“I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
He’s clearly been practicing the art of magical thinking, has K Rehman Khan, the Union Minister for Minority Affairs. Earlier this week, Khan went on record to say he’s sceptical the Indian Mujahideen exists, because “nobody knows what it is, where it was formed, and who runs it”. “The Muslim community,” he went on, “is not buying its existence”. Khan says these aren’t his personal views—”the community has that feeling”—but added that no Indian Muslim had ever been actually convicted of involvement in terrorism. “A few are suspected,” he said, but “their involvement is not proved.”
Perhaps Khan is just playing to the gallery: in a nation ever-more obsessed by religious identity, politicians from the late Bal Thackeray to Akbaruddin Owaisi all know bizarre invective pays.
There’s a more terrifying prospect, though: that Khan actually believes what he’s saying. If that’s the case, it tells us something deeply depressing-even terrifying-about the state of our polity.
First up, it’s flat-out untrue to assert, as Khan does, that there haven’t been any convictions of Indian Muslims in terrorism-related cases– and that’s not counting Shahzad Ahmad, who is awaiting sentencing after having been convicted for the 2008 Batla House shootout. I’m guessing the minister read, not that many weeks ago, of the death sentence awarded to Mirza Himayat Beigh for his role in the bombing of the German Bakery in Pune, which claimed 17 lives. Khan’s entitled to dispute the court’s findings, just as Baig’s lawyers have done in the Mumbai High court; for a variety of reasons, I’m sceptical too.
He can’t just pretend, though, that the conviction never happened.
The charges filed in the German Bakery bombing, morever, to claim that no-one knows what the Indian Mujahideen is: the Maharashtra Police says it does. So does the National Investigations Agency, which just filed against five alleged Indian Mujahideen operatives. The NIA states that the organisation “was formed in 2003 after ultra-radicalised Muslim youth segregated from the Student Islamic Movement of India”. It adds: “they do not believe in India’s Constitution and IM’s members nurse communal hatred against the Hindu community.” In case that’s too much reading for Khan, I’ve written up a short summary of the organisation and its genesis.
Khan might think both the Maharashtra Police and the NIA are talking drivel-but then he should say that.
Indian Muslims have been often been acquitted of terrorism charges–just like lots of people who are neither Indian or Muslim have been, for good reasons or for bad. Enough have been convicted, though, to leave no rational person in any doubt there is a problem.
This isn’t something that’s new-so I’m guessing Khan just forgot the recent convictions of the perpetrators of the 1993 serial bombings.
Let’s leave aside these trivial details, though, to address Khan’s more substantial argument: that there’s no ideological support for jihadism among Indian Muslims. He says, “Have you ever found a single Indian Muslim going and supporting terrorists in Kashmir?”
Not one, no.
Oh, wait.
The NIA, in 2011, charged 24 men, several of them Kerala residents, with training with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Jammu and Kashmir. The story dates back to 1996, when Islamist activists in Kerala began recruiting jihad volunteers, operating under cover as proslelytysers for a religious order called the Noorisha Tareeqat. In September, 2008, the NIA alleges, five of those men made their way to a Lashkar-run training camp in the mountains above Kupwara, in northern Kashmir. The NIA is yet to prove its charges in court, but four of those five men were shot dead by the Indian Army–so there’s pretty compelling evidence at least those four Indian Muslims supported terrorists in Kashmir.
Had Khan bothered to check, he’d have found plenty of other cases like this. In the summer of 2001, for example, police determined that three Jalgaon men, Sheikh Asif Supdu, Sheikh Khalid Iqbal and Sheikh Mohammad Hanif, were killed in a firefight with Indian troops while training with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen near Kishtwar, in Jammu and Kashmir.
Later, in 2002, at least six residents of Gujarat are believed to have trained at Lashkar-e-Taiba bases in the Hil Kaka mountains, near the frontier town of Poonch. Five of the group crossed the Line of Control to undergo advanced training while one, Munir Ahmad, is thought to have been killed in an encounter with the Army.
In June, 2006, the Jammu and Kashmir police and the Army shot dead Kolhapur-based seminary student Mohammad Irfan near the town of Tral, in southern Kashmir.
There are, we know, other cases: among them, a certain Zabiuddin Ansari, who, sitting in the 26/11 control room, guided the perpetrators to their targets that night. He’s being tried for his crimes, too.
I’m guessing Khan didn’t actually mean to lie–because these aren’t the kind of lies any rational person would think he wouldn’t be called on. To my mind, his claims are testimony to the human mind’s considerable capacity to censor-out things that make us uncomfortable. Neuroscientists have long known cognition errors can underpin our most most fervently held beliefs-which is why there’s no sho. In his book, The Tell-Tale Brain, VS Ramachandran suggests there’s a good evolutionary purpose for some this. If we see or hear something that suggests a tiger might be nearby, for example, we’d probably be ill-advised to hang around awaiting further evidence.
Human minds are hard-wired to draw extravagant conclusions from limited data when survival is involved-but those conclusions are often wrong. These conclusions, though, none the less tell us something important about what’s going on in peoples’ minds.
Khan is right when he states that Indian Muslims have felt a deep “sense of insecurity” since the demolition of the Babri Masjid demolition and the Gujarat riots of 2002. He’s almost certainly right to, when he suggests–in essence–that many Indian Muslims fear that the debate over jihadi terrorism is some sort of tool to undermine what gains they have made in the last two decades.
The thing is, the Indian Mujahideen isn’t a fiction cooked up for anyone to get at anyone with. Like so much else to do with our country’s troubled history, it’s a symptom of deep dysfunctions in our society; of a cycle of hate that has generated dangerous strains on our polity and republic.
Leaders like Khan deepen those strains when they peddle fantasies. Leaders like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh make things worse when they choose not to call their ministers’ crazy thinking.
