A NEW TERROR by Sankarshan Thakur

Bush’s changing rhetoric could make the world a more unsafe place

RK Laxman said it all the other day in his pocket wisdom. As his Common Man quizzically scrolls the list of things that can’t any longer be taken aboard flights, his droll wife mutters in the background, “Yes, soon they’ll say no people allowed and then air travel will become completely safe.”

The requirements of security are indeed beginning to verge on the absurd. But can anyone afford to quarrel with them? The next bomb cocktail could come contained in babyfood or disguised as shirt buttons. Terror is constantly innovating, constantly expanding its constituency, constantly traipsing frontiers. There’s no knowing where it will erupt next.

There’s no taking chances. It is perhaps fair to say enough can’t be done today to secure the world against threat. Sure, capitals such as Washington and London send out routine advisories to other nations about possible strikes, especially since 9/11; it is becoming increasingly unwise to treat them as merely routine. The threat exists even in the absence of advisories. Stealth and surprise are terror’s operating arms, it doesn’t follow advisories.

But if terror has become our most insistent peril, so has the rhetoric of the protagonists of the war on terror. Hover a moment on US President George Bush’s first reaction to Scotland Yard’s detection of a plot to blow up several airliners flying into America from Heathrow — Islamic fascists! Scourge be upon them! Terror is abhorrent. Fascism is abhorrent. But Islam? Tarred with the same brush dipped in the vitriol of half-baked understanding? Bush — and frontline groupies like Tony Blair of Britain — have spoken this divisive Us versus Them tongue a long while now, long enough to achieve the opposite of what they purportedly intend.

The world is a much more disaffected place today than it was in 2001, thanks in the main to the words and deeds of Bush and his cronies. Their tactics haven’t contained terror; they have sown a million more seeds of violent rift. Just as our shores are not insulated from incursion by terror, so are they not invulnerable to negative byproducts of the unthinking rhetoric of today’s self-proclaimed counter-terrorists. When our Muslims begin to display signs they too are upset over Bush’s new rhetoric, it is time for us to take note.

It is pointless pretending the new Bush line will not impact India. We are in the throes of our own communal tumult and to adopt, or even allow, the Bush rhetoric to prosper unchecked would be to foment greater disaffections and deepen chasms at home. India needs to counter terror, but it requires to be more nuanced and sophisticated in apportioning blame to the guilty. Every Indian Muslim is not a terrorist, in fact only very few are. And it isn’t as if only Muslims are terrorists, in India or in the world at large. Unless there is clarity on this, we are in a more doomed place than we think.
Aug 26 , 2006