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The Hindu communalist by the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims in Gujarat has betrayed the very faith of which he claims to be a devotee. He has disowned Gandhi and rejected his legacy of non violence. Moreover, he has justified the bestial killings and looting as a measure of revenge for the gruesome torching of the kar sewaks in the ill-fated Sabarmati Express.

The Ghanchis who did it were illiterate, uncivilised brutes, who were Muslims in name but absolutely ignorant of what Islam stands for. They must pay for their crimes against the helpless, innocent women and children and, according to the Quran, in their life hereafter they will burn in hell forever. But for the madness of those few, why were the innocent Muslims in different parts of Gujarat taken out of their homes and slaughtered mercilessly; their businesses, homes and properties looted by Hindu criminals? In what way were they responsible for what happened in Godhra?

It is happening all the time these days. Some Muslims misbehave with some Hindus and the rest of the Muslims have to bear the brunt of the angry Hindus elsewhere. It is thus time for Indian Muslims as a whole to think seriously as to what they should do with those Muslims whose crimes bring about a carnage of such horrendous magnitude on the rest of them. Those who know nothing of Islam are bringing disaster after disaster on the real followers of the religion. The sins of some lunatics in the community are being visited upon the whole people who are completely innocent of such terrible brutalities. This is the worst kind of travesty of justice that Muslims are being made to suffer in India.

Instead of confronting the criminal Muslims and saving the rest of the community from the consequences of their lunacy, there are some Muslim fanatics who are working up the spirit of retaliation and generating further ill-will against Hindus. This will cause more alienation between the two communities. The Hindus too are, no less, guilty of fostering and furthering it. Some of them have outdone the worst of Muslim criminals. But while they can get away with it, Muslims in India become the ultimate sufferers. They must, therefore, find a way out to safeguard themselves against the possibility of a calamity such as the one Muslims in Gujarat have suffered. people have written enough about the part Jinnah played in bringing about the division of the country which has ruined Indian Muslims in every respect. His propagation of the pernicious two-nation theory erected such barriers of hate between Hindus and Muslims that it gave a fatal blow to Mahatma Gandhi’s mission of Hindu-Muslim unity. Abul Kalam Azad cried himself hoarse about how this would strike the death-knell for Indian Muslims. But nobody heeded him.

After Partition, most of those who took over the leadership of Indian Muslims continued the policy of confrontation against Hindus. They created one crisis after another on issues which had little relevance to the day-to-day existence of Indian Muslims. The result of their aggressive utterances and senseless activities hardly brought any relief to Indian Muslims. On the contrary, their repeated agitations brought in their wake Hindu backlash, causing more misery to Muslims everywhere. More than a decade ago, some of them mounted a countrywide protest against the Supreme Court judgment in the Shah Bano case. They forced the then government of Rajiv Gandhi to amend the Constitution and enact a law to give better maintenance to divorced Muslim women. Instead, it encouraged more divorces and threw thousands of young Muslim women on the streets. Worse still, it provoked communal Hindus to organise the Ramjanmabhoomi movement to reassert their supremacy in their motherland.

Of late, the so-called jehadis have emerged, who in the name of Islam are murdering innocent Hindus day after day, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. Backed by Pakistan, their murderous adventures are adding constantly to Hindu hatred against Muslims. In last week’s Outlook, Dilip D’Souza mentions his conversation with a young Hindu student in Sabarmati Ashram. He writes, the young man told him: ``‘Eighty per cent of Muslims are terrorists,`` his lower lip quivering in rage. ``They have attacked us here for 55 years.``’ He went on and on, avers D’Souza.

That is the mindset of many Hindus who are becoming increasingly hostile to Muslims. Some openly talk of enacting a Bosnia here. There are others who quietly propagate that unless Hindus get rid of Muslims, India will never prosper. As a result, a number of Hindus are beginning to look upon Muslims as undesirable Indians. Among the elite and those from the middle-class as well, many Hindus talk of keeping away from Muslims. They have become resentful and even averse to them. Partnerships or collaborations with Muslims in business enterprises are being withdrawn. There is a threat of boycott all around. Too much distrust is growing against the Muslims.

Isn’t this in complete contrast to what Swami Vivekananda has said: ``Our watchword, then, should be acceptance and not exclusion. Not only toleration, for so-called toleration is often blasphemy, and I do not believe in it. I believe in acceptance. Why should I tolerate? Toleration means that I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live. Is it not blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live? I accept all religions that were in the past and worship with them all.``

A number of Muslims also persist in their attitude of segregation from Hindus. They discourage social contact with them. They wrongly believe that their religion prohibits them to trust or collaborate with them. They distort Quranic injunctions and misrepresent the prophetic traditions. There is no desire on their part to develop a meaningful relationship with Hindus. Hence the gulf between the two communities is widening. For almost a decade, Muslims have been fighting for Babri masjid. But strangely, they seem unconcerned that hundreds of mosques meanwhile have been destroyed in Gujarat and some parts of Maharashtra like Malegaon. Why is this onslaught taking place on their sacred places?

Muslims have to go into the causes and strive to bring about a more congenial atmosphere. Those, who are playing with fire in the name of protecting Islam, must give serious thought to the fact that confrontationist bravado is now proving utterly counterproductive. Muslims are becoming victims of this hate and counter-hate phenomenon, which is also harming the larger interests of the country. Both sides must sit together with leaders who believe in collaboration and harmony. They must make an earnest effort to break once and for all, the walls of hostility so that more bloodshed can be avoided and every Indian is assured of a stable and secure environment which will bring prosperity to all. They must shed their in-built prejudices which breed antagonism and resolve to stop this terrible alienation between the two religious groups, which, even the RSS admits, consists of ‘blood brothers’. A majority of Muslims are supporters of the international fight against mindless terrorism, but have also opposed the US-backed military campaign in Afghanistan which killed hundreds of innocents and have been warning of global instability if the United States attacks Iraq. According to them, the issues such as Israel`s occupation of Palestinian territory and Western sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Libya and Sudan has forced some Muslims to `retaliate` ... through acts of terror, hitting out blindly at the innocents as well as the guilty.

Typically, the solution prevalent these days is to physically fight against the enemy, the Islamic civilization, but unfortunately, the fact remains that anything short of total genocide, the terrorists cannot be militarily defeated.

There is practically no effort to win the hearts and minds of the Muslims, In fact, everything is being done to alienate them further, to anger and frustrate them, and to ensure there will be a constant and probably increasing supply of recruits to terrorism. ... And so, there will be no end to Muslim terrorism.

Allah’s message to his creatures is clear, unequivocal. It has been put in a beautiful couplet by Maulana Rumi, the greatest Sufi that Islam produced:

Too baraaye wasl kardan aamadi

Na baraaya fasl kardan aamadi

(You’ve been sent to unite people...You’ve not been sent to divide people.)

Foreign Affairs

July/August 2002

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020701fareviewessay8530/radha-kumar/india-s-house-divided-understanding-communal-violence.html

SUMMARY

Why are some parts of India -- such as the recently riot-stricken state of Gujarat -- plagued by communal violence while other parts are not? Ashutosh Varshney`s new book finds an answer in civil society.

India`s House Divided: Understanding Communal Violence

by Radha Kumar

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002

Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. By Ashutosh Varshney. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, 384 pp. $45.00.

Radha Kumar is Senior Fellow in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

India once stood tall in the annals of postcolonial nations. Beset by deep poverty, great inequality, and a vast population, the country still managed to avoid the dictatorships that befell so many of its neighbors. India`s democracy, now encompassing a billion people, may have been maddeningly slow to reform, but at least it was resilient. Governments rose and fell, new participants swelled the ranks of the political elite, and the middle class kept expanding. Although the country`s many religious, linguistic, and caste groups frequently squabbled -- and sometimes exploded into violence -- they also coexisted.

Whereas other multiethnic countries underwent violent breakups leading to ethnically homogeneous states, India appeared to have pulled off that unlikely feat: maintaining a pluralist administration under a secular government. The country`s rulers proved surprisingly responsive to diverse ethnic and minority claims when compared to other developing nations, and even some developed ones. In its first 15 years of independence alone, India created 11 new states based on linguistic and cultural identity and also implemented a broad system of affirmative action to redress traditional discrimination. This record, combined with booming economic growth in the 1990s, led many in the international community -- and indeed, many Indians themselves -- to view the country as a force for stability in a volatile region.

Then came the Hindu-Muslim riots of this spring in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat, six weeks of violence that left more than a thousand people dead and a hundred thousand in makeshift shelters. The riots began when a Muslim mob torched a trainload of sloganeering Hindu nationalists, killing 59 of them. A wave of retaliatory rioting rolled over Gujarat; the overwhelming majority of the riots` victims were Muslim. Unlike earlier riots that ended as abruptly as they began, the bloodletting in Gujarat has not ceased. Although reduced in intensity, violence continues to flare up, primarily in the underpoliced Muslim areas of Gujarat`s major cities, where there are daily instances of murder, looting, and arson.

The central and state governments, both run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have been disturbingly slow to curb Hindu retaliation. While India`s parliament debated whether the Gujarat government should be dismissed for failing to restore the rule of law, even more disturbing reports emerged that some of the Hindu mob leaders were activist members of the ruling party or its allies in the wider ``family`` of Hindu nationalist organizations. Is India beginning to suffer the same kind of communal convulsion that has ravaged so many multiethnic countries in recent years?

KEEPING SOCIETY CIVIL

That would be the wrong conclusion to draw, says University of Michigan political scientist Ashutosh Varshney in Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. In his view, there are two reasons why India is unlikely to succumb to the maelstrom that broke up countries such as Yugoslavia. First, Hindu-Muslim conflict is highly localized, and so any one wave of violence has limited potential to spread across the country. And second, India`s complex polity is made up of a range of constituencies with cross-cutting interests in which linguistic or caste affinities, for example, often supersede religious loyalty. Hindu nationalism is therefore unlikely to become the kind of cohesive murderous force that Serb nationalism turned into. Moreover, argues Varshney, the need to cater to these cross-cutting interests forces all political parties to the secular center once in government -- even when that government is, as at present, formed by Hindu nationalists.

Varshney`s first argument is more convincing than his second. Using data for a 45-year period from 1950 to 1995 -- that is, covering most of independent India`s history -- he shows that the

vast majority of communal riots have been concentrated in 4 of India`s 28 states, located in the northern, western, and eastern parts of the country. All four have large Muslim minorities. But so do several of the southern Indian states, yet southern India has remained largely calm over the past 50 years -- even while the country`s northern and western areas have been periodically ravaged by Hindu-Muslim violence.

By itself, this is not a surprising finding. It is fairly well known that Hindu-Muslim relations in northern and southern India are poles apart. The real surprise of Varshney`s data lies in their revelations of the subregional nature of Hindu-Muslim violence. Even within the four states in which ethnic conflict has been concentrated, most of the riots have been restricted to a handful of cities. In fact, 70 percent of Hindu-Muslim violence takes place in only 30 out of India`s more than 400 cities. More startling still, just 8 cities are responsible for almost half of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots.

In other words, ancient hatreds have little to do with ethnic conflict in India. Although India is a predominantly agricultural society, violence between Hindus and Muslims is an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. During the 45-year period that Varshney`s data cover, rural violence accounted for just over three percent of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots. India`s traditional heartland, its villages, has been largely unscathed by the communal killings that have swept its cities.

If ethnic conflict is limited chiefly to a handful of Indian cities, then why do we fear its destructive potential for the country at large? One reason is that these cities are the power centers of the country. They include India`s metropolitan and trading hubs and several of its state capitals. India`s three largest and most cosmopolitan cities are among the eight that top Varshney`s list of ``riot-prone`` areas -- the nation`s capital, New Delhi, and the influential state capitals Mumbai (Bombay) and Kolkata (Calcutta). Each has a population of over 12 million, and together they are linchpins of India`s economy.

Each of the eight cities that top Varshney`s list has a large middle class, a high literacy rate, and an old and established Muslim minority. Two of them are in Gujarat, and it is a testimony to the predictive value of Varshney`s data that he ranks Ahmedabad, Gujarat`s financial capital, as the second most riot-prone city in India. (Mumbai leads the death count.) Ahmedabad saw the worst of the recent killings in Gujarat and continues to burn as of this writing. The city where the riots began, Godhra, also appears in Varshney`s data, on the longer list of 30.

CRASHING THE PARTY

Why should these cities, with better standards of living than most of the rest of India, greater economic opportunity, and more power to shape government policy, suffer from a pattern of recurrent Hindu-Muslim violence?

Varshney`s answer to this question is deceptively simple. Each of these cities, he says, has suffered a gradual and progressive decline in civic life. Ahmedabad, for example, was largely untouched by the violence between Hindus and Muslims that hit other cities in the early twentieth century and during the partition of colonial India in 1947. Gujarat was Mohandas Gandhi`s homeland and a testing ground for his methods of nonviolent resistance, and it also had some of the strongest civil associations in India, built by the Congress Party as well as by Gandhi`s disciples in both industry and labor. These associations served to integrate Hindus and Muslims and stepped in to prevent Hindu-Muslim violence during the partition riots of 1947-48. After independence, however, the Congress Party neglected its various programs promoting cooperative credit, women`s health and employment, and educational and media outreach. Following the death of India`s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964, the party leadership started to fragment. Its different factions began to focus on wooing specific voting blocs by cultivating the more chauvinist elements within India`s different castes and religious communities.

Ahmedabad`s first serious Hindu-Muslim riots occurred in 1969 as a result of a local dispute over a religious procession; they were followed by more violence in several subsequent years. Gujarat was then relatively peaceful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. But this calm was deceptive, according to Varshney; during that period the Congress Party`s civic decline was followed by its political decline. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did away with Congress` internal elections and limited the powers of the party`s local branches. The party`s vast apparatus in Gujarat, its one remaining integrative network for Hindus and Muslims, dwindled to a shadow of its former self.

At the same time, there was a parallel decline in Gujarat`s largest nonparty organization, the Textile Labor Association. Based in Ahmedabad, the Gandhian trade union was the last significant source of Hindu-Muslim cooperation in the city. When its numbers dwindled as mill production gave way to the rise of the power-loom sector, the vacuum was filled by Hindu nationalist organizations that founded new schools and newspapers and performed a range of social services.

The BJP benefited from the Congress Party`s decline in Gujarat. Varshney shows how the state turned to the Hindu right well before the rest of India did. In the 1980s, when the BJP won between 5 and 7 percent of the vote nationally, it polled over 15 percent in Gujarat. In the mid-1990s, when the BJP`s share of the national vote rose to 20 percent, it was 42 percent in Gujarat. In 1990-92, Hindu nationalists were able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of the state`s citizens for a nationwide agitation to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram -- who is as central to Hinduism as Jesus is to Christianity -- in his purported birthplace, the far-off northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The temple site was also home to a seventeenth-century mosque, which was destroyed in 1992 by a 10,000-strong mob of Hindu nationalists who had gathered from all over the country. Gujarat was one of the largest contributors of volunteers to this mission of destruction; when Hindu-Muslim riots followed, it was Gujarat that saw the largest number of deaths.

The BJP came to power in Gujarat in 1995 and in the central government in 1998 -- but at the national level it is part of a wider coalition including secular regional parties. The BJP leadership in New Delhi said that, out of respect for the coalition, they would put the more contentious issues on their agenda, such as building the Ram temple, on the back burner. The BJP`s leaders had already begun to restrain the party`s hard-liners after the riots that followed the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, and India remained relatively calm between 1993 and 2002. Like Varshney, many analysts concluded that India`s polity forces all political parties to the secular center once they have to govern.

THE UNCERTAIN CENTER

The Gujarat riots of this spring, however, have made this conclusion look doubtful. They came quickly on the heels of the BJP`s reelection in Gujarat under a new hard-line leadership. The state`s chief minister makes no secret of his belief that Muslims must be second-class citizens in the Hindu nation he is bent on creating, and he is one of the most ardent supporters of the Ram temple campaign. Despite New Delhi`s pleas for restraint, he was one of the leaders who supported the revival of the campaign in early March. The Hindus who were torched by a Muslim mob in Gujarat two weeks later -- the incident that sparked the recent riots -- were returning from Ayodhya. They had made a preemptive bid to begin building the temple on the ruins of the mosque but were thwarted by the central government, which had dispatched 2,500 troops to keep the peace.

New Delhi`s prompt action to prevent violence in Ayodhya stands in stark contrast to its reluctance to intervene in Gujarat. The Gujarat government has made little effort to stop the riots; worse still, it has transferred out many of the police officers who did turn back the mobs. Reports indicate a total breakdown of law and order in Ahmedabad`s mostly Muslim old quarter, as well as in several of the city`s outlying areas. New Delhi has repeatedly expressed concern at

the continuing violence -- yet neither the central government nor the BJP leadership is prepared to take any action

that might run counter to the Gujarat government`s wishes.

Trounced in state-level legislative elections last year, today the BJP governs Gujarat alone out of India`s 28 states. So New Delhi has dug in its heels, and the BJP has ignored its coalition allies who have asked that the Gujarat government step down. Far from being constrained to adhere to the secular center, it seems that the BJP is now being pushed by Gujarat to move toward the far right. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has made no secret of the fact that he wanted Gujarat`s government to step down, but BJP hard-liners persuaded him to yield. For their part, the BJP`s allies are unwilling to see the government fall over this issue, so they have limited their response to mere remonstrations.

Nevertheless, the BJP`s recent electoral losses suggest that Indian support for Hindu nationalism resembles support for the far-right anti-immigrant parties in Austria, France, and the Netherlands more closely than it does something like Serb nationalism. Each of the former has shown a disturbing rise in the past decade, but none has been able to capture the mainstream. Slobodan Milosevic`s Communist Party, by comparison, did extremely well at the Serbian polls until his government lost the war over Kosovo.

Unlike the western European countries, however, India has not been able to cauterize the destructive potential of its ethnic and religious nationalists. Over the past decade, 4,000 Indians have died in battles over the Ram temple campaign, but the Hindu nationalists are unwilling to seek a compromise solution. The regional parties that are the BJP`s allies have not been able to persuade the BJP to act in Gujarat; nor has the opposition. The corrective mechanisms of Indian politics appear to have only a weak hold over its legislators and government.

DEMOCRACY IN INDIA

As Varshney argues, this decay in India`s party politics puts the spotlight squarely on civil society. Here the picture is more reassuring. The most stable Indian states are those in which Hindus and Muslims have joint economic, educational, and political associations -- even if the latter rely more on power-sharing than on integration. But it is not necessary to have the entire gamut or a combination of such associations: as Varshney shows, at the ground level any one Hindu-Muslim group can successfully prevent the spread of conflict. In one textile-producing city in Gujarat, for instance, the local manufacturers` and traders` association kept the peace in the old city area; indeed, press accounts of the latest riots tell the story of a Hindu-Muslim workers` colony that successfully turned the mobs away.

Top-down initiatives can also work, says Varshney, citing an industrial city whose poor record of violence was turned around by a police officer who set up Hindu-Muslim peace committees in all the city`s localities. But they are inherently weaker because they are not subject to the same tests of accountability that locally based associations face.

Sadly, Varshney does not examine religious organizations in his analysis; he addresses only Hindu-Muslim associations. Yet the greatest conundrum of all might well be the role that religious organizations play in sparking or dampening Hindu-Muslim tension. Unlike the Christian and Muslim religious leaders who added to communal conflict in Bosnia, or the priests and nuns who were implicated in genocide in Rwanda, most Hindu religious leaders shun the Ram temple campaign. At one of Hinduism`s largest and most important religious festivals, the Kumbh Mela, Hindu priests expelled advocates of the Ram temple campaign. After the Gujarat riots began, several of India`s leading Hindu priests offered to help find an alternative site for the temple. Ironically, their offer has yet to be accepted by the BJP government.

It is a pity, too, that Varshney does not examine government institutions such as the judiciary, the National Human Rights Commission, or the National Commission for Minorities. All three have displayed a new activism in the wake of the Gujarat riots. The Indian Supreme Court is currently holding a landmark hearing on the human rights commission`s findings about the violence. India`s attorney general has also criticized the Gujarat government for its failure to protect minorities. And the minorities commission has just organized the first meeting between Gujarat`s chief minister and representatives of the Muslim community.

These are heartening indications of Indian democracy`s willingness to reclaim the secular center. Varshney`s findings are more heartening still for India. If the task of building unifying networks is a daunting one, it is encouraging to know that improving civic life in just eight cities could make all the difference. Tellingly, too, the recent Human Rights Watch report on Gujarat makes many of the same policy recommendations that flow from Varshney`s book: in particular, that support for integrative civic associations is now the need of the hour in cities such as Ahmedabad.

Apart from the immediate policy relevance of Varshney`s book, his material also makes a lasting contribution to our understanding of how to tackle the roots of communal violence in India. This is an issue that Indian policymakers have ignored for too long. Perhaps Varshney`s book can help close that gap.

Dear Prem - i meant ``stuff it`` as in ``cut the crap`` - Bangalore is still very much in India : )

: )

re: aicha # 257

I did not know they shifted Bangalore to Pakistan. When did that happen?

Soundmeister - yes I should have said ``stuff it`` please instead !!

bechara rsidhar... hamesha late rahe ga... tsk tsk ...

Please read tahmed`s letter to me 236 on the `Hate board`

http://www.chowk.com/bin/showr.cgi?f=godot_apr1402&n=240#reply136

And then spit it in your hand, dive, and drown!

:)

See ya

re:Reply #: 165

shammi,

ABV seems to be caught between the RSS ideology (which he supports strongly)and his own innate goodness. Whatever be the RSS ideology, it seems to clash with good governance following Godhra. ABV`s fault lies in not siding with what is right and being swayed by the ideiology and the hardliners. He is also a ``status-quo``st and is slow to take decisions. Not the best leader to have in times like this.

Sridhar

re:Reply #: 167

ylh,

I have interacted with tahmed in the past and i have always found him to be cultured, respectful of other`s views. Even when i had said some nasty things, he never gave it back to me as some others (including myself)in chowk have done in the past.

You are despicable, fastidious young fellow. People like you have little hope of changing for the better. You do not see reason. You are not willing to learn from your mistakes and keep harping on the same theme again and again. Your country has little to gain from the likes of you.

My advice to you is: leave tahmed alone as he is in a different league. You have much to learn.

Sridhar

re:Reply #: 246

mithuna,

What is IAAD?

Sridhar

Another report blames Modi, BJP for Gujarat carnage

http://in.news.yahoo.com/020425/43/1ml0g.html

Reply aicha #249:

``soundmeister -

damage control?? Effective?? you must be kidding!! Actions speak louder than words. WHat next i wonder?? ``

I have no idea what you mean. I did not use any of the words you have quoted here. And while I am at it, I`m no apologist for Hindutva either. What I do resent is people like you tarring all ``us Hindus/Indians`` with the same brush when it comes to our perceived views of Islam/Pakistan. I suggest you go back and read my post in its entirety and then react rather than posting cheap cracks that benefit nobody. Integrity of the press is far too serious an issue to be left to idiots.

soundmeister

[``This is happening in Malaysia. Wherever there are SUCH Muslims, they do not wish to live together, do not want to mix and mingle with others and instead of spreading their message peacefully, they want to spread their beliefs by terror, by fear, by threatening. The world has woken to this danger.``]

The press in India has been taken over by pinkos who score points by creating mischief. During UP elections they harrassed Vajapayee, taunting him asking what he was going to do since muslims were not going to vote for him. Vajapayee said he would still win. The pinko press went to town with headlines the next day that Vajapayee didn`t want muslim`s votes.

Quoting contexts for - ``Let the Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority.``

soundmeister -

damage control?? Effective?? you must be kidding!! Actions speak louder than words. WHat next i wonder??

How in a Little British Town Jihad Found Young Converts

Wed Apr 24, 8:55 AM ET

By AMY WALDMAN The New York Times

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20020424/wl_nyt/how_in_a_little_british_town_jihad_found_young_converts

TIPTON, England The young men lived within a few blocks of one another in a Muslim pocket in this small town near Birmingham. They were out of school and often on the streets, in the occasional fight, sometime smokers of marijuana. They were, in the slang of the British Midlands, ``dossers`` slackers, layabouts.

So when they renounced the street for Islam, gave up their bad habits for prayer, their parents immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were pleased. Neighbors were bemused: the drifters had found faith.

Last fall, four young men announced that they were leaving for Pakistan for a computer course, a holiday, an arranged marriage then disappeared. Their families had no word until January, when the Foreign Office called. Three of them Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed had been captured with the Taliban in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and taken to Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The fourth, Munir Ali, believed to have accompanied them into Afghanistan, is missing.

No one knows precisely what drove them to Afghanistan whether they went to take up arms or offer aid. What is clear is that in Tipton, as across Britain, the seeds were there: a Muslim generation uncertain of its identity and prospects, angry at the treatment of Muslims the world over, and prey to recruitment, by individual journeymen and potent imagery, to militant Islam.

The ``Tipton Taliban`` were just four young men in a corner of one small town in England. But their story is a window into the psychic journey being taken in immigrant communities across Western Europe as young Muslims are swept up by an orthodox, and often politicized, form of Islam far removed from the ``Friday Prayers`` version of their elders.

Some of the youths are stagnant or unemployed, others breezily successful. Either way, in a poignant kink in the immigrant arc, they have often deemed immaterial all the material comforts their parents emigrated for.

Today, the Taliban are fallen and Al Qaeda is, at least temporarily, in some disarray. The world`s attention has shifted to another group of angry young Muslims the Palestinians battling Israel. Still, here in Britain, what one jihad champion calls the ``nexus of politics and religion and frustration`` remains unbroken. If anything, it has been fortified by events in the Middle East.

These young men were ripe for being swept up. They lived a small-town ennui that could make trouble attractive because at least it made them feel alive. Asif Iqbal, 20, was hyper and excitable. He liked to test the limits. He had left school at 16, run with a wild crowd for a while, and blown a chance at college.

He lived with both his Pakistani-born parents but often seemed on his own. His father, 68 and retired, was busy with leisure pursuits. His mother was uneducated and mentally a bit unwell. ``He had no one to give him advice,`` a friend said.

He worked the night shift at an office postal service and spent most of his free time in the street, other than a Sunday afternoon soccer game. In 1999, he and a friend, also now in Camp X-Ray, had fought with other Asian youths in a nearby town, hurting one so badly he was left scarred.

A Refuge for Muslim Activists

When he turned toward Islam, then, Asif Iqbal did not do so in half-measures. What began as a mild curiosity soon became aggressive, even confrontational.

His path was already a well-trodden one. Britain has during the last two decades become a refuge unmatched in Europe for Muslim activists, scholars and clerics fleeing repressive governments in the Arab world or North Africa, and thus a center of Islamist influence.

Richard Reid, who tried to detonate a shoe-bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight, came to radical Islam at London`s mosques; so did Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Djamel Beghal, accused of plotting an attack on the American Embassy in Paris, sought spiritual tutelage there. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who is on trial in Pakistan accused of the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, grew up in Britain, the child of prosperous Pakistani parents.

In all, no one knows how many of the newly radicalized have actually taken the journey from Britain to jihad. But over the last decade, members of the jihad movement say, hundreds have gone for training or fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya (news - web sites) and Afghanistan. A document found by New York Times reporters at a Kabul house used by the Islamic militant group Harkat ul-Mujahedeen lists nine trainees, identified by code name, from Britain.

Since Sept. 11, the presence of so many radicals, and a number of tantalizing, if ambiguous, terrorist links, have prompted other European nations to accuse Britain of being soft on terrorism.

Stung by the criticism and fearful that Britain will become a target for supporting America`s war on terror, the government is using tough, even draconian, new laws to crack down on extremism. It is also trying to better understand why young men like Mr. Iqbal turn to militancy.

The young men of Tipton are out of British hands, for now. Whether they will be tried here or in America, or simply go free, is unclear. For now, they pass their days in sunbaked cages in Camp X-Ray, far from the Midlands drizzle.

At Ease in Neither Land

Their families and friends have mostly put forward the same defense: the boys were too Westernized for fundamentalism to creep in. They were irreligious; they had to be prodded to mosque. They drank. They smoked. They went clubbing and chased girls.

Asif Iqbal preferred snooker and soccer to politics, his father told one newspaper. Shafiq Rasul`s brothers said he wore Armani, as if that alone was impregnable armor against extremism.

It is a disorienting image: Muslim immigrant parents defending their children on grounds of decadence.

But it hints at the forces pulling at this immigrant second generation, the first to be British raised. Their parents had brought their home country to their host country and so lived comfortably in both. Their sons seemed at ease in neither.

Aziz ul-Hak, 22, was Asif Iqbal`s best friend, and if, like most people here, he isn`t terribly forthcoming about what happened, he is willing to talk a bit about his own ``stressful`` in-between life.

He speaks Bengali with his father and Birmingham English with his mates. His uniform is Nikes and a baseball cap, his wife a Bangladeshi his father picked. He does not feel particularly British, but in Bangladesh that`s all he feels a rich Briton ripe for ripping off.

His father came from Bangladesh in 1963, part of a great migration of former imperial subjects from the Indian subcontinent invited to toil in Britain`s factories. Many came here to the West Midlands, creating in Victoria Park Estate in Tipton a community that feels like a sari beneath a drab, gray English coat.

In Truth, a Place Apart

It is just six or so streets of linked plain prewar houses in neat uninterrupted rows. But behind the doors, the South Asian village culture survives, in the handmade chapatis, the parentally arranged marriages and the mildly intoxicating Bangladeshi leaf stored in a basket by the register at the Pakeeza grocery store.

All this has made for the appearance of quirky cultural fusion. Pep`s Park Lane Chippy serves curry sauce as well as fish and chips. Bollywood and Hollywood share space at the video store. Young Muslims study at the Roman Catholic school.

But, in truth, the Park Estate is a place apart, a lace-curtained ghetto surrounded by the whites who make up 86 percent of Tipton`s 50,000 residents. Around Tipton, young Asian men who wear Moschino jeans and gold earrings in one ear also hear themselves referred to as ``Pakis.``

It cannot help that the entire economic basis of this world has fallen away. The factories are mostly closed now. Aziz ul-Hak thinks himself lucky to work at a food shop, since in Tipton many young Muslims do not work at all. More graduate to prison than university.

``The main thing with our teenagers is a drug problem, not a religious problem,`` says Bashrhan Khan, 34.

Similar social strains among young South Asians prompted riots in some British towns last summer. Tipton`s afflictions have been milder, but jarring nonetheless. A few years ago, gangs of young whites came through the Park Estate yanking off Muslim women`s head scarfs.

The Pull Between Cultures

The Asians settled the score, sometimes violently, but felt personally betrayed by onetime schoolmates. Two years ago, the right-wing British National Party, whose Web site now features a ``Campaign Against Islam,`` won 24 percent of the vote in a local election.

This was the circumscribed stage on which the young men who disappeared were playing out their lives. They had left school at 16 and were living at home, two on the same street.

Ruhal Ahmed, 20, was a takeaway worker and skilled kickboxer who felt the pull between cultures more acutely than most. A Bengali, he had fallen in love with a local Pakistani girl. In Tipton, this was not done. Parents picked partners back home. The Park Estate was too small to be disrupted by love.

Shafiq Rasul, 24, was 6 foot 2 and model-handsome, by his brothers` reckoning. His father had come from India 35 years ago to work in a factory, and died four years ago. The son`s purpose seemed less clear: shy Shafiq had dropped out of college or ``taken some time off,`` and was working part time at an electronics store.

Munir Ali, 21, now missing, was also Bengali. Sweet and simple, he had struggled to find work, relying, as many young people here do, on temporary jobs. Before he left, he wasn`t working at all.

As he searched for his place, his older sister had found hers unusual in a culture where women rarely work outside the home. She had won election to the local council, the first Asian woman to do so.

After the news broke about her missing brother, she issued a statement: ``We have grown up in Britain in a Western society. All members of our family share and respect British values.``

Those values, like freedom of speech and human rights, have drawn Islamic dissidents seeking haven from repression at home. Some have used Britain as a base for influencing their home countries` politics, through writing, lobbying or fund-raising.

But others are steadily kneading the identity crises of Britain`s young South Asians, as well as converts like Richard Reid. These purveyors of radicalism single out moderate mosques, prisons and universities. Their foil is the West its actions, its policies, even the very freedoms they use to malign it.

On a Wednesday night in Luton, just north of London, 20 or so brown young men crowd into the Islamic Educational Center to hear the Syrian-born Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad. Sons of Pakistani or Bangladeshi immigrants, most wear Western dress.

``They want to keep calling us Pakis, bloody Arabs, brown Kaffirs,`` Mr. Bakri says.

He caresses a bushy beard and conjures an imaginary character to dramatize a favorite theme: the futility of assimilation. ``Abu Jabar changes his name to Bobby. He changes all his clothes. He dances. He raves with them. They still call him Paki.``

Bobby asks, ``For God`s sake who do I belong to?``

Mr. Bakri answers: ``You belong to the Muslim umma, brothers. Come on in.``

Mr. Bakri heads Al Muhajiroun, or The Emigrants, which he calls an Islamic ideological party. Some say he is all bombast and bluff, others that he manipulates young men into jihad. Whatever the truth, he indisputably transforms anomic young Muslims into Islamists.

Conjuring Up the Caliphate

His followers see recreating the caliphate the era of Islam`s ascendancy after the death of Muhammad in the eighth century as the answer to Muslims`, and the world`s, problems. They often sound like nothing so much as young Marxists of another era.

Islam ``will guarantee every single individual the bare necessities of food, clothing, shelter,`` says Muhammed Ali, a 21-year-old information technology specialist of slight build and febrile mien.

In Britain, as everywhere, Islam has ribboned into countless sects and schools that often spend as much time attacking one another as attracting fresh recruits.

The Birmingham Central Mosque is crowded with young people raised as indifferent Muslims who have now turned to a Taliban-style Islam that provides a way of life as much as a religion. The women cover not just their heads, but their faces; the long-bearded men no longer allow their children to be photographed.

At the same time, many well-educated young Muslims have joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, a movement brought to England in the 1980`s by Middle Eastern students. Its followers, who wear Western dress and often work in high-tech jobs, use anti-American propaganda to rally support for a pan-Islamic state.

``Your Muslim brothers are suffering,`` they whisper to potential recruits.

The goal of the radicals, of whatever stripe, is to make Islam a political force. To do this, they employ a potent mix of vivid imagery, Koranic scholarship, hard facts and soft-boiled conspiracy theories the Jews attacked the World Trade Center to discredit Osama bin Laden (news - web sites); the C.I.A. did it to give America a way into Central Asia; Mr. bin Laden is an American agent meant to discredit Islam.

All of this is passed along a Muslim information loop, a daisy chain of Web sites and word of mouth. Azzam.com, for example, features pictures of Iraqi babies malnourished because of American sanctions or videos of graphic slaughter by and of Muslims in Chechnya.

Imran Khan, 32, who publishes and sells pro-jihad literature, says that jihad recruitment is ``more promising in smaller towns than larger towns.``

``In smaller towns,`` he said, ``there`s nothing happening.``

The Tales They Told

In the small town of Tipton, Shafiq Rasul told his family he was going to take a computer course in Pakistan. Asif Iqbal was going to carry out an arranged marriage, and Ruhal Ahmed was going to watch, or going on holiday, or making a religious pilgrimage no one, anymore, seems sure.

As these stories have fallen away, parents and friends say the young men must have been brainwashed. They describe jihad recruiters and fiery visiting sheiks; Muslim door-to-door preachers and extremist mosques that influenced the young men. None of their theories are provable, but all are plausible.

With three mosques in four square blocks, the Park Estate was ripe for revival. Islam here has been parsed by denomination, language and culture all the divisions of the subcontinent. That variety well suited the Tipton youths` meanderings through faith.

When they first turned to Islam, over idle talk at a local pool hall, their guides were moderates with mystical leanings. They borrowed tapes of Hamza Yusuf, a moderate American convert who has achieved a mass following in Britain and the United States. Their families immediately noticed a change. Asif`s father was happy, he told friends his son had become a good religious boy.

But, friends say, the boys soon migrated to an Islam of a more puritanical bent. They became judgmental, telling friends that they would see after they died how bad their clubbing and pubbing was.

They became convinced of their rightness. Asif once threw a punch because he could not win a theological argument in front of a group of friends. They argued against citations from classical scholars by saying they could interpret the Koran themselves they didn`t need scholars.

They challenged moderates in town to debate visitors like Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican-born, Saudi-educated preacher who came to Tipton for two visits. He talked of the obligation to jihad, of Muslims killed in Bosnia.

A World of Conspiracies

Mr. Faisal sketched a world of conspiracies, of cabals of Jews and Freemasons plotting to take over the world. It was more exciting than Bollywood and Hollywood combined. It was real.

On some of his tapes, he speaks of why Muslims can never have peace with the ``filthy Jews,`` and of Muslims` right to kill a Hindu if they encounter one in the road. In February, those tapes got him arrested and charged with ``solicitation to murder,`` a charge he has said he will answer by showing that everything he said exists in the Koran.

Asif and his friends were briefly taken with Mr. Faisal, but then moved on. They learned about Hizb ut-Tahrir, and attended lectures given by a recruiter for Al Muhajiroun. They argued that the Palestinians` conflict with Israel justified jihad.

Then came Sept. 11. Muslims in Tipton, like those across Britain, were outraged by America`s bombing of Afghanistan. Still, that the young men undertook their pilgrimage without parental permission shocked this tradition-bound community almost as much as their going at all.

``They were supposed to ask their mother three times and their father once,`` one young woman said.

But the literature of jihad has an answer to that. ``Join the Caravan,`` considered a ``classic`` treatise of the Afghan jihad movement, states, ``When Jihad becomes Fard Ain`` an individual obligation ``no permission of parents is required.``

All the young men needed was someone to make the argument that jihad had become Fard Ain. In Tipton and beyond, there was no shortage of people to make it.

soundmeister #245
I can understand your outrage at the media leaving out key words and contexts here and there and changing the import/intent of various statements by Hindutva leaders.

But I am puzzled why the media has omitted reporting BJP/Hindutva organisations` and their leaders loud and vociferous demands for action against the rapists, murdererers, child-killers, looterers and arsonists whose activities resulted in many hundred gruesome deaths and devastation in Gujarat and widespread insecurity around India?

Not reporting these loud demands for justice on behalf of the 850 killed from the BJP/VHP/RSS/ Bajarang Dal cadres and leadership is a grievous criminal omission of the media indeed and cannot be enough condemned.