Jihad has come to
India. The Obama administration and the State Department will tell
you that it is nothing more than isolated acts by individuals.
The government in New Delhi will say you are stirring up anti-Muslim
sentiment. The mainstream media will ask how you can say that when
we are hearing nothing about it from them. But it is real, and it
is happening now. I have seen it first-hand. The Obama
administration's studied denial will find us caught as flat-footed in
India as we were in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The
difference is that India is an economic and military giant, with nuclear
weapons, and could be a cornerstone of any effective fight against
radical Islam.
For several years, I have been talking
about the progressive radicalization of Bangladesh. Although it is
the only country that ranks among the ten most populous and the ten
most densely populated, as well as being the second largest
Muslim-majority nation, events there do not capture people's
imagination. When you talk about India in the same context,
however, people take notice. The thought of an Islamist dominated
India scares the heck out of them and should. While our own
strategic thinkers concentrate on internecine struggles in the Middle
East, their obliviousness to the significance of an Islamist India has
enabled our enemies to further their agenda.
I have spent
several years along India's 2545 mile-long frontier with Bangladesh, and
have seen the impact Bangladesh's radicalization has had on its giant
neighbor to the west. Amitabh Tripathi, who has been fighting
against what he calls his country's "soft policies," noted that
Bangladesh's Muslims "are not radicalized but their institutions
are." That radicalization and a level of corruption on both sides
of the border that makes my fellow Chicagoans look like amateurs has
already produced demographic change in many strategic areas of
India. It also has given Muslim activists carte blanche throughout
the entire country. The process is deliberate, has been going on
for decades, and should send us a screaming warning signal, not only
because of what it bodes for India, but also because of what sort of
future the Obama administration's soft policies and tolerance for an
open border to our south mean for the United States.
Each
year in districts like Uttar Dinajpur and North and South 24 Parganas
directly across from the Islamic state, my colleagues and I find that
more and more villages which once had mixed Hindu-Muslim populations are
now all Muslim or Muslim-dominated. Gone are the roadside temples
characteristic of places where Hindus practice their faith openly; gone
are the sights of Hindu women dressed in their colorful saris and other
vestments. They have been replaced by mosques and burqas. Last
year, Tripathi and I met with Bimal Praminik, Director of the
Kolkata-based Centre for Research in Indo-Bangladesh Relations and
arguably the foremost authority on these population changes. He is
convinced that this population shift is a deliberate and an integral
element the jihad that threatens all of us: "Bangladeshi
infiltration with Pakistani ideas... trying to 'Pakistanize' the entire
region," he said adding that that the dominant culture for South Asian
Muslims has become more "Arabic," than South Asian.
In
1947 when the British left, they partitioned the Indian subcontinent
into Hindu and Muslim states. West Bengal went to Hindu India, and
East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became part of Pakistan. While Hindu
and Muslim majorities respectively, remain, exhaustive studies by
Pramanik and others hold out little hope that things will continue that
way. During the second half of the 20th century, the
Muslim proportion of West Bengal's population rose by 25 percent and its
Hindu population declined by nine, a process that has continued into
the 21st. At the same time, Bangladesh's Hindu
population dropped from almost a third to nine percent. The
process has not been pretty and has involved murder, gang rape,
abduction of women and children, forced conversion to Islam, and
legalized thievery of ancestral Hindu lands under Bangladesh's
anti-Hindu Vested Property Act. And now it is happening in India.
Between
1981 and 1991, Muslim population growth in West Bengal actually
exceeded its growth in Bangladesh. The South Asia Research Society
concluded that Hindus have been fleeing Islamist persecution in East
Bengal since the partition; but that since Bangladesh's emergence as an
independent nation in 1971, "there has been large scale voluntary
infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims...to West Bengal and other parts of
India" as well. The actual Muslim population growth exceeded
Indian government projections that were based on demographic factors
(fertility and mortality), internal migration, and the influx of Hindu
refugees; thus, there had to be another element driving the
change. Pramanik identifies it as "illegal immigration from across
the border." Islamist plans have been so detailed and
longstanding that since 1951 the Muslim growth rate exceeded that of
Hindus in each individual district of West Bengal.
Statistics might be the "smoking gun," but jihad's impact
is far more powerful in the testimony of individual non-Muslim
residents who are its victims. One elderly woman in the Howrah
district told us how Muslims are taking over her property piece by
piece. She even showed us a wall with a star and crescent on it
that local Muslims built to identify it as dar al Islam.
In another village, residents showed us the remains of a Hindu temple
that Muslims recently destroyed after urinating on its holy
objects. Most poignant was the testimony of a crestfallen mother
whose 22-year-old daughter was abducted weeks ago by local
Muslims. Abduction of Hindu women and girls in the name of Islam
has been common in Bangladesh for years and is a key element in jihad: eliminating
females of childbearing years from the gene pool and forcing them to
"produce" Muslim offspring instead. It is now happening in India,
according to victimized parents who told me about it in India's North
and Northeast.
Residents of Deganga, only 40 kilometers
from the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, lived through an anti-Hindu
pogrom last September. The pogrom started -- as these things are
wont to do these days -- with a fabricated land dispute in which Muslims
claimed a wooded area off the region's main road that Hindus own and on
which sits a Hindu shrine that is considered very sacred. As the
2010 Islamic observance of Iftar came to an end, a large group
of Muslims attempted to seize the land until local Hindus stopped
them. It was then that they started attacking Hindu households and
shops indiscriminately, forcing many to flee the area with little more
than the clothes on their backs.
I returned to
Deganga last month to find that while many homes and shops have been
rebuilt, a sense of security by Hindus in their ancestral land has
not. Most of the residents spoke about leaving the area; others
talked about being fearful of attack, their children unable to attend
school, and Hindu women being harassed whenever they go to the market or
other places in the area. Many of them showed us charred pieces
of their former residences; in other cases we were able to see signs of
it bleeding through a new coat of paint. Hindu women and girls
showed us where they hid during the attack to avoid being raped or
abducted and made concubines; a fate that likely has befallen the
missing 22-year old daughter of the mother above.
In every
single one of these cases, local authorities have refused to take
action. In fact, during the Deganga pogrom, they arrested the
community's wealthiest Hindu on the false charge of firing on the jihadis. In
the past, this official inaction has been purchased; but it is also a
product of the alliance between Islamists and Communists in India.
That alliance was announced publicly at a meeting in the south Indian
state of Kerala; and it has been policy for West Bengal's three-decade
old communist government. Wherever we spoke with these villagers,
Muslim neighbors would gather menacingly in an attempt to intimidate our
informants. In some cases, they attacked after we left -- again
with no action by the authorities.
In Meerut northeast of
New Delhi and far from Deganga, the population of this once
Hindu-dominated town is now split down the middle between Hindus and
Muslims; and the Hindus are living in fear. Just five days ago
before my arrival, a Hindu was burned to death and shortly before that a
community leader was targeted and killed. These actions are
becoming more common in this substantial-sized town with no police
re-action; and according to residents and activists, it is only a matter
of time before things explode.
Our State Department will tell you that there is no jihad in
India. They will hew the official line that the liberal Awami
League government in Bangladesh has put an end to anti-Hindu actions
there. A similarly weak government in New Delhi will parrot the
same platitudes. Yet, their false palliatives bring no
comfort to the scores of victims who have told us their stories; or the
many others now unable to do so.
They cannot
explain away major terrorist attacks in India's largest cities like
Mumbai, Pune, in New Delhi, and elsewhere. They cannot explain how
insurgents can regularly kidnap minor officials and receive their
ransom (usually release of prisoners, cash, and government forbearance
from counter terrorist action) every time they do. If the Obama
administration and its left-wing counterparts in India do not replace
their studied ignorance with effective action, we will be as "surprised"
over what becomes of India as we were with Iran, Egypt, and a host of
other nations.
Imagine what an Islamist India would mean for us.
