ROUND THE WORLD

New Delhi, 28 February 2006

U.S. President’s Itinerary

SIGNIFIANCE OF HYDERABAD VISIT

By Dr. Chintamani Mahapatra

School of International Studies, JNU

One of the destinations of US President George Bush’s India visit is the city of Hyderabad. His predecessor Bill Clinton too visited Hyderabad in March 2000. But there is a difference in motivation of these two American leaders. Unlike Bill Clinton, George Bush visited this South Indian city because of, among other things, its social geography. Foreign policy advisors of  Bush have shown interest in this city because of the presence of a large number of Muslim population.

At a time when the anti-American sentiment in the Islamic World is at its height, President Bush  visited India which proudly claims its place as the second largest Muslim country in the world. The Egyptians who receive the second largest component of US foreign assistance are at logger heads with Washington on a host of foreign policy issues. Saudi Arabia, which has been a traditional American ally in the Persian Gulf, is home of Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader, who master-minded the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States. Pakistan, another American strategic ally, created the Taliban force in Afghanistan, which provided shelter to Osama and safe haven to his followers, so that they could plan the 9/11 attacks from the caves of that country.

In contrast to all these Islamic countries, Indian Muslims are known to be hardcore anti-Americans. Al Qaeda has no base in India. Indian Muslims do grieve, complain and express concerns over US policies and perceptions which are considered to be anti-Islamic. But Indian Muslims do not resort to terrorism or suicide bombings to avenge the perceived mistreatment of Islam and attack the innocents.

Of late, a series of events have occurred, which give some credence to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization theory. While many liberal and Leftist intellectuals quickly condemned this theory after its publications in mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden took it seriously and indeed launched his attacks against the centres of Western (Christian) civilization. The 9/11 attack has been interpreted by some Muslim intellectuals and followers of Al Qaeda’s ideology, as a response to perceived attack on Islam by the West.

A large majority of Muslim people in the Islamic world did not support the terrorist methods adopted by Al Qaeda to kill the innocents and destroy property. Nor did they loudly protest against the US attack on Afghanistan to flush out the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders from that country. But the continuation of NATO presence in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq under cooked-up justifications have angered a large number of Muslims around the world. The US handling of the Palestinian issue during the last months of Yasser Arafat, after his death and now after the victory of Hamas in the elections is not considered fair and just in the Muslim world.

Again the backdrop of all these developments, the US undivided attention on Iranian nuclear programme and pressure on Tehran to follow Washington’s prescriptions on transparency have generated an impression that the US intends to emasculate the Islamic civilization, while maintaining silence over the Israeli nuclear weapon capability. Even friendly Islamic countries in the Middle-East do not support the US position, although they simultaneously would not be comfortable with the Iranian nuclear capability.

Besides the West’s relations with the Islamic countries, the treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the incident involving flushing of the Holy Book of Koran down the toilet at Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, treatment meted out to Muslim immigrants and visitors to Western countries, including the US, and now depiction of the Muslim Prophet in a cartoon in a Danish newspaper have inflamed the passion among millions of Muslims around the globe. The reaction in several Muslim countries has also resulted in burning of the Churches and the Holy Bible.

What else could be an example of clash of civilization? It is true that the entire Muslim civilization is not at war with the Western civilization. It cannot be. The two World Wars that humankind witnessed and suffered in the first half of the twentieth Century did not involve every citizen of the earth. Nor did it affect every country equally. Even then we call those World Wars. There are differences and contradictions within the Muslim world and within the Western civilizations. But some people from both the civilizations appear to have been convinced that a clash is taking place between Muslims and non-Muslims, predominantly adherents of the Christian faith.

And this is dangerous. The non-state actors involved in this clash yield a capacity to cause a level of violence unprecedented in human history. Some of the state actors may inflame passion and other states may use violence to stop violence, in the process causing much more violence. When an Iranian leader speaks of wiping out a country in the Middle-East, it encourages certain non-state actors to try for that and induces other countries to prepare for preventing that. Before a madness is unleashed and a vicious circle assumes catastrophic proportions, sane nations have to come together to put an end to this phenomenon.

The United States as a victim of Islamic extremist violence and a country that has substantially contributed to it has a major role to play in ending religious extremism. India is also a victim of terrorism; probably India has lost more lives in terrorist attacks than any other country in the world. Yet, most of the terrorist violence in India is not the result of religious extremism. It has an external dimension, where some people of Muslim faith in Kashmir are incited to cause violence in the name of Islam. Massive majority of Indian Muslim population is on the side of the Indian state against these religious fanatics and terrorists. Barring communal clashes on the ground of local factors in modern India, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims have formed groups to eliminate the other by adopting terrorism as a method of achieving their goals.

Moreover, the Indian Muslim masses are truly democratic in their outlook and attitude. The multicultural and multi-religious Indian society has been woven in a democratic fiber that has set an example to others in the world. It is here that the US can learn a lot from India. No other country in the world is better suited to promote democracy in the Islamic world than India. The US is a suspect. So are its NATO allies of the Western world.

India needs American cooperation to end anti-Indian terrorism. The US can acquire great help from India to establish and promote democracy in the Islamic countries, which in turn can provide a long-term solution to anti-US terrorism. This is an important area both for India and America.---INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)