Hindutva Terrorism in India

Hindutva Terrorism in India
By Sudha Ramachandran
July 07, 2017

In the name of protecting cows, members of extremist outfits affiliated to India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are attacking Muslims.

On June 29, a mob beat up and killed Asgar Ansari, a 45-year-old Muslim trader in the eastern state of Jharkhand, for allegedly carrying beef in his car. Three days earlier, a Muslim dairy owner, Usman Ansari, was beaten up and his house set on fire; a cow carcass was reportedly found near his house.
The two incidents are the latest in a string of attacks carried out by activists belonging to outfits like the Bharatiya Gau Raksha Dal (BGRD) and its regional units as well as organizations like the Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) that are part of the Sangh Parivar, a family of Hindu right-wing organizations of which the BJP is a part.

The attacks, which are illegal and being described as cow vigilantism, have surged in recent years.
According to an analysis by IndiaSpend, a public interest journalism website, 63 incidents of “violence centered on bovine issues” were reported between 2010 and 2017; 97 percent of these occurred after the BJP came to power in May 2014. Twenty-five of these incidents were reported in 2016 alone, the most so far in a single year.

However, 2017 seems poised to break this record as around 20 cow vigilante attacks have been reported in the first six months this year, with the violence showing no signs of abating.

Targeting Muslims

The cow vigilantes claim they are “gau rakshaks” (protectors of cows). According to the BGRD’s website, caring for abandoned cattle and orphaned calves by providing them food, medical care, and shelter is the organization’s main objective.

In addition, “we focus on preventing cow slaughter too and hence act to shut down the beef trade,” Bobby Singh, a BGRD activist from Haryana, told The Diplomat.

However, protecting cows is not a priority of the cow vigilantes, critics point out, drawing attention to the fact that the groups do little work to prevent ill-treatment of cows roaming India’s streets, for instance. Rather, their main activity appears to be tracking and trapping people transporting cattle and unleashing horrific violence on them.

Many Hindus consider the cow to be sacred, oppose cow slaughter, and do not eat beef. However, Muslims and Christians as well as a section of Hindus are beef-eaters. The beef business in India is dominated by Muslims, and those who skin cows and work with leather are largely Muslims and Dalits.

The beef issue thus comes in handy to target Muslims.

Although Dalits have been targeted occasionally by the cow vigilantes, Muslims have borne the brunt of their attacks. Of the 28 people killed in such attacks so far, 86 percent were Muslim.

The violence, then, seems designed to terrorize Muslims, damaging their livelihood and way of life. The ultimate objective of the cow vigilantism is achieving the goal of the Sangh Parivar: homogenizing pluralistic India and making it a Hindu state.

The Cow as a Nationalist Symbol

It was in the late 19th century that the cow emerged as an important rallying point for mass political mobilization in India. Hindu nationalists sought to unite Hindus against British colonial rule and subsequently, against Muslims amidst the growing Hindu-Muslim communalism in the early 20th century.

The cow has since become a potent symbol of Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist ideology espoused by the Sangh Parivar. Hindutva proponents view India as a Hindu nation, define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values, and seek to establish the hegemony of Hindus and the Hindu way of life.

In recent years, the Sangh Parivar has accelerated efforts to promote its Hindutva agenda and is pushing the cow slaughter issue to the political center-stage. “Cow protection,” the imposition of upper-caste Hindu food habits on Muslims and others, calls for a beef ban. The current wave of cow vigilantism must be seen in this context.

BGRD at the Helm

At the forefront of hundreds of cow vigilante outfits active across India is the BGRD, “a non-profit, tax-exempt organization” that was set up in 2012 and registered as a company by the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Although there are no organizational links between the BGRD and the Sangh Parivar, many activists are members of Parivar constituencies such as the VHP and the Bajrang Dal or in close touch with them.

They are fierce supporters of Hindutva. According to Pawan Pandit, the BGRD’s chairman, India is divided in two, one part that includes “the so-called kattar [Hindi for radical] Hindutva people” like himself and the other comprising people who don’t share this ideology.

The BGRD takes pride in its violent methods. Videos and photographs of activists flaunting automatic weapons and swords and beating people with iron rods are available online. Facebook pages of BGRD leaders and activists show them armed with guns, a brazen acknowledgement of their violent tactics.

Police and politicians have often described the BGRD’s attacks as the outcome of mob fury, as though these are spontaneous incidents. However, the attacks are pre-planned and activists even undergo training in how to inflict injuries.

Indian analysts have so far avoided categorizing these attacks as acts of terror.

While acknowledging that the BGRD’s violent attacks are “extreme and deeply insidious” with “potential to cause great harm to India’s stability,” terrorism analyst and executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, Ajai Sahni, stops short of categorizing them as terrorism, arguing that they “fall into a pattern of communal mobilization and vigilantism.”
Terrorist violence is “indiscriminate,” Sahni told The Diplomat, pointing out that unlike the BGRD activists, terrorists “do not seek out specific individuals purportedly guilty of particular deemed offenses but put bombs in public places or shoot indiscriminately, to kill just about anybody to draw attention to their political agenda, and to intimidate authorities into compliance.”

However, the violent attacks by BGRD and other cow vigilantes are similar to terror attacks in several ways. Both are pre-meditated, politically motivated, and carried out by non-state actors against unarmed civilians. And their target is not so much the immediate victim as it is the larger community.
Cow vigilantism is therefore terroristic in nature. This is Hindutva terrorism.

Hindutva Terror

Hindutva terrorism is not new to India. Hindutva activists have carried out several massacres of Muslims, as in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002, and set off bombs in neighborhoods and towns that are predominantly Muslim, even in their places of worship.
Yet these attacks have not been described as acts of terrorism. They are part of a world-wide trend wherein majoritarian terror against minorities is not termed terrorism and consequently not dealt with sternly by the state.

Indeed, given the links between cow vigilantes and the ruling BJP, rarely has action been taken against the perpetrators of violence, especially in BJP-ruled states. Often, it is the victims of the vigilantes who are punished.

In BJP-ruled states, existing laws banning cow slaughter have been amended to expand the scope of such bans and to increase punishments for violation. Gujarat, for instance, amended its animal protection law this year to make cow slaughter punishable with life imprisonment. Other BJP chief ministers have endorsed hanging those who slaughter cows and have even exhorted vigilantes to do more and not stop at sloganeering. Little action is being taken to rein in the vigilantes or punish them. Emboldened by such state support, violence targeting Muslims is being unleashed in the name of protecting the cow.

India’s reluctance to take stern action against the BGRD’s unleashing of violence against Muslims will deepen communal divisions in the country. Its failure to bring to justice those who orchestrated and unleashed horrific violence on Muslims in the Bombay and Gujarat “riots” of 1992 and 2002, respectively cost it dearly. These incidents prompted hundreds of Muslim youths to take up arms against the Indian state.

If the ongoing violence against Muslims in the name of protecting the cow persists and goes unpunished, another generation of angry and alienated Muslim youth will turn to militancy and terrorism again.

Dr. Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist and researcher based in Bangalore, India. She writes on South Asian political and security issues.

UAE Hacked Qatari Web sites and publish her own report against Qatara's emir

National Security

UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites, sparking regional upheaval, according to U.S. intelligence officials

U.S. officials say the United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government sites that occurred shortly before the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt broke ties with Qatar. 

(The Washington Post)

By Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima 
July 16   
 
The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done. The false reports said that the emir, among other things, had called Iran an “Islamic power” and praised Hamas.

The hacks and posting took place on May 24, shortly after President Trump completed a lengthy counterterrorism meeting with Persian Gulf leaders in neighboring Saudi Arabia and declared them unified.

Citing the emir’s reported comments, the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt immediately banned all Qatari media. They then broke relations with Qatar and declared a trade and diplomatic boycott, sending the region into a political and diplomatic tailspin that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned could undermine U.S. counterterrorism efforts against the Islamic State.

In a statement released in Washington by its ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE said the Post article was “false.”

“The UAE had no role whatsoever in the alleged hacking described in the article,” the statement said. “What is true is Qatar’s behavior. Funding, supporting, and enabling extremists from the Taliban to Hamas and Qadafi. Inciting violence, encouraging radicalization, and undermining the stability of its neighbors.”

The revelations come as emails purportedly hacked from Otaiba’s private account have circulated to journalists over the past several months. That hack has been claimed by an apparently pro-Qatari organization calling itself GlobalLeaks. Many of the emails highlight the UAE’s determination over the years to rally Washington thinkers and policymakers to its side on the issues at the center of its dispute with Qatar.

All of the Persian Gulf nations are members of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. More than 10,000 U.S. troops are based at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base, the U.S. Central Command’s regional headquarters, and Bahrain is the home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. All are purchasers of U.S. defense equipment and tied to U.S. foreign policy priorities in numerous ways.

The conflict has also exposed sharp differences between Trump — who has clearly taken the Saudi and UAE side in a series of tweets and statements — and Tillerson, who has urged compromise and spent most of last week in shuttle diplomacy among the regional capitals that has been unsuccessful so far.

“We don’t expect any near-term resolution,” Tillerson aide R.C. Hammond said Saturday. He said the secretary had left behind proposals with the “Saudi bloc” and with Qatar including “a common set of principles that all countries can agree to so that we start from . . . a common place.”

Qatar has repeatedly charged that its sites were hacked, but it has not released the results of its investigation. Intelligence officials said their working theory since the Qatar hacks has been that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt or some combination of those countries were involved. It remains unclear whether the others also participated in the plan.

U.S. intelligence and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment, as did the CIA. The FBI, which Qatar has said was helping in its investigation, also declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington responded by drawing attention to a statement by that government’s attorney general, Ali Bin Fetais al-Marri, who said late last month that “Qatar has evidence that certain iPhones originating from countries laying siege to Qatar were used in the hack.”

Hammond said he did not know of the newly analyzed U.S. intelligence on the UAE or whether Tillerson was aware of it.

The hacking incident reopened a bitter feud among the gulf monarchies that has simmered for years. It last erupted in 2013, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain accused Qatar of providing safe haven for their political dissidents and supporting the pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood; funding terrorists, including U.S.-designated terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah; and using its state-funded media outlets to destabilize its neighbors.

Qatar — an energy-rich country ruled by its own unelected monarchy — saw the Saudi-led accusations as an attempt by neighboring autocrats to stifle its more liberal tendencies. Separately, the United States warned Qatar to keep a tighter rein on wealthy individuals there who surreptitiously funded Islamist terror groups — a charge that Washington has also made in the past against the Saudis and other gulf countries. While Qatar promised some steps in response to the charges in a 2014 agreement with the others, it took little action.

During his two-day visit to ­Riyadh, Trump met with the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar — and held individual closed-door meetings with several GCC leaders, including the Qatar emir. The day before his departure on the morning of May 22, Trump delivered a speech, focused on the need for religious tolerance and unity against terrorism, to more than 50 Muslim leaders gathered from around the world for the occasion.

But he devoted most of his attention to Saudi King Salman, praising as a wise leader the man who controls his country’s vast oil reserves. In what the administration hailed as a high point of the visit, the Saudis agreed to purchase $110 billion in U.S. arms and signed letters of intent to invest hundreds of billions in deals with U.S. companies.

He had told the Saudis in advance, Trump said in an interview Wednesday with the Christian Broadcasting Network, that the agreements and purchases were a prerequisite for his presence. “I said, you have to do that, otherwise I’m not going,” Trump recounted.

The statements attributed to the emir first appeared on the Qatar News Agency’s website early on the morning of May 24, in a report on his appearance at a military ceremony, as Trump was wrapping up the next stop on his nine-day overseas trip, in Israel. According to the Qatari government, alerts were sent out within 45 minutes saying the information was false.

Later that morning, the same false information appeared on a ticker at the bottom of a video of the emir’s appearance that was posted on Qatar News Agency’s YouTube channel. Similar material appeared on government Twitter feeds.

The reports were repeatedly broadcast on Saudi Arabian government outlets, continuing even after the Qatari alert said it was false. The UAE shut down all broadcasts of Qatari media inside its borders, including the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera satellite network, the most watched in the Arab world.

The first week in June, the ­Saudi-led countries severed relations, ordered all Qatari nationals inside their countries to leave, and closed their borders to all land, air and sea traffic with Qatar, a peninsular nation in the Persian Gulf whose only land connection is with Saudi Arabia.

In addition to charges of supporting terrorism and promoting instability inside their countries, they accused Qatar of being too close to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main rival for regional power and, according to the United States, the world’s foremost supporter of global terrorism. Iran conducts robust trade with most of the gulf, including the UAE, and shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Qatar.

The day after the boycott was announced, Trump indirectly took credit for it. “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with King and 50 countries already paying off,” he tweeted. “They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar.”

At the same time, Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called for negotiations and a quick resolution of the dispute. When the Saudi-led group released a list of 13 “non-negotiable” demands for Qatar — including shutting down Al Jazeera and expelling a number of people deemed terrorists — the State Department suggested that they were unreasonable and that the terrorism funding issue was a smokescreen for long-standing regional grievances that should be resolved through mediation and negotiation.

Qatar rejected the demands. Tillerson appeared to agree that they were draconian. But when he called for the boycott to be eased, saying it was causing both security and humanitarian hardship, Trump said the measure was harsh “but necessary.”

The one concrete result of Tillerson’s stops in the region last week was a new bilateral agreement signed with Qatar on stopping terrorism financing, the only one of the gulf countries that had responded to an invitation to do so, Hammond said.

Speaking to reporters on his plane flying back to Washington on Friday, Tillerson said the trip was useful “first to listen and get a sense of how serious the situation is, how emotional some of these issues are.” He said that he had left proposals with both sides that suggested “some ways that we might move this forward.”

All of the countries involved, Tillerson said, are “really important to us from a national security standpoint. . . . We need this part of the world to be stable, and this particular conflict between these parties is obviously not helpful.”

Asked about Trump’s tweets and other comments, he noted that being secretary of state “is a lot different than being CEO of Exxon,” his previous job, “because I was the ultimate decision-maker.” He knew what to expect from long-standing colleagues, he said, and decision-making was disciplined and “highly structured.”

“Those are not the characteristics of the United States government. And I don’t say that as a criticism, it’s just an observation of fact,” Tillerson said. While neither he nor the president came from the political world, he said, his old job put him in contact with the rest of the world and “that engagement . . . is actually very easy for me.”

For his part, Trump agreed in the Christian Broadcasting Network interview that he and Tillerson “had a little bit of a difference, only in terms of tone” over the gulf conflict.

Qatar, Trump said, “is now a little bit on the outs, but I think they’re being brought back in.” Asked about the U.S. military base in Qatar, Trump said he was not concerned.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “Look, if we ever have to leave” the base, “we would have 10 countries willing to build us another one, believe me. And they’ll pay for it.”

Kareem Fahim in Istanbul and  Carol Morello in Washington contributed to this report.
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