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Friday 5 September 2008

An attack on India’s future

One can imagine how this place — like New York, Madrid and London — would offend the sensibilities of the fundamentalists who dream of a ‘pure’ Muslim India, their vision narrowed to nothingness by the promise of heaven. Such are the men of Lashkar-e-Toiba — the ‘Army of the Pure’ — who are the principal suspects for the bombings. The Lashkar have plenty of form. They are blamed for attacking the Indian Parliament in Delhi in 2001; two years later they attacked Mumbai and killed about 50 people. They are also accused of attacking a Hindu temple in Varanasi and scores of other attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir.

There is plenty of history to animate this violence. Just as the Taleban sprang from a generation radicalised by the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, many of the men who joined Lashkar were shaped by the bitter conflict in Kashmir. Some also fought in Afghanistan. The cycle of atrocity and reprisal provided fertile ground for radical mullahs who promised the utopia of a pure Islamic state.

Of course not every fighter deserted the nationalist struggle in Kashmir for the more religious war fought by Lashkar and other like-minded groups. But enough young men followed the call to make the fundamentalists a potent threat. Long before al-Zarkawi and his kind were beheading Western hostages in Iraq, the fundamentalists in Kashmir were butchering their captives. Who now remembers the name of Hans Christian Ostro? He was the first Westerner to be beheaded by fundamentalists, and it happened in the high mountain lands of Kashmir. That was back in 1995 when six Western hostages disappeared on a hiking trip to the Himalayas. Scores of Indians have met a similar fate there.

Many of the Lashkar’s fighters are grad-uates of military camps in Afghanistan and share a strong affinity with the Taleban and al-Qa’eda. They trained and fought together. Over the years the Lashkar is believed to have received strong backing from Pakistan’s Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) which is accused of backing the Taleban troops fighting the British in Afghanistan.

More articles from: Fergal Keane | this section

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