January 14, 2008	Monday	Muharram 04, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” To many today the words would seem to belong to a suicide bomber preparing to blow himself up. They were in fact said by American icon Patrick Henry on March 23 1775 as British troops prepared to wage war on the rebellious colonists.

Similarly, the history of assassination bereft of its painful effects on contemporary politics is also traced to an exotic legend that began in northern Persia in 1092. It is said to be based on the evolution of one of the Shia sects that set themselves in opposition — theological, social, or occasionally physical — to the Sunni sultans.

The plot revolves around Hassan Ibn Saba, an old intellectual and teacher, who founds a sect called Hashashins, or Assassins. The sect exists to liberate Persia from the Seljuk Turks. Ibn Saba sets up a training camp at his castle in the mountains, called Alamut, or the Eagle's Nest.

The Assassins are neither mercenaries nor soldiers in any traditional sense. Ibn Saba gathers them from both inside and outside of Persia, and teaches them a wide range of subjects, from mathematics to literature. He indoctrinates his students with his radicalised vision of Islam, which requires blind obedience and not the slightest fear of death. The training process is helped along by hashish and promises of a heavenly reward, including harems and crystal palaces. Once the Assassins are transformed into living daggers drunk with fanaticism, Ibn Saba sends them off to attack the Turks. During World War II Kamikaze pilots were trained to ram their Japanese warplanes into American ships, lacing their escalated technology with the doctrine of Patrick Henry with the sure-footed zealotry of Hassan ibn Saba.

Consider the history of assassinations in South Asia. It makes the so-called global war on terror look like a compulsive obsession of a Texan layabout. Everybody shows up as dramatis personae in our region as either a victim or an assassin. Mahatma Gandhi, Liaqat Ali Khan, Solomon Bandaranaike, Mujib ur Rehman, Zia ur Rehman, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, President Premadasa, King Birendra and now Benazir Bhutto, whose father and two brothers should also be included as victims of conspiracies to eliminate them. All the leaders above were murdered by a wide variety of assassins nursing a whole range of motives. For a curious reason just one of the assignations has shaken the world, not the others.

History defies the logic of the current war on terror, which limits itself to a single motive of a targeted community. Would someone care to know how many of the murdered South Asian leaders were killed by Muslim fanatics, how many by Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh zealots? Are we curious about how many of the dead were done in by their own relatives or their trusted army officers and on whose orders? Keep your head down. Don't embarrass powerful people who rule the region. Moreover, the questions are too complex to deserve a simple answer. And now that Afghanistan is also formally part of the South Asia fraternity, it would be fair to ask who killed Muhammad Daud, Nur Muhammad Taraki and Najibullah. One of them was killed under UN watch, remember? Who applauded when the much-loved mujahideen of yore (as distinct from the despised jihadis although they mean the same thing) mercilessly lynched him?

It's the same topsy-turvy picture with the hijacking of airplanes. Pandey brothers from Uttar Pradesh were made state ministers after they hijacked an Indian Airlines plane over Lucknow with a cricket ball to assert their loyalty to Sanjay Gandhi's Congress Party. Brahmins, Dalits and Sikhs have all commandeered planes in India. The other fact worth noting is that the only Muslims to have hijacked planes in the country were Kashmiris. So how should we then regard the George Bush thesis of worldwide Muslim terrorism in the wake of a more varied experience in South Asia?

There are lessons to be learnt from the mess in the region and beyond. Iraq before it was raped and mangled by its foreign occupiers was a salad bowl of ethnicity and religions not unlike South Asia. Can anyone truly deny that Iraq was essentially a secular liberal nation when it was invaded and is now sought to be turned into theocratic fiefdoms to be lorded over by religious rivals. We can't even begin to imagine the consequences should the world's most powerful democracy, which is beginning to look jaded in its inevitable defeat in Iraq, shifts its gaze to South Asia.But how does one widen a war on terror, which has come to mean actually targeting a specific community, in countries where that community is not a major force, not even a negligible one? What about countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka, one a Hindu majority but notionally secular republican state the other a Buddhist majority state with a history of ethnic feuds both within the majority Sinhalese community and within a Sinhalese-Tamil paradigm? Excuses and justifications are really not that difficult to conjure. If the Baathist Saddam Hussein could be branded a supporter of the essentially Salafi Al Qaeda then there is nothing that a little manipulation of our ability to think independently would not do. Even as we wait for the war on (Muslim) terrorism to mutate into an anti-Maoist bombardment in Nepal, there is already a project underway to create the grounds to proclaim Sri Lanka's Tamil rebels as the long lost cohorts of Osama bin Laden. The dangers to South Asia generally and to India specifically from this evidently vacuous discovery are enormous.

No one really doubts that the LTTE uses terrorist methods and is in any case a banned organisation in the countries that matter. So why give a dog a bad name before hanging it? Not many years ago I asked Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who had a terrific sense of humour even when she was mostly immobile and unable to carry out her duties as Sri Lanka's prime minister, whether she was ready to comply with India's request to extradite LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran. “It's a laughable idea,” she had chortled. “Do you think we are going to find him, much less catch him?” Suddenly, quite out of the blue Sri Lanka is today claiming the death of one LTTE leader after another. It has threatened to scrap its truce with the Tamil rebels and President Rajapakse is being asked the same question about Prabhakaran that I had put to Mrs Bandaranaike. The answer this time is different though.

If he actually caught Prabhakaran, the government of India will be in fix, says a concerned NDTV interviewer. “If they ask me, I will send him there. Why not? No question. He has killed so many people and if India wants him, they have to send one request, of course,” Rajapakse replies.

But don't miss the story in its perspective. Look what the leaders of the anti-terror war are saying. The “ruthless tactics” of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers have inspired terrorist networks worldwide, including the Al Qaeda in Iraq; the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was quoted as saying last week.

In an appeal to the American public to report on Tiger operatives who might be lurking under cover, the FBI said that the LTTE had perfected the use of suicide bombers; invented the suicide belt; pioneered the use of women in suicide attacks; murdered some 4,000 people in the past two years alone; and assassinated two world leaders — the only terrorist organisation to do so.

The pattern of targeting the LTTE after nurturing it for years is of a piece with the fate of the other terrorist groups in the region who were groomed for a mission and then abandoned when they lost their utility in the post-Cold War era. Tamil Nadu is a volatile southern most state of India not to be trifled with. It is separated from Sri Lanka by a very narrow stretch of water.

There were reports last week that Prabhakaran's wife had showed up at one of the refugee camps there for Sri Lankan Tamils. Going by its stated objective to fight for a Tamil homeland and given its methods to win that freedom, the LTTE is only aping what Patrick Henry and Hassan bin Saba once advocated. Given the fact that it has acquired small planes also, no one should be surprised if kamikaze are lurking somewhere close by. Surely India and the rest of South Asian victims of terror must pluck their own chestnuts from the fire. They must understand that the popular definitions of terrorism are myopic and would wreak havoc in the region. That's one of the lessons we can learn from Iraq.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com