Time To Weed Out The Root Of The New Global Terror That Has Been Identified

India has the challenge of cautiously handling its mutual relations with the three biggest players in the region - Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran - without yielding an inch on its stand of a total denunciation of terrorism in all its forms

The post-Cold War era has seen a rise in cross-border offensives mainly by way of planned attacks of terrorist groups that could be denied by the sponsors. Terrorism by definition is a ‘resort to covert violence for a perceived political cause’ and since a ‘cause’ needed commitment and motivation, terror groups were raised through indoctrination. The motivation could be ‘ideological’ as in the case of Maoism, could be focused on the assertion of ‘ethnic identities’ as was seen in the past in India’s North-East or like what happened in Afghanistan, where militant outfits invoked the ‘war cry’ of Jehad to fight against the Soviet army there.

The current trends of global terrorism are seen more in the Pak-Afghan region, the Middle East and North Africa. Since Islam embraces all aspects of a man’s life - personal, social, cultural, political or even economic, there is no distinction between religion and politics there. In fact, today’s Islamic radicals carry the historical memory of the anti-West Wahhabi Revolt of the mid-19th century in Algeria, Arabia and India that was led by prominent Ulema who were greatly distressed to find that after a thousand years of ‘glorious advancement’ of Islam, Western powers had encroached on ‘Muslim lands’. It was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who had despatched the Taliban - the fundamentalist products of Deobandi Madrasahs of Pakistan - to Afghanistan to bring the situation there under control. This paved the way for the ascendancy of Taliban-Al Qaeda combine in Afghanistan. The Emirate, however, soon bared its anti-West fangs which led to the US working for its ouster. The events laid the turf for the terror bombing of 9/11 that precipitated the ‘war on terror’ by the US-led world coalition - first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The ‘war on terror’ was essentially a combat of the US against Islamic radical forces that had regrouped under the umbrella of Al Qaeda and its offspring the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in the Pak-Afghan belt and the Syria-Iraq region, respectively.

The US-led west was well poised towards the organisations that kept cropping up and in the Indian context of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir, even tried to coin the words ‘Political Islam’ and ‘Radical Islam’ to make a distinction between the doings of militant outfits of Jamaat and the activities of the Taliban-Al Qaeda axis. Pakistan was soon able to project itself as a mediator in the Doha talks between the Taliban and the US on the issue of withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan which was so keenly desired by the Joe Biden Administration. The ultimate gainer was Pakistan, which managed to reinstall the Taliban Emirate at Kabul and at the same time strengthen the Sino-Pak strategic alliance by arranging a ‘give and take’ between China and the Taliban regime.

India has to handle this new strategic challenge posed by the Pakistan-China axis. What has happened in recent years is that Islamic radical forces have found acceptance in the Muslim world at the cost of those ‘Islamists’ who favoured Sharia rule but who wished to be on the right side of the US or the West. Today through the checkered course of the ‘war on terror’, the radicals have managed to spread to new areas in the Muslim world - Nigeria and Yemen two widely separated territories could be mentioned in this regard. Arab Spring was another phenomenon that facilitated the shift of many Islamists to the fold of radicalisation. There has been a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa against authoritarian Arab rulers - beginning in 2010 - and there was an undercurrent of anti-capitalism and pro-poor polity in some of the agitations.

Over the years, Hamas has been radicalised becoming extremely inimical to Israel, though during the Intifada Israel had aided the Hamas for political reasons. Hamas came to detest the dictatorial regime of Israel in the occupied territory of Palestine. In what marked the extreme hostility between Hamas and Israel, there was an early morning cross-border terrorist attack by a group of Hamas militants on a gathering enjoying a national day festivity within Israel which caused the death of nearly 1200 Israelis - the terrorists also took away 200 Israelis including many women and children as hostages. The attack was severely condemned by India. Israel soon retaliated by launching a full-fledged military attack on Gaza with the declared objective of ‘finishing off’ Hamas there. The US as expected was giving full support to Israel but also unsuccessfully trying to arrange a ‘ceasefire’ for negotiating the release of hostages - the US ought to have realised that negotiations did not work with terrorists.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken it as a survival issue for Israel and the suggestion of a 2-state solution has remained as distant as ever. What is new in the scenario is that Iran-ruled by Ayatollahs - has taken Hamas in its embrace overcoming the historical Shia-Sunni contradictions, primarily because of Iran’s and Hamas’s shared political and ideological hostility towards the US. An interesting fallout of all of this is that Iran, China and Russia have come together against the US-Israel axis. With Houthis of Yemen and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah acting as Iran’s proxies and Saudi Arabia and UAE continuing to be the US’s closest allies, the superpower rivalries in the Middle East were getting bolstered because of both political and faith-based alignments. The assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah by Israel in a targeted missile attack in south of Beirut on September 27 has been followed by Iran firing nearly 180 missiles on Israel - mostly on military establishments near Tel Aviv - on October 1, many of which escaped being shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome Defence. Iran may have been deterred from resorting to an all-out offensive against Israel but the fact is that these events would keep the Middle East in the throes of violence.

India has the challenge of cautiously handling its mutual relations with the three biggest players in the region - Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran - without yielding an inch on its stand of a total denunciation of terrorism in all its forms. The threat of radicalisation is common to the US, Russia and India and even as there are signs of a new Cold War on the horizon.

Against this backdrop, India’s strategy of projecting this country as the voice of sanity and as an advocate of peace in the conflict-ridden geopolitics of today seems to be the correct line to follow.