On June 20, 2022, Hari Bhushan Thakur Bachaul, a habitual spewer of hateful anti-minority venom, used the term “Jihadi” to describe youth protesting the Agnipath scheme for army recruitment. “Jihad” is a vilified term that originally means Muslims who carry out a holy war as sacred duty, and has been often used by Islamophobes in an attempt to demonise the minority community. Though he has made remarks targeting Muslims in the past as well, his intentions appear to me more sinister this time.

Given how the outbreak of violence during the Agnipath protests took place shortly after the anti-Nupur Sharma protests that were led by the Muslim community, one wonders if Bachaul is trying to conflate the identities of all protesters, so that it comes easier to dehumanise, demonise and hate them.

What did Bachaul say?

According to the The Times of India Bahaul, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Bisfi, said, “Who are indulging in violence? Those involved are the ‘jihadi’ people and also the ‘samikaranvadi log’ (people who believe in forging political equations to form a government).” Bachol further said, “Those who are desperate to form government by hook or crook are behind the violence,” referring to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) without actually naming it specifically. He continued, “However, youths who nurse ‘desh prem’ and are ready to sacrifice themselves for it are happy (with the Agnipath scheme).”

Bachaul’s previous hate offenses

Hari Bhushan Bachaul is a habitual hatea offender against whom the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) had complained to the National Commission for Minorities in May 2022. In May 2022, Haribhushan Thakur Bachaul’s statements, telecast on a video uploaded by News 24, he had openly compared Muslims to demons and called for them to be set ablaze… something that is in effect an open call for genocide of members of the Muslim minority.

While speaking to news reporters, comparing Muslims to demons like Ravan (the chief antagonist of the Hindu epic Ramayan), Bachaul had said, “We need Hanuman ji so that our youth can be strong, and the people of our country can be strong. Just like Ravana’s Lanka was burnt by Hanuman ji, the demon-like Ravanas, who are hovering over Bihar and the country, should also be burnt.”  

CJP’s complaint had pointed out how this statement was a clear violation of Indian criminal law. Acting on CJP’s complaint, NCM had written to the Director General of Police (DGP) Bihar to act within 21 days.

Going into the background of the MLA from the party that rules in the Central government and is an alliance partner in the Bihar government, the complaint also spotlighted the earlier, derogatory remarks made by Bachaul in February this year stating that Muslims living in India should be stripped of voting rights and treated as second class citizens. He said, “In 1947, the country [India] was divided in the name of religion and they got another country [Pakistan]. They should go to another country. If they are living here, then I demand from the government that their voting rights be withdrawn. They [Muslims] can live in India as second-class citizens.”

Again, also highlighting another incident from last year where he makes remarks on Muslims fertility rate, the CJP complaint contains a detailed documentation of his hate-filled conduct. The legislator was caught in 2021 saying, “Muslims want to convert India into an Islamic state. Law should be brought to control the population in the country. The resources in the country are very limited but some people want to increase the population and capture and turn India into an Islamic country. Muslim community is indulging into this. It is important to control the population in order to make India into a developed country from a developing country.”

Will this affect political equations?

On June 20, while commenting on the protesters who are agitated over the Agnipath scheme, he not only termed them “jihadis” but also slandered the opposition RJD. Both the RJD and also the BJP’s ally in Bihar, HAM(S) have, since criticised his remarks. Without naming the political parties, but broadly meaning RJD and like-minded parties, Bachaul also said that it was the handiwork of “people who believe in forging equations to desperately form governments.”

He did not spare even the BJP ally JD(U) and said its national president Rajiv Ranjan alias Lalan Singh and parliamentary board chairman Upendra Kushwaha also fanned the violence of the Army aspirants by making their anti-Agnipath remarks.

The constituency from where Bachaul has been elected in 2020 falls in the Madhubani district. He won the seat in 2020, defeating Da. Faiyaz Ahmad of the RJD by a margin of 10241 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP candidate Ashok Kumar Yadav won from Madhubani Lok Sabha (MP) seat with the margin of 4,54,940 votes by defeating Badri Kumar Purbey of the Vikassheel Insaan Party.

Related:

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Apply more stringent sections in FIR against Bajrang Muni Das: CJP to UP DGP
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CJP urges DGP Haryana to act against cow vigilantes in Mewat, Haryana

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In plain sight of my unsuspecting family, I was radicalised during my teenage years. It did not matter that I lived a privileged life — not all terrorists fit the stereotype of poor, illiterate people who have nothing to lose.

The events changed my life, and would have ended it were it not for divine intervention. What I realised was that anyone can be systemically brainwashed to the point of committing violence.

How did it happen? How does someone growing up with a silver spoon connect with an ideology of anger and hate?

13-year-old me in 1997-98, during a visit to my house (under construction at the time) in Lahore.

Where it all begins
In the late 1990s, my family moved back to Lahore from Saudi Arabia. I was enrolled at an elite boarding school, where I would meet our 9th grade Islamic Studies teacher, a stocky man with a flowing orange beard, always dressed in a spotless white shalwar kameez and a black waistcoat.

He claimed to have fought against the Soviets in the 80s. He regaled us with stories from his time as a Mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan. His lectures had little to do with our syllabus, and included colourful, emotional sermons on the devilry of Hindus, Christians and Jews, as well as Sufis, Shias, Ahmadis, and whoever he considered to be heretics, polytheists and kafirs.

For him, fighting the enemies of Islam was our divinely ordained duty. If we did not strike the heretics down wherever we found them, we were no better than men who ‘wear mehendi on their feet and bangles on our wrists’, that is, we were no better than women.

He termed this blanket call for violence in the name of honour as ‘jihad’.

For 13-year-old me, this message was inspiring. I was also insulted by his labels — I was not at all womanly, and I certainly did not own any bangles.

He instigated my sense of honour, and this was enough to spur me into action.

It took only a month for me to go up to him and ask how I could further the cause of jihad. He suggested donating money. If I could spare 10 rupees for Allah, I could buy a bullet that would tear through a kafir’s chest in Kashmir.
I started giving him whatever meagre sum I could, before spending the rest of my pocket money at the canteen. Rs50, Rs10, Rs5 — he had promised me I would receive a portion of the bullet’s 'sawab' .

Then, I wanted to learn more. My teacher offered me books if I was willing to pay for them. I could not read Urdu well, so I delved into the English translation of the Holy Quran and the Sahih Bukhari (a collection of hadith).

But balancing daily reading school work wasn’t enough for a teenager infatuated by the idea of martyrdom. Eventually, I found myself before my teacher, expressing my decision to go fight the infidels in Kashmir.

He did not respond immediately and put me off for another few weeks. I went to him several times until he agreed.

The plan was this: on the last day of school, I would leave for the training camp in AJK. I was to bring Rs700 and meet my teacher at his house. We would then go to the bus station at Minar-i-Pakistan, where I would be joined by a travelling partner.

Once I reached the camp, I was to write a letter to my parents informing them of my decision, and of my desire to embrace martyrdom in the way of jihad.

Divine intervention
As fate would have it, my grandmother fell gravely ill the night before I was to leave. It was perhaps the last day before the Eid break, or the winter break, and I reached my hostel room to see my family already there, waiting for me.

My belongings were packed and ready and we immediately left for the hospital. My grandmother had contracted an incurable strain of Hepatitis C from a routine injection at the hospital, and survived the next few months in extreme pain. Greatly distracted by her illness, my parents decided I would commute to school from home for the rest of the school year.

I began living at home.

The tragedy wreaked havoc on my mother's emotional state, and it became a difficult time for my family. In such a state of sadness and loss, I could not leave them. In any case I had little time to myself on campus to consider meeting my teacher.

Somehow, someway, I kept putting off my trip to his house.
By the time my summer vacations ended, I had shelved my plans of leaving for jihad completely.

Finding my way to jihad
The spirit of what I knew then to be ‘jihad’ stayed with me and still shapes my life to this day.

There was an empowering sense of purity and certainty in my connection to the source of absolute truth. I felt mercy and forgiveness radiating from the Quran and the hadith, especially when I read them in a language I could understand.
Most of all, I felt fulfilled: I was aware of the Creator in the smallest details and happenings of life.

But there was much that I now know to be gravely misguided. I was made to feel disdain against those who chose ‘inferior’ beliefs; I dehumanised those I wanted to fight, and I belittled the act of taking a life to the point where it seemed like nothing at all — like brushing away a troublesome insect.

When I realised that I had once walked a dangerous path, filled with both darkness and light, I tried to read and learn as much as I could to answer my questions and seek out the truth. I must report that every answer has led me to even more questions, and I have learned just enough to know that I know nothing.

I have come to see Islam as a vast ocean of knowledge, an expanse of philosophy, wisdom and truth, and in my sinful life so far I have just barely scratched the surface.

I cannot claim to be any kind of expert, but as a seeker and a student, it is evident to me that the extreme reduction of Islam to a list of do’s and dont’s is a great corruption of our religion. Perhaps it is the real cause behind how Muslims are now split into so many hostile divisions with mutual hatred and enmity.

In the years since my failed attempt at joining a training camp, I have felt the call of what I now believe is the real jihad.

I have worked in multiple careers; financial services, telecom, advertising, publishing, and even as a part-time debate coach at my alma mater. But each time, even after settling into a career, I have left the path in front of me to begin a new one. I have been restless, unable to find satisfaction or peace in worldly pursuits.

After December 16, 2014, my heart once against felt this long-forgotten call to jihad. This time the pull was irresistible. I could not go back to the way things were, and relieved myself from corporate responsibilities completely.

I decided instead to focus full-time on a new mission: addressing the problem of religious extremism in our society.

Now, I write stories and comic books for schoolchildren. My series highlight the issue of religious extremism, in the hope of getting children to reject the toxic hatred society exposes us to.

I do this because I hold myself partly responsible for all the innocent men, women and children who have lost their lives in terrorist attacks.

I do this because I am indebted to those who have sacrificed themselves to protect us, and because I wish to be of service to the unnamed millions who continue to be misled into a false, hateful form of religion rather than the pure and everlasting truth of Islam.

For those of you who have made it this far in this very long post, I hope you have felt a calling as well. If you do feel the call, first learn, then do as you see fit to the best of your ability and position.

This is a dangerous time for those who dare to speak the truth, so if you can take action or speak out, you too must play your part.
I do this because I cannot stand by while another 16-year-old is brainwashed into thinking he will go to heaven for killing a 12-year-old, is then labeled a ‘terrorist’ to be shot by his own kind, or blown up by a drone fired by a foreign country.

I do this because tomorrow, if God forbid one of your children or loved one is harmed, I don’t want to look in the mirror and realise that I could have done something, said something to stop it.

This article was first published in Dawn.com and is being re-published with permission

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For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less sharply. The heads of state of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and extremists.
 

But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions. One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.
 

Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.
 

A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political behaviour have broken down and new ones are yet to be defined. Catapulted into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral supposition — the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of which is not interchangeable.
 

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it, and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the perpetrators. The demented, suicidal, fury of the attackers led to heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by which people can communicate.
 

Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that?

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it.

Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism" and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance, fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea of missile defence systems.
 

But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed with no more than knives and box–cutters have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be protected — a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan. Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.
 

Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people".
 

It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIA’s misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?
 

If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, secretary Colin Powell has promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist attack.
 

This is not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and promote never–ending tit–for–tat killings.
 

Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those that it has grievously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalisation.
 

But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour. There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch–conservative head of Pakistan’s Jamaat–i–Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a "pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries.
 

One hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be. The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large, chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings.
 

This is not an argument for doing away with one’s Muslim identity. But, without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business being there.
 

To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror, to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular species is far from guaranteed.

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 1

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