As India and Pakistan edge toward a settlement of the disputes that have disfigured their relations since 1947, there is hope in both countries that, freed of the burden of hostility, the two will be able to work together for a better life for their people. Unfortunately, there are many in both countries for whom such a hope of peaceful life is bad news. They want blood to keep flowing.
If M.K. Narayanan, India’s security adviser, was right in his disclosure Sunday, some militant groups have found an extremely effective way to ensure this. While most Indians and Pakistanis look hopefully to an end to the violence that has claimed thousands of lives, the militants are opening a new front designed to set India’s Muslims and Hindus at each other’s throats.
There have been attacks in the past against Indian targets, most notoriously against the Indian Parliament in 2001, the Red Fort in Delhi the year before and bombings in Bombay and other places. Now, however, they have shifted their aim to Hindu religious sites. Two weeks ago there were twin blasts in the temple city of Varanasi. Predictably Hindu hard-liners took to the streets in protest. Moderate Hindus were no less angry. Leading Muslims in India went out of their way to condemn the attacks. While it would have been deplorable had they stayed silent, the tragic truth is that it will not calm Hindu feelings. The terrorists know this perfectly well. The tipping point for the militants will be when Hindu hotheads, whose capacity for violent fanaticism was clearly shown in the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, begin to retaliate.
The effectiveness of this wicked and cynical provocation designed to set two innocent communities at each other’s throats is already becoming bloodily evident in Iraq. There, a long succession of murderous attacks and bombings by Al-Qaeda and the insurgents against ordinary Iraqis failed to do more than destroy the country’s ability to recover from the ravages of invasion and the brutalities of the Saddam years. However, since the terrorists turned their aim to Shiite mosques and shrines, they have been able to provoke retaliatory attacks against Sunni sites. Inexorably the citizens of a Muslim country are being tricked into a downward spiral of tit-for-tat bloodletting and misery.
The enormity of what militants are trying to achieve with the same tactics in India is the greater because no one can forget the appalling butchery that took place in 1947 with the partition of India and Pakistan. And their crime is even greater because they have been recruiting gullible Indian Muslims to train abroad and return to do their dirty work.
Two things only can head off appalling disaster. The first is that Indian Muslims must expose the men of violence the minute they arrive in their communities with the poisonous preaching of hate; Hindu leaders, too, must head off the bigots in their midst. The second, however, is that New Delhi and Islamabad must move much more rapidly toward a lasting Kashmir settlement.
