On a different matter, my eye was caught by two separate news stories. The first was a news item relating to the Taliban, who were burning down schools in Southern Afghanistan and the second was relating to how the Kashmiri militants were killing tourists in Kashmir. When I tried to discuss this in many forums or see the reactions, it was one of two. The first reaction was that these guys are idiots, while the second reaction was a shrug and indifference. This made me wonder at both sides of the story, what exactly are these guys trying to achieve?

We have previously explored this phenomenon of terrorists devouring their own (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2005/09/20th-century-versions- of-cronus.html). But this essay will try to delve deeper into these two particular instances. Why would anybody burn down schools and stop the children from getting educated? Or why would anybody want to stop economic growth by killing tourists? On the face of it, the answer is clear, the Taliban does not want Bush and Karzai to be seen helping the Afghans, and from their perspective, the very fact that schools are mushrooming and students are eager to learn and break out of their miserable existence is bad for them and their bizarre medieval ideology. Furthermore preventing the youth from getting an education to enable them to have a life later will leave them no option but to carry a gun, join the Taliban and become cannon fodder. As Pakistani Professor of Physics Pervez Hoodboy said in a recent article, the Urdu papers in Pakistan are full of stories about how schools are being burnt down, teachers shot and students terrorised, but especially in the NWFP, there is nary a peep out of anybody.

The Kashmiri Militants on the other hand have a vested interest in keeping the pot boiling. The insurgency has been wailing from 1987 onwards, and paradise has been converted into a hell on earth. But over the past two odd years, some form of normalcy has returned, elections to the local state legislature and municipal councils have taken place, there is some sort of a peace process underway between India and Pakistan and most importantly, the tourists are back. I was a young sprig when I was first there and I can clearly remember it as a tourist paradise with lovely gardens, crystal clear waters of the lakes and springs, winter sports, and the like. Given the mountainous nature of the state, agriculture and industry are a bit lower down the economic priority list and one of the mainstays of the state was and is tourism. For some strange reason, tourists prefer to go to places where bombs don’t explode and there is some peace and quiet. As I mentioned, over the past two years, the tourists from all over India were going back and the newspapers were full of stories about how the local economy is booming, the shikara’s (the wonderful carved wooden boats on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of the state) are busy plying the lake and the local inhabitants of Srinagar are looking up economically.

So it was a bit of shock to read about a few grenade attacks on tourists. These types of attacks are quite common; some of the idiots take some grenades and chuck them at a security patrol. Also, for some strange reason, their aims are usually off and the grenades end up landing in the middle of pedestrians and civilians going about their day to day lives. But in these particular set of cases, the grenades were explicitly aimed at tourists from West Bengal, another eastern state of India, and many tourists were killed. Again, the reason is pretty clear, if the normal populace is economically inactive and if the government can be shown to be incompetent to protect the tourists, then hey, it’s great news for them. As for the tourists, they are infidels anyway so they don’t matter at all.

Two separate phenomenon, but both are related in so far as their objectives are concerned. Both sets of people are totally un-interested in having any form of normalcy being present in their states. After all, if normalcy appears, then their power decreases. In the Taliban’s case, it is even worse. You see, education is one of the best ways of breaking the hold that the ignorant mullahs have over the general populace. The news reports all talked about the eagerness of the students to learn, specially the girl students. Here’s a translation of one of the pamphlets which was stuck on the walls of a mosque in Kandahar in south eastern Afghanistan, "Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents."

Coming from a family of professors and being one myself and being raised in a culture where teachers are considered to be greater than God, I find this behaviour totally amazing. Human Rights Watch reported that two hundred schools were burnt in the past eighteen months. I can understand, with a wince, if a school is destroyed in war. But for somebody to actually go about burning a school down deliberately simply because it is a school is symptomatic of deep seated mental problems. And it is not Islam, for those who would point to it. The Quran starts with the word ‘IQRA’, meaning “read” or “study”. The prophet himself exhorted people to even go all the way to China if that’s where learning, knowledge and education were found.

So to go back to the reactions I read, I can sympathise with the first reaction of thinking that these guys were idiots. The second was indifference and that I cannot identify with one bit. Even though I cannot identify with indifference, there is a feeling of impotence around this entire situation. What can you do with people who are so much against modernity, or the basic human rights of education, burning down schools, killing teachers and throwing acid on girl students? Here’s one solution, as reported in the Independent of the UK. In Zabul province, there are 47 schools, three are open and only one teaches girls. Why is it still open? Because it is two hundred meters away from a US Military Base. It is such a sad state of affairs.

Even worse is the way the supporters of the Taliban across a wide swathe of the world do not think about the damage being done. Another factoid reported by Professor Hoodboy was a repeat of the incident in Saudi Arabia where a girls’ hostel caught fire and the religious police refused the fire-fighters to rescue the girls because their faces could be seen and the sad predictable result was that many girls burnt to death. The incident was repeated in Pakistan during the recent earthquake, where the militant groups refused to let men rescuers dig in and rescue the girls who were crushed under a collapsed building. Girls are especially the target. If they get educated and they know about their rights, then the entire patriarchal edifice collapses. Who will stroke their beards if the women are out and about, eh? The screams against the Zionists and Crusaders notwithstanding, they do not see the insidious hollowing out of their society from within.

The world is slowly moving towards a knowledge society and agriculture/industry is being progressively automated. This is the world where knowledge is important and education is key; so to throw grenades and burn up schools is not just vandalism on schools, it is vandalism against their future. Turning your back to the world, drawing up the draw bridge and trying to insulate themselves from the world will not work. This will have one of two possible long term effects. Either they will be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age or they will simply become extinct. How is this possible? Well, the smart fellows will escape their fetters into other countries which are not so brutal. Or else, they will simply die in their medieval villages. I was reading a fiction book, ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini. I strongly recommend the book, it is very well written, but the backdrop of the book is about a boy growing up in pre-communist takeover Afghanistan and then till the time that the Taliban came to power. While the story is fiction, the author treats the common man and his reaction to the brutalities performed by the communists first and Taliban second in a very sensitive way. In particular, I found one section especially poignant with respect to this essay. How a professor at a university turned into a beggar. The influence of a teacher stops at eternity, but in the case of the Pathans and Taliban, their influence is malignant, they are literally pond-life. The same account in the Independent reported that a headmaster was beaten by rifle butts and then shot in the thigh. Many teachers have been beheaded. Beheading a teacher? Who will show you the way to God? How moronic can you be?

Similarly, one looks at the Kashmiri Militants. Needless to say, this is a different kettle of fish. We already talked about why they are doing so. But the same reaction comes up in a different way. Just why would you do anything like that? Chase away the same people who are putting food on your table? These tourists are there, giving gainful employment to the young men and women who do not have sufficient employment opportunities, which give them a chance to make a life for themselves. But not according to the terrorists, killing innocents and destroying the economic life is good for them. It makes the state government look bad and will push more of the unemployed or underemployed youth into the arms of the militants. But the solution is to keep on trying to impose security and peace. That is the only way and while it is difficult to find a silver lining in this dark cloud, the fact that these militants are now reduced to attacking tourists means that their desperation level is increasing steadily.

Strangely enough, there was an interesting press release a few months ago, which sort of ties the two phenomena together. A group from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) asked for reserved seats for Pakistani Kashmiri students in the Indian educational institutions. Now you cannot have a better reason to stick with India and be part of the secular nation than education. The PoK is heavily under the control of these jehadi groups as well as the Pakistani Army. For a group to actually ask for educational opportunities in India is such a blinding ray of hope, that this is something which the world should push for. Open up the world’s educational institutions, give scholarships to these people who want to break out of the chains locking them inside tradition and religion. Yes, I know, that just being educated doesn’t mean that they will all be nice citizens of the world, but it is only a very small proportion that turns bad. In the vast majority of cases, this works. If people are doubting it, just look at how good that investment in training afghan students in India over the past 20-30 years was for India. Now India has friends in high places in Afghanistan.

But I am rambling, these two phenomena have to be fought and indifference is certainly not the right reaction. Give them education, give them jobs and show them a better path to the light. Victor Hugo said: "The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge."