O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
Turbulence in Iraq: A boost to political Islam
Islam is beset by its inter-sect rivalry for space which has seen violent overtones for many centuries. Until this rivalry is put to rest with victory, dominance or defeat of one or the other, there is no likelihood of evolution towards modernism
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)
TO understand just what is happening in northern Iraq one first needs to turn to a map because without that the deeper dynamics of the emerging situation in the region will not be easily understood. The next thing is to remind oneself of a few facts. First, this is not some warlord effort to garner territory or a simple standoff between sects. It is the manifestation of ambitions of ‘political Islam’ playing out.

Touchstones
Focus on all things English, but at what cost?
Unless one nurtures the roots, a tree will keel over in the first storm. The trees that give shade and succour have very deep roots. Ornamental trees may look good but offer neither shade nor fruit
Ira Pande
For some years now, I have been mulling over chronicling the decades of the 50s and 60s as a book project. The fact that I grew up in those years from a child to a young woman may have something to do with it because as you grow older, those magical years seem the best.

GROUND ZERO
Prakash Javadekar, please be Mr Green
Instead of operating like a stealth bomber to blast out environmental roadblocks, Javadekar should work towards reforming the environmental clearance mechanism in a transparent consultative process
Raj Chengappa
As a BJP national spokesperson, Prakash Javadekar was a familiar face on prime time television as a trenchant critic of the UPA government — a task he immensely enjoyed. Now that he wears the twin hats of Union Minister of State for Information and Environment (both with independent charge), Javadekar will soon find that the boot is on his opponent’s foot and prepare himself for the expected kicks.

Guest Column
Turbulence in Iraq: A boost to political Islam
Islam is beset by its inter-sect rivalry for space which has seen violent overtones for many centuries. Until this rivalry is put to rest with victory, dominance or defeat of one or the other, there is no likelihood of evolution towards modernism
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)

TO understand just what is happening in northern Iraq one first needs to turn to a map because without that the deeper dynamics of the emerging situation in the region will not be easily understood. The next thing is to remind oneself of a few facts. First, this is not some warlord effort to garner territory or a simple standoff between sects. It is the manifestation of ambitions of ‘political Islam’ playing out.

Second, in the wake of 9/11 and the entry of the US Forces into Af-Pak and Iraq, the American strategic establishment spoke of the Long War with political Islam for which the American public would have to be prepared. War weariness over 11-12 years placed this notion on the back burner and all reference to Long War was forgotten within the realm of justification for withdrawal. This appears to be the Long War returning to remind the world that there is much yet to happen within the faith of Islam, the youngest of the triad of Abrahamic faiths. Analysts point towards the churning within Islam before the process of reformation, a phenomenon which occurs in most major faiths as civilisational changes and modernism find their way into the evolutionary process.

Militants move through the Iraq-Syria border. AP file photo

Third, Islam is also beset by its inter-sect rivalry for space which has seen violent overtones for many centuries. Until this rivalry is put to rest with victory, dominance or defeat of one or the other, there is no likelihood of evolution towards modernism.

What we are witnessing in the Iraq-Syria theatre is a violent struggle within Islam. This was expected after the withdrawal of US troops. The portends were evident four months ago when Ramadi and Fallujah erupted with Al Qaida presence. The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), as it is also known, is an off shoot of Al Qaida. It was lurking in the shadows awaiting opportunities. Building a strength of 10,000 (including mercenaries) in a transnational environment is not easy.

Obviously the ISIS/ISIL has external and transnational backing. To sustain such an army you need money and weapons. This is a manifestation of the Syria, Lebanon and Iraq wars merging into one, much like the Af-Pak some years ago.

There are major complexities within this situation. The US presence in Iraq dismantled the ruling Sunni dispensation and restored Shia authority as per demographics, even as it was opposed to Iran’s inevitable gains and Saudi Arabia’s inevitable loss of influence. The Saudis were never too happy about this or about the reluctance of the US to involve itself in efforts towards regime change in Syria, which in many ways strengthened the Alawite-Shia survivability in the greater Syrian conflict.

The win-win situation for the Iran- Hezbollah-Allawite -Iraq (all Shia/quasi Shia) axis had seen the Shia hold strengthening from western Afghanistan to the eastern Mediterranean. The upsurge in Mosul and Tikrit by the radical Sunni forces now seems to threaten that dominance. The US trained Iraqi Army has wilted and this may see Iraq return to civil war; which means the spread of turbulence to areas right up to southern Iraq.

The complexity brought on by the presence of multiple players with different shades of ideological moorings is resulting in selective support from the established states such as the UAE, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US itself. However, the emergence of the ISIS/ISIL as a militarily stronger element and it carrying the stamp of Al Qaeda linkages is likely to lead to a major rethink regarding this support. This will have a profound effect on the situation in Syria and Iraq itself.

How is all this likely to effect the security environment of the crucial West Asian region? First, it increases the uncertainty in Syria where Bashar Assad’s recent electoral victory had given him a lease of life. The ISIS/ISIL is opposed to various Saudi backed Sunni groups in Syria. Second, the turbulence in northern Iraq has weakened the structure left behind by the US and the Iraqi Army, also trained by the US, is unlikely to remain homogenous in the face of determined onslaughts by the Sunni dominated forces. Third, the energy belt is under increasing threat of greater violence; prices have already risen. Fourth, the Hezbollah-Iran dominance has received a setback. How actively Iran will involve itself in regaining advantage will decide how much more violence may happen. Whichever way this goes it will have a deciding effect on the future of political Islam in West Asia.

Notwithstanding the fact that movements linked with political Islam have been active in faraway Nigeria (Boko Haram), Somalia (Al Shabab), the Sinai and Yemen, it is now evident that there are really two major areas where political Islam is fighting hard for dominance. These are the Syria-Iraq-Lebanon region and internally within Pakistan. There may or may not be direct linkages between the two emerging situations but the common thread appears to be the resurgence of Salafi groups on either flank of Iran. It is difficult to predict the response of Iran when its ideology is under threat.

The last important issue is the fact that all this is happening six months from the date of final drawdown of the ISAF in Afghanistan. Is this a preparation for the re-entry of Al Qaida into Af-Pak?

The US strategic think tanks need to work overtime to ascertain just what is happening. Perhaps, it is the much forgotten Long War returning to haunt the world all over again.

(The writer is a former Commander of the Srinagar-based 15 Corps, a Senior Fellow at the Delhi Policy Group and Visiting Fellow with the Vivekanand International Foundation)

Touchstones
Focus on all things English, but at what cost?
Unless one nurtures the roots, a tree will keel over in the first storm. The trees that give shade and succour have very deep roots. Ornamental trees may look good but offer neither shade nor fruit
Ira Pande

For some years now, I have been mulling over chronicling the decades of the 50s and 60s as a book project. The fact that I grew up in those years from a child to a young woman may have something to do with it because as you grow older, those magical years seem the best. But more importantly, these decades encapsulate the most interesting epochs of our early history as an independent nation and have resulted in equally interesting phenomena.

India’s most happening places were then not its great megapolises but its small towns. These towns had such well-defined personalities that they branded them forever on those who lived there. Each town had its share of government officials or the ‘gentry’ as it was called. So apart from the Collector sa’ab, Civil Surgeon sa’ab, SP sa’ab and Judge sa’ab, these included lawyers, teachers and writers among other more eccentric characters. The town derived its fund of tales and cultural mythology from their presence. The local neta was not half as important as these worthies. Above all, close ties between families did not condemn Hindus and Muslims to live in ghettos in sullen suspicion of each other. I still remember the joy with which we looked forward to some begum sahib sending us delicious kababs and korma on Bakr-Eid and I am sure their kids savoured our Holi gujiyas with equal delight. Secularism was practised then not merely preached.

We must not alienate what is ours.

We may have studied in the local English-medium missionary schools but our lives at home were Hindi medium. We spoke in our own tongues and did not feel the need to apologise if our relatives spoke no English. Quite apart from making our vocabularies richer and more expressive, this linguistic variety also gave us access to lives that were so different from ours. We traversed the territory between English, Hindi, Kumaoni and Awadhi taking liberally from each tongue the sweetness and grammar of its world view. Later, when my husband and I moved from one small Punjabi town to another — Malerkotla, Samrala, Ludhiana and Hoshiarpur — we added the robustness of Punjabi to our UP languages.

I have written earlier about this but reducing one’s tongue to just English (as now seems the trend among young parents) is a dreadful mistake. Look what happened to the Baba-log of the previous government if you doubt this theory. Their complete lack of understanding of what small towns and rural India needed was their undoing. If they now ruefully acknowledge that they were unable to communicate their achievements to ‘the people’, one wants to ask who, according to them, are the people they wish to address? People like them in our metros or a ‘Ms Kalawati’ produced by some fawning party worker for the prince to be shown as the poorest of the poor? Before I am accused of being a jingoistic supporter of Hindi, let me assure readers that it is the homogenisation of this polyglot nation that I actually bemoan. From TV panel discussions to schoolchildren, every one is considered worthy of hearing only if they think and speak in English. Vernacular newspapers, once the vehicle of disseminating new ideas, have become the carriers of sleaze and sensational political gossip. Mahatma Gandhi, Lokmanya Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malviya — all of them edited vernacular papers that were read by an eager public. Today, rare is the house that subscribes to one, unless it is meant for the driver or maid. In my childhood, the so-called illiterate vegetable vendor could calculate faster than a computer because he knew his tables by heart (even fractions of ‘addhas’ and ‘dhaias). This was because he had rocked and learnt them by heart as a village boy attending the local pathshala. I doubt if you can catch anyone today who is willing to send a child to the local municipal school.

What happened to change all this, you may well ask. It was the centralisation of all political and cultural power in the 70s. Suddenly, no one wanted to live in a small town any more. The affluent sent their children abroad and many never came back, the less well-off people migrated to the big towns in search of livelihood and never came back either. We abandoned our towns and depleted them of any intellectual stimulation. The very people who now talk romantically of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb and the lost noble savage were the ones whose trade unionism destroyed the mills and lively life of the ‘chawls’ and their worship of the ‘high intellectual’ left the town eccentric alone and bitter in a crumbling home. They took away the dignity of the poor and the confidence of the mediocre by sneering at their accents and clothes. No wonder when the small town hit back, it wiped out the Left parties and their supporters.

The lesson I have learnt is that unless one nurtures its roots, a tree will keel over in the first storm. And that the trees that give shade and succour have very deep roots. Ornamental trees may look good for a while but offer neither shade nor fruit.