The Islamist bombings of Christian churches across Sri Lanka and the tragic loss of innocent lives – 253 at the last count, with 15 more to be added in the final security assault on the terrorist hideout – has awakened the country’s authorities from their traditional slumbers. The apology issued by the President’s Office revealed the gravity of the existential crisis facing the island nation. Government has long been a house divided: President Maithripala Sirisena pitted his authority against that of the democratically elected power of Prime Minister Ranil Wickramesinghe. Administration was in limbo, with the government’s Security Council failng to convene when called upon to do by the Prime Minister, who was thus kept in the dark about the dire warnings emanating from foreign intelligence services, one of them from neighbouring India. There have been sackings of key civil servants and senior police officials, but such actions cannot account for the lapses of politicians in power. Scapegoats cannot be substitutes for the real villains.
For far too long, the country’s Sinhala establishment has trained its sights on the minority Tamil community. This ethnic divide is truly alarming. The revelation that the mastermind of the bombings was one of the country’s largest and most influential businessman, Zahran Hakim, whose factories manufactured the deadly devices that wrought such havoc, should be a wakeup call. Such activity took place over many months and was closely supervised and coordinated at every step of the way under the very noses of the police. The tentacles of the local jihadi group which has claimed responsibility for these murderous assaults, it now turns out, were linked to Islamic State, operating out of Iraq and Syria and other pockets of the Greater Middle East. The story does not, and cannot, end there. International scrutiny of the jihadi phenomenon must be wide as well as deep, if we are to tackle the sources of jihadi terrorism. Copious funds emanate principally from the Arab world, notably from the conservative reactionary monarchies of the Gulf, headed by the House of Saud, the heart of Wahabbi Islam and beyoud. Mosques across the Muslim world preaching its nefarious doctrines, have become platforms for hate and intolerance.
The carefully calibrated myth that Islamic extremism is incubated in poverty and ignorance has to be dispelled. The aerial attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington were carried out by planes piloted by terrorists with advanced engineering qualifications. The most notorious terrorist attacks in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, were the work of rich jihadis with degrees from US universities.
Beguiling Islamic faces on international TV channels keep yapping away on the perils of Islamophobia, even as Islamist bombers target children at a Manchester pop concert, blow up pubs in London, or enter the premises of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and shoot dead the entire editorial staff. Such deeds are crimes against humanity. The bombings in Mumbai in March 1993 and November 2008 by Pakistan-sponsored jihadis fall into a similar category. Hundreds of people died during these assaults. Expressions of outrage are not Islamophobia but simple disgust.
We come, thereafter, to Western culpability. The US,UK and France turn a blind eye to the role of Saudi Arabia, thanks to the mega arms deals the monarchy regularly signs up to with its benefactors in Washington, London and Paris. Terror groups, for a time, were given sanctuary in the UK provided they confined their activities to third countries, with Russia the major target. Attacks in Moscow and the Beslan killing of children were viewed by the mainstream American and British press with grim satisfaction – a cynical and dangerous game, with the jihadi monster turning on those who once succoured it. China does much the same with India, giving Pakistan a certificate of innocence.
We return to the events in Sri Lanka and the possibility of a spill-over into India. South India, especially Kerala, is on red alert, as IS operatives are known to exist there. Indian intelligence sleuths have raided a number of sites of known suspects. Farther away in the Kolkata diocese of the Church of North India, clerics sought special police protection in the wake of the Sri Lankan bombings. Bishop Probal Dutta said he was overwhelmed by the prompt police response at all the city’s major churches, each part of its cherished cultural landscape. As he spoke, the Kolkata’s venerable Armenian Christian community held a memorial service to Armenians who perished in the Turkish genocide during the First World War. There has never been any atonement for this dreadful deed by Turkish governments, past and present. The scorge of Islamist terrorism is a continuing menace to civilized societies.
Iran exception to Saudi rule
The standard set for Iran does not apply to Saudi Arabia. Such appears to be the message of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. While excoriating Iran for its lack of democracy and human rights and its alleged support for Islamist Jihadi terrorism, international news agencies reported 37 beheadings – mostly of Shia - in Saudi Arabia, which engages in an interventionist war in neighbouring Yemen, which, according to the UN, is the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in modern times, as men, women and children starve to death or parish from lack of medicare. Money, it appears, is the ultimate arbiter in such matters. President Trump flaunts the arms contact with Saudi Arabia, which, he claims, guarantees American jobs, Prime Minister May assures the British public Her Majesty’s Government takes every precaution to safeguard innocent lives on the ground, President Macron does much the same in France.
The US pronouncement on Iran comes with the threat of US sanctions against any country purchasing Iranian oil. That includes India, although a senior State Department official, visiting New Delhi, informed her hosts somewhat kindly that Indian help in building the Iranian port of Chabahar could go ahead without US demur.
The Indian print media, accustomed to dancing to every US tune was chuffed about Chabahar but neurotic about the threated oil sanctions. None of these papers, alas, pointed out that sanctions without an UN imprimatur lacked legitimacy in International Law. US exception to every rule of international law is considered par for the course, and cast aside with impunity.
No rule-based order can exist or survive on the caprice of a single state or group of states. What is at stake is a multipolar global order. What emerges is the vision of an unilateral order obedient to the whim and fancy of a sole self appointed guardian. What India is obliged to do is tell the United States respectfully that as a sovereign state she has the inviolable right to behave as one. Is The first loyalty of any Indian government is to the country’s own Constitution. In other words is India to be a banana republic on the central American model, to kowtow to Washington in the abject manner European Union, or as others of the ‘free world’ choose to do. Hopefully Indian pride and self respect will prevail. India will trade with Iran in its national interest, and in accordance with the provisions of the UN Charter. That said, India should face the threat of US sanctions as the part of the pains of labour that come with true sovereignty and not some counterfeit imitation. Superpower diktat has ceased to be in harmony with the spirit of the age.
Man for all seasons, for all time
William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon and died in 1616. He wrote 38 plays and composed 154 sonnets. He bestrode England the world as a literary colossus without peer whose light has shone brightly across the centuries, his works translated into almost every known tongue for pleasure and profit to the mind and spirit.
In India, Shakespeare’s plays have been an inspiration in the renditions of Bollywood cinema. Likewise, in Bengal, where the great Sanskrit/Bengali scholar and social reformer Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar’s play Branti Bilash (1869) was a Bengali adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.
With Calcutta the capital of the Raj, theatres sprang up in the city from 1775 and Shakespeare was performed in the original. After Independence the Bengali stage actor Utpal Dutt played in a number of Shakespeare plays directed by Geoffrey Kendal. Dutt’s Little Theatre performed some of the plays in the original. However, as a Shakespeare enthusiast, Dutt translated Shakespeare for the Bengali stage in the metropolis, then took his troupe to rural Bengal. Shakespeare is among the foremost legacies of the British presence in India. Long may these endure.
