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Terrorist organizations have used and abused the Kashmir issue for years, to cause tension between India and Pakistan. Like the Palestinian cause, Kashmir has become a “football” – terrorists continue to kick it around, promoting violence and mistrust in the region. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the prime suspect in the Mumbai bombings, is one such terrorist group that abuses the Kashmir issue to incite violence.
Along with the organizations that play up Kashmir, there are a number of terrorist organizations in India and Pakistan that use religion, language or political ideology as a tool to further violence. The environment of mistrust created by these organizations is fostering terrorism in the region. Other factors contributing to the problem are a growing arms race in South Asia and widespread poverty.
India, a country of more than 1 billion people with a long history of achievement in the arts, philosophy, music and science, has been lagging behind in providing even basic facilities to its citizens. In the capital, New Delhi, there are slums large enough to be a city – without running water, electricity or a sewage management system.
The city of Mumbai – the financial heart of India – has the world’s largest slum where people get by without clean drinking water, living in huts with bare floors and cardboard boxes for roofs. Around India, there are pockets of desperation where one is lucky to see the next day.
Bangalore is India’s information technology boom town, but for those in the remote villages of Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh states, life hasn’t changed much. Every year is the same, and the government doesn’t seem to care.
Poverty is potent ammunition, and unfortunately India continues to ignore the trouble brewing within. When you have millions of people angry at the way their lives are treated as “unnecessary,” terrorism has found a perfect breeding ground. It is no surprise that Lashkar and other militant groups, including the Indian Maoists, are rapidly growing in poor villages of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar states.
Add to the desperate poverty the growing arms race in the region. India and Pakistan, home to millions of poor, spend billions of dollars every year trying to stack up the latest and greatest weapons in the world. In 2006 alone, India bought US$1.6 billion worth of weapons from Israel alone. It also spent substantial amounts of money to buy military equipment from Russia and the United States.
It is naïve to think that the war on terror can be won without sophisticated equipment, but it is obscene for India to spend billions on weapons and ignore the plight of its poor. The country spends about 18 percent of its annual budget on defense, while healthcare and education get a measly 5-6 percent.
Pakistan is not far behind. According to Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in national defense with the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service, “In 2006, the United States signed arms transfer agreements with Pakistan in excess of $3.5 billion, ranking Pakistan first among all arms clients of the United States during that calendar year.”
Arms trade aids terrorists by diverting funds that could be used to aid the poor and build the country’s infrastructure, thereby increasing the number of those angry at their government and vulnerable enough to be recruited by the terrorists.
It also arms the terrorists, indirectly. When the security forces clash with terrorists, if they lose the particular encounter or when their storage facility is attacked or because of corruption, the terrorists are also able to lay their hands on the sophisticated weapons. The cycle of violence and poverty thus goes on.
When India and Pakistan do sit down to take that long hard look at the Mumbai attacks and why they are home to so many domestic terrorist organizations, I hope they come up with plans to attack both poverty and the out-of-control arms race. Terrorism cannot be stopped by weapons alone.
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(Bhumika Ghimire is a freelance reporter. Her articles have been published at OhMyNews, NepalNews, Toward Freedom, Telegraph Nepal, Himal South Asian and ACM Ubiquity. She is also a regular contributor to News Front Weekly, in Kathmandu, and Nepal Abroad, in Washington D.C. She can be reached at bhumika_g@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Bhumika Ghimire.)
