By M D Nalapat
A
WhatsApp message is being circulated, asking for ‘1 crore 21 lakh
Muslims to come out on the roads (of Assam) on November 27 (to stop)
harassment of (Bangladeshi) Muslims.’ The objective is to stop
de-regularisation and possible deportation of several million illegal
Bangladeshi migrants.
Pakistan’s
ISI, through a “Major Shafiq”, has from February this year tasked its
India-based units with ensuring that “Assam 2019 catches fire the way
Kashmir did from 1989”. They have begun work on this objective by
establishing contact and coordinating strategies with associate groups
within the state, especially from Rohingyas and illegal Bangladeshi
migrants in Assam and Bengal. The Myanmar headquarters of the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which is an affiliate of Al Qaeda, is
engaged with the same mission and is active in involving the Rohingya in
India, as is the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami Arakan (HUJI-K). The plan is
to provide recruits for clandestine entry into India from Myanmar and
Bangladesh, who will be expected to carry out the actions ordered by the
ISI and Al Qaeda in Assam. These measures are designed to (i) create a
communal holocaust in parts of Assam that would drive out the majority
community from those locations, and (ii) ensure safe zones for Rohingya
and other extremists in Bengal. Interestingly, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Amir
of Al Qaeda, had specifically mentioned Assam in a 55-minute video
released in 2014. This marked the start of their drive to spark extreme
radicalisation of significant numbers of people in that state from
within the pool of Bangladeshi migrants. Similar radicalisation is being
carried out in Bengal as well, a state where Wahhabism in the violently
exclusivist form manifested in Kashmir is a developing threat, which
seems thus far to have been downplayed by Writers Building. In Myanmar
itself, both Ataulla and Abdus Burmi, the Emirs (chiefs) of ARSA and
HUJI-K, respectively, have close working links with Pakistan army-linked
Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
(LeT), as well as with elements of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh,
where its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS) is active in
assisting extremists, together with other India-based groups and even
political parties.
Apart from Myanmar and Bangladesh, another recruitment zone for
Rohingya recruits by extremist organisations tasked with later waging
non-conventional war in parts of India, is Indonesia, a country that has
opened its doors to the Rohingya from Myanmar. Both the United States
and the European Union (EU) are urging India to do likewise, even though
they themselves have shut the door on such immigrants, despite their
chatter about “Rohingya rights”. Interestingly, the Indonesian
authorities have been either unable or unwilling to put in check
extremist organisations such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), which
is openly calling for armed volunteers to go to armed war against the
authorities in Myanmar, so as to carve out an “Islamic Emirate” or
Rohingyastan out of substantial parts of that country. In India, both in
Bengal and Assam, the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) has been
quietly setting up units since 2011, and it has been estimated that well
over 18,000 (eighteen thousand) cadres have been recruited out of
illegal Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrant pools in these two states.
The Wahhabi International has worked hard at ensuring that the US,
the UK, France and other NATO powers support the Rohingya cause. These
countries are ignoring the decades of insurgency that Myanmar has
endured from separatists. The danger is that such facilitation could
ignite waves of fresh recruitment to militant organisations the same way
as took place in the 1980s as a consequence of the US empowerment of
religious fanatics to battle the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. In
their usual thoughtless manner, the larger NATO member-states are
willy-nilly at risk of replicating the chaos of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan
and Syria in Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and
Thailand, through their high-decibel support for those generating
religious fervour through selective presentation of the situation facing
the Rohingyas. Thus far, India has not (openly at least) warned against
such destabilising efforts by the NATO powers to implant fanatics into
countries not their own. Such silence in the face of policy errors that
could have a grave future impact is reminiscent of the silence of New
Delhi at Moscow’s subduing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s
and the 1960s, as also the lack of official blowback to the USSR’s
occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since 2015, substantial amounts
of cash from Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Wahhabi-friendly
locations (that include cities in Canada, the UK and Germany) are
flowing, mostly through hawala channels, to NGOs in India, Indonesia,
Pakistan, Malaysia and other countries to fund marches and protests
demanding free entry for the Rohingya into these countries.
OPERATION ASSAM
Operation “Kashmir 1989 in Assam 2019” is assisted by the ease with
which the Rohingya, as well as others from Bangladesh can infiltrate the
state. Four districts (Dhubri, Cachar, Karimganj and South Salmara)
share a border with Bangladesh. Because of delay in fencing the borders
of Tripura and Meghalaya, despite a security alert in both locations,
these two states have also witnessed a large influx of migrants from
Bangladesh, including several Rohingya. Since al-Zawahiri’s call,
efforts by Wahhabi organisations to poison the communal atmosphere in
parts of eastern India, so that it approximates the situation in Kashmir
(where members of a particular community have almost entirely been
driven out), have been unceasing. An example is a WhatsApp message
asking for “1 crore 21 lakh Muslims to come out on the roads (of Assam)
on November 27 (to stop) harassment of (Bangladeshi) Muslims. If we do
not unite in time we will all have to die like in Myanmar. Come with
your father and mother onto the roads.” The objective of such rants is
to stop a planned de-regularisation and possible deportation of several
million illegal Bangladeshi migrants. These are at risk of being outed
by the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The call of groups
sympathetic to radical elements is to not only allow free migration from
Bangladesh into India, but ensure that an estimated six-million-plus
illegal migrants now resident in Assam (and countless others in Bengal)
be given full rights and papers of Indian citizenship. A few
organisations are in the lead in organising such moves. Across the
state, inflammatory material is being distributed that warn of an
imaginary plan by Central and state authorities to “lynch and murder
members of the minority community”.
Fortunately, in India, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are
modern and moderate, and therefore refuse to respond to incendiary calls
to action by groups that subscribe to the Wahhabi doctrine of
exclusivism through violence. Muslims in India are overall wedded to
moderate doctrines such as the Barelvi and have not given way to
Wahhabism the way it has been the case in Pakistan, and to a lesser
extent in Bangladesh and Indonesia as well. However, funding from
Wahhabis outside the country has resulted in several theological
institutions and educational establishments getting set up in Bengal and
Assam, where credulous students sometimes believe in the exclusivist
teachings fed to them by teachers with links to extremist ideologies.
The good news is that both Bengal and Assam have a tradition of
tolerance and mutual respect, hence it is proving to be difficult for
the ISI to recruit enough fanatic cadre so as to carry out its plans for
eastern India. However, because of the plans put into operation by the
ISI, an atmosphere of fear, panic and hatred is being sought to be
created by organisations linked to Al Qaeda and its associates
(including the ISI, which sheltered Osama bin Laden and still does Ayman
al Zawahiri).
Despite the threat of inciting mobs of illegal migrants in their
hundreds of thousands, the state government in Assam is on track to
carry out a scientific assessment designed to locate illegal migrants,
who have bribed or tricked their way (through false and forged papers)
into Assam. Although Indian citizens have nothing to fear from the
ongoing preparation of a National Register of Citizens in Assam,
increasing efforts are being made by the ISI and its auxiliaries that
are designed to mislead them into joining agitations sponsored by
external interests. The proposed mass manifestation on 27 November is
regarded by such entities as a dress rehearsal for launching an
operation designed to turn selected parts of Assam in 2019 into what
Kashmir was allowed to become from 1989 onwards. Hopefully, the ISI-Al
Qaeda operation will end in failure, rather than convert Assam into the
cauldron that the Pakistan army made parts of Kashmir for many decades.
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