Union home minister Rajnath Singh was protesting too much in Parliament last week when he tried to launch a full scale attack on the Congress on the so called “Hindu terror”. The assault seemed unwarranted and out of context. It also looked contrived. In his anxiety to suggest Hindus could not conceivably be terrorists,
Mr Singh proceeded to emphasise the banal proposition that the notion of terrorism was not faith-specific. This is a worn out observation.
Surely the home minister did not rise in the Lok Sabha to allude to just this while speaking on the recent terrorist strike in Gurdaspur. Indeed, it will be no surprise if, given Mr Singh’s Hindutva moorings, the real purpose of his remark was to obliquely hint that in India terrorism would have to be Islamic, if anything.
This became clear enough as he needlessly dragged in a former UPA-era home minister as referring to “Hindu terrorism” in Parliament, and thus diverting attention away from any productive probe. Mr Singh may have been referring to Sushilkumar Shinde, but Mr Shinde’s talk of “Hindu terrorism” had come not in Parliament, but at an AICC session, and in a context very different from what Mr Singh was making out.
The natural surmise is that the home minister was being deliberately provocative in order to divert attention from the failures of his own government. Gurdaspur, after all, was preventable. The Jammu-Pathankot belt has been an object of frequent Pakistan-based jihadi terrorist attention from the time of the first NDA government, and it was only expected that the Modi government would have tightened the frontier in the proximate area.
More, it is not unlikely that Mr Singh’s remark was also a part of BJP’s political preparation for the coming Bihar Assembly elections. It has been the BJP’s practice to paint its opponents, particularly the Congress, as working against Hindu interests, and by implication trying to appease Muslims.
Not to put too fine a point on it, however, “Hindu terrorism” is not an imaginary thing in today’s India, just as jihadi or Islamist terrorism is not. Its existence does not mean that all Hindus are terrorists, just as all Muslims are not. But the existence of an extremist outfit like Abhinav Bharat cannot be denied. Those who executed the Samjhauta Express blast, or the explosions at Malegaon and Mecca Masjid, may also be deemed to be “Hindu terrorists.” As if to confirm this, a well known Mumbai public prosecutor complained recently that she had been softly asked by NIA to go slow on some cases by the present government.
