Injustice and the New World Order: an anthropological perspective on “terrorism” in India

ABSTRACT

This article presents biographies of three activists of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Following 9/11, the Indian state banned SIMI for fomenting “terrorism”, “sedition” and “destroying Indian nationalism”. Of the three SIMI activists, Qasim Omar had spent 30 months in prison and Samin Patel, a US citizen of Indian origin, 27 months. Both these prominent SIMI leaders were charged with denigrating the photo of India’s flag and making provocative speeches. I interviewed them after their release. The third was an ordinary (non-office bearer) activist. Drawing on their biographies, I argue that Islamist radicalism or “terrorism” should be construed politically. Contrary to the prevalent politics, the pivot of which is bare rationality of profit and loss and ruthless pursuit of national interests, the kind of politics SIMI actors enact is best understood as a profound act of ethics manifest in the quest for justice. As such, they are not enemies of freedom, democracy and human rights; on the contrary, activists such as those in SIMI strive to rescue freedom and human rights from being monopolised and molested by the mighty few and thereby truly universalise them. Against methodological nationalism, I take the post-World War II global order as the human condition in which to situate the radical politics of these young SIMI activists.

KEYWORDS:

• New World Order
• terrorism
• justice
• SIMI
• India
• Jihad
• Gandhi

Acknowledgements

I want to thank four anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their thoughtful and critical comments. I am also thankful to Benjamin Soares (Leiden University) and Adeline Masquelier (Tulane University) for commenting on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In transliterating Arabic/Hindi/Urdu/Farsi words, I follow the Annual of Urdu Studies Guidelines, available online.

2. On the history of Jamaat and Maududi, see Ahmad (2009a, 2009b); on SIMI’s history, see Ahmad (2005). To compete with Marxist student organisations in 1970s, the Jamaat floated SIMI. Only a few years later, however, the Jamaat disowned SIMI because the latter refused to work under its sarparastī (tutelage). Until the 1980s, seldom did the non-Urdu press report SIMI’s activities. It was during the 1990s that SIMI’s image as “terrorist” began to appear in the media. During this decade, SIMI, whose activities were previously largely educational-moral, began to get radical in response to the large-scale killings of Muslims ignited by Hindu nationalists who illegally demolished the Babri mosque in 1992 (see Ahmad 2009c). The Government of India is yet to legally establish its rationale for banning SIMI (Ahmad 2011b).

3. To ensure anonymity, I have changed the names of SIMI activists.

4. I use “radical” and “radicalism” not in the ways currently used by governments, security experts, policy analysts, media pundits and scholars of mainstream terrorism studies for a set ideological aims and agenda. For a critical overview of these terms, see Sedgwick (2010). My usage is closer to that of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (2002): “… someone who demands substantial or extreme changes in the existing system”. I broadly use it in the sense in which “radical politics” (Hage 2012) and “radical democracy” (Mouffe 1992) are deployed. In my usage, radical excludes the use of violence. By Islamist, I mean one who views Islam more than a set of rituals to relate it to society and politics.

5. After 9/11, like over 20 countries (most of them “democracies”), India passed a series of anti-terror laws (Sethi 2014; Singh 2007, 22–27). Australia tops the list; before 9/11 it had no anti-terror law; by 2008, it had passed 45 (Manne 2009, 252).

6. For a critique of the mainstream works on “Islamic terrorism” by “experts” such as Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman, Peter Neumann, Amritha Venkatraman and others, see Ahmad (2010, 2012a, 2012b). For a critical account of orthodox works on terrorism in general, see the references to the critical studies on terrorism literature and anthropology of terrorism literature mentioned in the penultimate paragraph of the previous section.

7. My approach to international politics differs from that of the Realist or Neo-realist, arguably the dominant framework (see Agnew 1994, Ashley 1984). Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time magazine and “one of the top 100 global thinkers” as named by Foreign Policy is an important figure of (neo-) realism (Dunne and Schmidt 2005). For a critique of Zakaria’s approach, see Ahmad (2011d).

8. This long quote “mixes” religion and politics and might not be accepted as “secular”. The poverty of the religious-secular binary, however, has been critiqued in the past decade (Asad 2006). The West claims to be secular and in the same breath insists that “secular” ideas like capitalism, democracy, individualism, human rights are all derived from Christianity (Anidjar 2015; Bruce 2004; Dumont 1982; Weber 2001). In itself important, the scope of this article does not allow further exploration of this subject.

9. Until 9/11, religion was not considered an important factor in international relations. According to Morgenthau (1985, 412), one of its key theoreticians, “religions have been made obsolete by the ability of humans to rely on themselves rather than on divine intervention”. On recent interests in and connections between IR and religion, see Snyder (2011).

10. On the influence of Lewis and Huntington in shaping the US policy towards the Islamic world, see Trumpbour (2003). In an interview which described him as “the scholar who provided the intellectual ammunition for the Iraq War”, Lewis said that he nursed friendly relations with President Bush Jr. who had read his What Went Wrong given by Condoleezza Rice (Berman 2011).

11. On the anthropology of the state, see Ahmad (2009b). Much literature on the Indian state and discourses on it in the media are statist and considerably majoritarian (see Ahmad 2009a, 2013; Murphy 2010). Minorities view the state differently. For instance, it is known that the state authorities and politicians have actively participated in numerous instances of anti-minorities violence. In a study examining four cases of mass communal violence (one against Sikhs and three against Muslims) – Nellie (1983), Delhi (1984), Bhagalpur (1989) and Gujarat 2002 – Chopra and Jha (2014) note that the biased role of the authorities and the denial of justice are systemic, not episodic. The 2006 Sachar committee recorded extreme marginalisation of Muslims in education, the economy, government services and so on (except in prisons where they were disproportionately over-represented). Proponents of Hindutva denounced the Sachar committee as “caring for terrorists” (Hansen 2007, 51). Academic accounts of the state ignore these realities in their theorisations (Hasan 2000).

12. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the ideological fountainhead of anti-Muslim militant Hindutva, Hindu nationalism. In 2014, Mr Narendra Modi, an RSS member under whose chief ministership over 3000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2002, won elections (through a violent mobilisation against Muslims) to become India’s Prime Minister (Ahmad 2014a).

13. From the American side, there was hardly any mention in the press or on television of Patel American nationality. Citizenship in itself thus does not necessarily suffice for intervention by the state whose citizen one is. Legally, there may not be any hierarchy or gradation of citizens; in practice, it exists along multiple lines (see Isin and Turner 2002; Smith 1988). A similar case is the terrifying tale of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen of Egyptian origin, imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay but later released. See the biography of Habib (2008). For an excellent analysis of dualism based on orientalist trope woven into an American national identity of citizen versus terrorist, see Volpp (2002).

14. Address and names wilfully made invisible through yellow sticker to ensure anonymity.

Additional information

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Irfan Ahmad

Irfan Ahmad is Associate Professor of Political Anthropology, Institute for Religion, Politics, & Society, Australian Catholic University. Having completed Religion As Critique: Islam, Reason, Tradition, he is currently working on another book manuscript titled Terrorism in Question: Media, Terror, India. He is recipient of Rubicon fellowship from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and earlier taught at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University before moving to Monash University. His first book Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press) was short-listed for the International Convention of Asia Scholars (2011) Book Prize for the best study in Social Sciences. He is founding co-editor (with Bryan Turner) of Journal of Religious and Political Practice.