Balbir Punj By

This is the second time in a row that this column is dealing with the issue of the unending problem of global terrorism. Within weeks of bombing at the Istanbul airport, there were attacks in Afghanistan and, now Bangladesh is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Even those saying their Eid prayers have not been spared. Last Thursday, there was an attack at Sholakia Eidgah in Kishoreganj, about 150 km from Dhaka. The sordid incidents in Bangladesh have brought out into the open the unholy nexus between self-proclaimed ‘secularists’ in India and the menace of terrorism in the sub-continent.

Rohan Imtiaz, one of the suspects of the terror attack in Bangladesh, is said to have posted a message on Facebook, quoting Dr Zakir Naik prior to the assault on the Holey Artisan cafe in Dhaka. Apart from terrorists, the list of Dr Naik’s admirers includes Congress leader Digvijay Singh, who had shared dais with the hate spewing Mumbai-based preacher. Mr Singh had termed Naik a ‘messenger of peace’ and asked him to tour the country to work for ‘communal amity.’

The ‘commitment’ of Mr Singh and leaders of the secular ilk to the cause of ‘secularism’ has been proved repeatedly. According to Mr Singh, the Batla House encounter in which Delhi Police Inspector MC Sharma was martyred, was fake. For him, Osama Bin Laden’s name is a respectable one and he happily released a book which claimed that the 26/11 Mumbai carnage was not caused by ISI agents but by the RSS!

Against the background of this nexus, does the world stand a chance to win the war against terror? The perpetrators of the horror of actually butchering some 20 people, mostly foreigners including an Indian — imagine the barbarity of cutting to pieces with a machete and at the same reciting Allahu Akbar bringing God into the barbarity — were sponsored by Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, according to Begum Sheikh Hasina, the Banglaesh Prime Minister.

The Islamic State had already come out with its claim of responsibility for the event before the Prime Minister spoke. Hence, this mystery over the official claim blaming the ISI. In effect, it hardly matters who is behind any massacre so disgusting for a civilised world. Both ISIS and an al-Qaeda remnant based in Pakistan have been broadcasting their intention to kill or capture as many non-Muslims as possible to raise the level of terror and thereby, make the world safe for only Islam to survive. The exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen said, after the killing spree in Dhaka, that Bangladesh has already become an Islamic fundamentalist nation. Much against what the world perceived as a valiant effort by Prime Minister Hasina to keep her nation on the secular path, Nasreen says that when the fundamentalists threaten and even kill free thinkers in her nation, it is the victims that the government (of Sheikh Hasina) accuses of hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims.

Such indirect endorsement of fundamentalists’ actions at that level certainly gives a leg up to the religious bigots, who claim that their holy book has already mandated that every Muslim is ipso facto or must become a terrorist (holy warrior). The very next day of the Dhaka horror, the Muslim holy city of Medina and a few other places in Saudi Arabia were attacked by terrorists. One of them was a Pakistani resident of Saudi Arabia.

From what we saw, it seems dissident writer Nasareen may not be far from truth about Islam, as currently interpreted by several organisations, including recognised proponents of the religion. They are widely giving the impression that it has a soft corner for terrorism. How can one make sense of the terror organisations receiving funds from many sources and, attacking the holiest places of Islam like Medina, which is under the protection of the Saudi Kingdom, the proclaimed protector of Islam?

We should recall that the regime of the Saudi kings has been the financier of lakhs of madarasas across South Asia and the jihadists are now attacking these very institutions that breed the exclusivism that the inner dynamics of the religion, as practised, is driving its followers to the brink of total irrationality. The terrorist organisations operating in Bangladesh are Pakistan’s allies in its own larger undeclared war to destroy the infidel ( kafir ) India. It is out of understanding the dynamics of Pakistan’s policy that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has pointed her finger at Pakistan’s ISI as the real culprit in the Holey Artisan Bakery terrorist attack. When, what Taslima Nasreen describes as, ‘One Truth and No Other’ fever is the under current everywhere in one religion, all diversities including national boundaries are to be destroyed as a holy job. The call going around on social media from the ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as well as al-Qaeda chief Al Zawahiri is just one, which they declared even recently once again: “Kill as many as you can who are not part of us.”

In this backdrop, as Taslima Nasareen says, voices of sanity are a cry in the wilderness. She herself regularly gets death threats from Indian Muslim conservative leadership, whether in Hyderabad or Kolkata like the one that made her flee from Dhaka. Obviously, there are other patterns of globalisation and claimants to enforce them than what the economists hold up as the one remedy against global ills like poverty.

Balbir Punj is a former BJP MP and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues

Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com