Balbir Punj
India’s self-styled secularists, who have sought to defend the ‘Love Jihad’ menace as an expression of women’s liberty, are possibly oblivious to reports from abroad on how European and American women are getting caught in the vortex of jihadi terror after converting to Islam. Some of these women have been shown in television clips as well. The Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, which tracks the rising threat of jihad to human civilisation, reports that some 60 British women have joined an all-female outfit in Syria which enforces Sharia’h laws on local women. It is a virtual all-women police force that seeks to ensure that other women behave strictly within the harsh and illiberal Islamic laws prescribed for women. Another research body, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, says that a prominent figure in such a jihadi women police force is 20-year-old Aqsa Mahamood who fled to Syria last November.
British and European newspapers have dug up a lot of details on what happens to these women who are brainwashed into joining the Jihadi outfits, in the battlefield. Since these women are usually between the age group of 18 and 30 years, they are easily wheedled, and realise the harsh truth only when they are among the Jihadis.
It has been found that many of these women become one of the the multiple wives that the Jihadi leaders are allowed to have, as per their religious laws. Once the women become pregnant, they are either sent back to their country of origin or confined to camps and end up n the hollow of a movement that has little concern for the female of the species except as a sex slave and production machine.
By the time many of these women discover the truth, it is too late to retrieve the ground. The entire European society has become concerned over the spread of this virus.
Reports that over 5,000 Western men are now part of the Sunni Jihadi outfit going by the name of the Islamic State, have alarmed Governments across Europe and America. The brutality of this movement has been brought home by the video clipping it has sent of another beheading of a captured Western journalist.
In the UK, security agencies have warned the David Cameron Government that Islamic preachers are radicalising Muslim masses through the mosque and the madarssa. The sizeable Muslim populations in European countries are being targeted by the Jihadi preachers even after several of them have been thrown out by the alarmed Governments.
It is almost a week since the Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahari, issued a call through his video to Muslims in many countries to overthrow their governments and establish an Islamist rule. The appeal specifies regions in India, such as Maharashtra, Ahmedabad, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, with Hyderabad as the capital of the Islamist rebellion. Every country mentioned in Zawahiri’s video message has immediately taken steps to insulate itself from this Islamist rash . The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has alerted the States mentioned in the video.
There must have been grounds for the Al Qaeda chief to declare Hyderabad as the hub of the Jihadi kingdom he wants to be established in India. For over a decade the city has been mentioned in Intelligence reports to the Government about jihadi recruits being herded into Hyderabad from different parts of the country, especially Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The effectiveness of the security agencies, however, was constrained by the Congress and Marxist-led Governments and the political parties behind them that ignore national interests in the drive to consolidate their communal agenda. The long-drawn judicial process in the case of a Pakistani terrorist out of the many in the Mumbai killings, who was caught alive, and his execution, convinced public opinion across the world how fair New Delhi’s treatment is.
But even that has not convinced our secularists. They continue to go to Azamgarh (the last time they did was just on the eve of the general election) as if they are on a pilgrimage where they cry over the shoulders of the families of those whose sons have joined the IM or other Jihadi outfits.
The Congress Government in the united Andhra Pradesh sanctioned special compensation for those who were accused in terrorist events and later released by the courts. The Andhra Pradesh High Court stopped this, asking the Government whether it has a policy to compensate those acquitted by the Courts of criminal charges for the years they spent as undertrials irrespective of their religion.
In Kerala, the entire security establishment was caught with its pants down when it was revealed that the IM had conducted a fortnight of training in Islamist radicalism and arms usage. The truth popped out when the exasperated police officers leaked out that they had in act the trail but were stopped in the track by the then Marxist-led Government.
Top IM operative T Naseer was able to ‘escape’ from police custody as he was being taken from his home to the police station. There were a hundred policemen in the ring. When the public began to question this unusual weakness of the Kerala Police, it came out that the political establishment had something to do with the escape.
It was a Bangladeshi Government sympathetic to India that got wind of this IM leader and handed him over to our security. It was again when a Kerala police officer’s daughter was the victim of ‘love jihad’ operations that the extent of the nefarious conspiracy came out.
Some consciously, others more on the ‘liberal’ ground, are seeking to divert public attention to the serious implications of the theological attractions the Islamists are spreading not just in India but in almost every country in the world. Governments across the globe have begun to study the implications of the IS setting up the Islamic caliphate and the second coming of Zawahari, and initiate steps to contain their combined or seashore rim lands – where the Muslim population is substantial.
US President Barack Obama, in his address after the second beheading of an American journalist, promised measured retaliation. He said the US would “degrade and destroy” the IS. But saying is not enough. Global powers must combine and issue a plan to destroy this virus before it becomes a global pandemic.
From the mostly silent response of the past, civil society must declare globally that this menace of Islamists would have to be eliminated lock, stock and barrel. The best way the leaders of the world Muslim community could help is by pledging their participation in this cleansing of the bug from the system.