many of the political actors would really like Pakistan to get rid of the jihad groups and the terrorist network. The Pakistani army itself is not monolithically hawkish, or fully identified with jihad forces. India should make its appreciation of these differences clear to the people of Pakistan and the only democratic instrument they have – the Zardari government. India should leave the difficult task of pressurizing Pakistan to systematically take on the jihad groups to the US and the NATO countries. In any event, the terrorist network in Pakistan cannot be dealt with in isolation from the goings on in Afghanistan. The incoming Obama administration has its work cut out in embarking on a triangulation exercise of an international kind, involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

On the vexed question of Kashmir, Pakistan would be well advised to avoid the ‘K’ word to provoke India in international parleys, such as it did at the UN recently. Just as Pakistan is asking for patience and help to put its house in order, so must India be given the time and space to rethink its position and explore new possibilities for Kashmir. As Tariq Ali recently remarked, a feasible solution to the Kashmiri problem as well as the Tamil question in Sri Lanka could well be a South Asian arrangement that recognizes, where necessary, ethno-territorial autonomies within the existing state boundaries.

The first of the five principles of the Gujral Doctrine is for India not to ask for reciprocity in its relations with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka, but to give and accommodate what it can in good faith and trust. By and large, India has been acting in this manner with these countries both before and after the Gujral Doctrine. Strange as it may seem, India should apply the same principle to Pakistan without seeming to be condescending. Even if the government of Pakistan is not “an innocent bystander”, as Fareed Zakaria, a Mumbai born American Muslim, has called it, the people of Pakistan are innocent bystanders as jihad terrorists launch attacks on India. And the Pakistani people need every help they can get to rid of the menace in their nation’s bosom.