War on Terror

In a follow-through that has taken the world by surprise, and contrary to the apprehensions raised initially, the US has shown growing restraint in its pronouncements and its apparent intentions in the pursuit of its war against terrorism. Whatever the internal and geopolitical compulsions that have moderated the early rhetoric, this in retrospect makes the Indian government’s response to the World Trade Centre disaster appear notably naïve.

As the world moves to a new sensibility on terrorism in the wake of saturation coverage of the terrorist strikes on America and their aftermath, it has become fashionable in quite a few circles to characterise terrorism as the result of a clash of cultures. The cultures in question are identified, implicitly at least, as Islam and the west, the latter standing for modernity and the former cast as offender against reason and progress. The transparent irrationality of such an interpretation is not reason enough, in the Indian context, to dismiss it lightly. This is so because of the attraction such a characterisation of terrorism holds for sectarian ideologies that seek to target and isolate minority communities.