Nightmare in Dhaka

Dhaka had a bad night on Friday. Twenty hostages were killed in the most chilling fashion in a downtown café. There has never been such an attack in Bangladesh though at least 50 secularists, Hindus, Buddhists and Shias have been hacked to death in the last couple of years. The warring ladies of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina and Khalida Zia, had created a political vacuum in Bangladesh, allowing extremists to set up shop. They thus undid all the splendid work done in the past in routing extremists who had gained enough muscle to simultaneously explode 500 bombs in all but one of Bangladesh's 64 districts. It has been downhill since then for Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina taking to judicial hangings of several hardline leaders for their complicity with the Pakistan Army in 1971. On a parallel track, the extremists kept on plying their deadly trade.

For India, a big concern will be whether the ISIS threat in the subcontinent is for real or are these disaffected Muslim youths with perverted minds taking to violence? For the uninitiated, the ISIS is a Sunni-only organisation focused on resurrecting the medieval empire of Khorasan consisting of parts of Iraq, Syria and Central Asia. It has succeeded only in places where the authority of the state has withered. Bangladesh on the other hand has a vibrant civil society and a capable army. But the country badly needs political reconciliation to effectively counter the space for politics of violence. 

In India, political Hindutva's anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence with the `92 Babri Masjid demolition and the 2002 riots has spawned sporadic counter mobilisation and given grist to the mills of those poisoning young minds in the name of Islam. Besides, India's population mix with the Sunnis in a minority is not a conducive ground for the ISIS to attempt an Iraq, Syria or a Libya. It appears that like the attacks in the US and Europe, a small section of radicalised Muslim youth in Bangladesh has adopted a similar path. In India, the need is to go beyond beefing up security and rounding up youngsters by stepping up deradicalisation measures.