India

dhumejihadinsouthasia

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Ayesha Jalal, Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $29.95

The November assault on Mumbai by ten heavily-armed members of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba came as a reminder, if one was needed, of South Asia’s trouble with radical Islam. Home to about a third of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the region also houses a plethora of violent groups committed to imposing an austere interpretation of their faith on believers and non-believers alike. Many of these—including the L-e-T and its occasional partner-in arms, Jaish-e-Mohammed—sprung up only in the 1990s. But as Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistan-born historian who teaches at Tufts University in Massachusetts, points out in her new book, in South Asia the intellectual pedigree for violence committed in the name of faith stretches back not decades but centuries.

At the heart of Partisans of Allah is an earnest attempt to understand the concept of jihad. In common parlance it means holy war against non-Muslims, but the word itself—as Ms. Jalal takes great pains to stress—simply signifies striving for a worthy or ennobling cause. Indeed, according to Ms. Jalal, jihad is the core principle of Islamic ethics. At least in theory, it encompasses more than suicide attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir or truck bombs targeting luxury hotels. A student’s endeavor to read a book, a patient’s suffering in a hospital, or a farmer’s effort to increase his crop yield may all be construed as types of jihad.

Usually, this sort of sophistry is the province of apologists for radical Islamic violence eager to explain it away as antithetical to the spirit of the faith. At times Ms. Jalal tilts in this direction—the word “infidel” is used without irony, and a tinge of hagiography enters her description of a group of 19th-century jihadists who fought the Sikhs in the Northwest Frontier. However, to her credit, Ms. Jalal is not concerned with whitewashing the less savory interpretations of jihad, but with ensuring that the term is understood with all its nuance, and in a proper historical context.

Toward this effort, a parade of theologians, scholars and legists pass across the book’s pages. In the 16th century, the liberal policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar—who abolished discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims and strove to treat all faiths equally—earned the ire of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Sirhindi claimed that Islam and Hinduism were fundamentally incompatible, and that one could flourish only at the expense of the other. A prolific letter writer and a widely respected Sufi scholar, Sirhindi is credited with the revival of orthodox Islamic practice in India after Akbar’s death.

Of a similar cast of mind was Delhi’s Shah Waliullah (1703-62), the most influential Islamic scholar of his time. His blueprint to extend Islamic law outwards from the family to the local polity to (eventually) the world resonates with radical Muslims to this day. Waliullah shared teachers in what is today Saudi Arabia with Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the austere strain of Islam that bears his name. Waliullah believed in a vast Hindu and Shia conspiracy against Sunni orthodoxy, and sought to ban both the Hindu festival of color, Holi, and Muharram, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Waliullah popularized a saying of the prophet according to which participating in jihad was superior to fasting or praying for a month. In a similar vein, extrapolating from the history of seventh-century Arabia, Waliullah declared war booty legitimate for Muslims.

The cleric’s influence outlived him by centuries. Between 1826 and 1831, Waliullah’s most famous disciple, Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly in north India, led a bloody, though ultimately unsuccessful, jihad in the Northwest frontier against the Sikhs. Even today, Ahmad’s grave is a sacred site visited regularly by modern day jihadists, who have declared war on, among other things, film, music and education for girls.

It was only under British colonial rule—under attack from both Western scholars and Christian missionaries—that prominent Indian Muslims began to reinterpret jihad in less violent terms. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), the erudite founder of Aligarh’s famous Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental college, argued that Muslims owed their loyalty to the Raj as long as their religious practices were not interfered with. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, felt that jihad as warfare against non-believers had lost its relevance in the modern world, and only contributed toward tarnishing the image of Islam. The Ahmadiyyas instead channeled their efforts toward good works, especially education.

At the outset, Ms. Jalal sets out to breach what she calls the “artificial walls” separating an academic and a general readership. In this, unfortunately, she fails. A potentially gripping read is turned into drudgery by a prose style both dry and somewhat discombobulated. The exception is Ms. Jalal’s examination of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), who—along with the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood—is widely regarded as the 20th century’s preeminent radical Islamic ideologue.

An admirer of Waliullah, Maududi too believed that warfare for Islam was an exalted form of piety—that fighting resolutely on the battlefield was superior to staying home and praying for 60 years. He saw Islam as a “revolutionary ideology,” which seeks to “alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” The faith’s violent history was nothing to be apologetic about. Indeed Islam’s strength lay in the sword’s ability to tear away the veil of misunderstanding that characterizes non-Muslims. For Maududi, art, painting and music belong to jahiliyya, the state of barbarism Muslims ascribe to pre-Islamic Arabs. Apostasy from Islam was akin to treason and therefore punishable by death.

Like Islamic radicals everywhere, Maududi was obsessed with keeping women in their proper place. They were to be respected, but only in the role of nurturing mother, doting sister, devoted wife or dutiful daughter. He believed that menstruation made women physically and mentally infirm, and that they must be excluded from the public sphere altogether. Non-Muslims, inherently unreliable, had no place in the administration of the Islamic state.

In 1953, barely six years after the creation of Pakistan, Maududi joined an agitation to have Ahmadiyyas declared non-Muslim. Their alleged crimes: the veneration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, albeit a lesser one than Mohammed, and the rejection of armed jihad. In 1974, five years before he died, Maududi witnessed the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, eager to co-opt the radical Islamic element in Pakistani society, finally accede to his demands.

As a work of scholarship, Partisans of Allah is not meant to be prescriptive, but its subject matter places it squarely at the heart of the policy debate on how best to handle the rise of radical Islam. For one, it debunks the notion—especially popular on the left—that radical Islamic violence can be explained entirely in the secular language of historical injustice, territorial boundaries and political aspirations. In fact, religious ideas, as attested to by the continuing influence of Waliullah and Maududi, matter profoundly.

Second, and again contrary to conventional wisdom, criticism and firmness will do more than praise and concessions on points of principle to ensure that a modern, good neighborly interpretation of Islam triumphs over the radical Islamic alternative. It’s no coincidence that British rule fostered the relatively moderate Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whereas 60 years of Pakistani independence have thrown up the likes of Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the L-e-T and Masood Azhar of the J-e-M.

Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

YaleGlobal

Global economic integration depends largely on how India and the world deal with Pakistan and its radical Islam.

Sadanand Dhume

	The face of nihilism: Mumbai’s iconic Taj hotel burns after terror attack: captured attacker (inset), alleged Pakistani member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Ajmal Amir Kasab

NEW DELHI: Even for India, which typically loses many more lives to terrorism in a year than most countries do in a decade, the November 26-28 attacks on Mumbai marked a watershed. For the first time, foreigners – Americans, Japanese, Israelis and Germans, among others – were among the nearly 200 dead and 295 wounded. The scale of the attacks, carried out in 10 places by 10 heavily armed jihadists, made the 2001 terrorist assault on India’s parliament appear almost trivial by comparison. In its audacity and ruthlessness, as well as in the wall-to-wall international coverage it attracted, the assault on Mumbai brought to mind 9/11 in New York and Washington, the bloody Chechen takeover of a school in Beslan in 2004 and the 2005 London suicide bombings.

In many ways, the victims of the carnage in Mumbai represent the integration of markets, peoples and ideas captured by that catchall word – globalization. Both the hotels attacked, the Taj and the Oberoi, are mainstays of high-end business travel. If a global icon – say Bono or Bill Gates or Bill Clinton – has spent a night in India’s financial capital, odds are that he stayed in one or the other. The nearby Nariman House, home to the local branch of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox Jewish movement, served as an informal way station for young Israelis, familiar figures on the tourist trails of Asia. Leopold Cafe, where jihadists lobbed a hand grenade and sprayed diners with automatic weapon fire, has long been a backpacker favorite. All in all, the odds of the victims having multiple entry stamps in their passports, friends from more than one country on Facebook and a credit card welcome across borders in their wallets were incomparably higher than in any previous terrorist attack in India.

If the city of Mumbai symbolizes the hopeful face of globalization in South Asia – standing for pluralism, enterprise and openness to ideas and investment – then the Pakistan-trained jihadists responsible for the carnage represent its darker twin. Carved out of British India in 1947 as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan has long been a magnet for pan-Islamic radicals from around the world, among them Abdullah Azzam (1941-89), the ideological father of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their comrade in arms Mullah Omar of the Taliban. A plethora of local groups, among them Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected to be behind the Mumbai attacks, one of whose alleged operatives, Ajmal Amir Kasab, was captured by Indian authorities, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, though organizationally distinct from Al Qaeda, share the same toxic ideology. The L-e-T was among the jihadist groups that banded together in 1998 under the umbrella of bin Laden’s Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

Along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the world’s pre-eminent exporter of radical Sunni fervor. The country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), part of the army, in a sense pioneered the yoking together of modern-weapons training with pan-Islamic religious brainwashing, albeit initially with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. Many Pakistanis are moderate; nonetheless sympathy for radical Islam runs deep. A 2007 poll showed bin Laden with an approval rating of 46 percent, higher than that of many of Pakistani politicians. The radical Islamic outlook – obsessed with the glories of Islamic civilization, hostile toward non-Muslims and non-conformist women, and convinced that Jews and Americans are perpetually plotting against their faith – is shared by many who may formally disapprove of Al Qaeda’s tactics.

Until the most recent incidents in Mumbai, the consensus view in both New Delhi and Washington was that India – with its robust democracy, large middle class and world-beating companies – could sprint toward development despite its dysfunctional neighbor. But the capacity of a handful of terrorists to paralyze life in Mumbai and inflict several billion dollars worth of damage raise profound questions about the basic premise underlying India’s reach for great power status. It should give pause to even the hardiest optimist. Put simply, the world can no longer be certain that a failing Pakistan won’t take India down with it or, at the very least, hobble its efforts to catch up with East Asia.

For India, then, the challenge is not merely to do a better job of combating terrorism within its borders, or to attempt to assuage public anger through a token diplomatic tit-for-tat. New Delhi must also find a way to work with the international community to change the very nature of the Pakistani state. A good neighborly Pakistan will be one that does more than make appropriate noises after every fresh terrorist outrage. It will be a country that holds itself responsible for acts of violence originating on its soil, renounces grandiose extra-territorial ambitions in Indian Kashmir and Afghanistan, and focuses its energies on improving the abysmal levels of health care and education that rank it 136th of 177 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index.

A minimal first step will be to show good faith in what Islamabad now calls a shared fight against terrorism by handing over to Indian authorities Pakistan residents with civilian blood on their hands. Heading the list: the L-e-T leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and the Indian mafia don Dawood Ibrahim, a Karachi resident who orchestrated the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250 people. Ibrahim is also suspected of using his underworld network to aid the most recent attacks. Terrorist camps on Pakistan territory, including those in the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir, must be closed in a way that is verifiable by the international community. Madrassas that have long stoked radicalism in the region – including Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Darul Uloom Haqqania outside Peshawar – must be given a credible ultimatum to either reform or be shuttered.

None of this is possible without dollops of international aid. But aid alone, however well-intentioned, cannot alleviate the problem unless properly directed. More pressing than the need for health clinics and new schools, or even support for Pakistan’s shaky democratic institutions, is military and educational reform. Over the medium to long term, Pakistan must cease to be what the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has called a “garrison state.” Though the country spends a relatively modest 3.2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, according to Ayesha Siddiqua, an expert on the Pakistan military, its budget, official and unofficial, accounts for as much as 30 percent of government spending. Its army is beyond the control of its putative civilian masters, and reforming or re-orienting the ISI will be impossible as long as Pakistan’s generals continue to wield the kind of clout and wealth that would make a 1970s Latin American strongman blush.

Education reform will have to go much deeper than providing sorely needed infrastructure and boosting enrollment, especially among girls – only about one in three Pakistani women can read and write. The world needs to understand how Pakistanis view history, and find a way to strike a balance between a justified pride in Islam and a celebration of militarism and conquest. Madrassa students ought to be exposed to art, music and literature to see a world beyond the black and white of Koranic injunctions.

Needless to say, none of these measures are easy to implement. But as the carnage in Mumbai shows, and as jihadists the world over appear to instinctively grasp, our rapidly shrinking planet is not large enough for global capitalism and global radical Islam to exist side by side indefinitely.

Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, DC, and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic,” a travelogue about radical Islam. Click here to read an excerpt. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

The Wall Street Journal

Years of appeasing terrorists has made the problem worse.

By SADANAND DHUME

As the story of the carnage in Mumbai unfolds, it is tempting to dismiss it as merely another sorry episode in India’s flailing effort to combat terrorism. Over the past four years, Islamist groups have struck in New Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, among other places. The death toll from terrorism — not counting at least 119 killed in Mumbai on Wednesday and Thursday — stands at over 4,000, which gives India the dubious distinction of suffering more casualties since 2004 than any country except Iraq.

The attacks highlight India’s particular vulnerability to terrorist violence. But they are also a warning to any country that values what Mumbai symbolizes for Indians: pluralism, enterprise and an open society. Put simply, India’s failure to protect its premier city offers a textbook example for fellow democracies on how not to deal with militant Islam.

The litany of errors is long. Unlike their counterparts in the West, or in East Asia, India’s perpetually squabbling leaders have failed to put national security above partisan politics. The country’s antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Its public discourse on Islam oscillates between crude, anti-Muslim bigotry and mindless sympathy for largely unjustified Muslim grievance-mongering. Its failure to either charm or cow its Islamist-friendly neighbors — Pakistan and Bangladesh — reveals a limited grasp of statecraft.

Finally, India’s inability to modernize its 150-million strong Muslim population, the second largest after Indonesia’s, has spawned a community that is ill-equipped to seize new economic opportunities and susceptible to militant Islam’s faith-based appeal.

To be sure, not all of India’s problems are of its own making. In Pakistan, it has a neighbor founded on the basis of religion, whose government — along with those of Iran and Saudi Arabia — has long been one of the world’s principal exporters of militant Islamic fervor.

Bangladesh also hosts a panoply of jihadist groups. As in Pakistan, public sympathy with the militant Islamic worldview forestalls any meaningful effort against those who regularly use the country as a sanctuary to plan mayhem in India. America’s unsuccessful Pakistan policy — too many carrots and too few sticks — has also contributed to a fundamentally unstable neighborhood.

Nonetheless, the reflexive Indian response to most every act of terrorism is to apportion blame rather than to seek a solution that will prevent, or at least minimize, its recurrence. Even Indonesia — a still-poor Muslim-majority nation where sympathy for militants runs deeper than it does in India — has done an infinitely better job of recognizing that the protection of citizens’ lives is any government’s first responsibility. A superbly trained, federal antiterrorism force called Detachment 88 has ensured that country has not suffered a terrorist attack in more than three years.

By contrast, India’s leaders — who invariably swan around with armed guards paid for by the taxpayer — can’t even agree on a legal framework to keep the country safe. On taking office in 2004, one of the first acts of the ruling Congress Party was to scrap a federal antiterrorism law that strengthened witness protection and enhanced police powers.

The Congress Party has stalled similar state-level legislation in Gujarat, which is ruled by the opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. And it was a Congress government that kowtowed to fundamentalist pressure and made India the first country to ban Mumbai-born Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” in 1988.

The BJP hasn’t exactly distinguished itself either. In 1999, the hijacking of an Indian aircraft to then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan led a BJP government to release three hardened militants, including Omar Sheikh Saeed, the former London School of Economics student who would go on to murder Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

More recently, the BJP, driven by tribal religious solidarity and a penchant for conspiracy theories, has failed to demand the same tough treatment for alleged Hindu terrorists as it does for Muslims. Minor parties, especially those dependent on the Muslim vote, compete to earn fundamentalists’ favor.

In sum, the Indian approach to terrorism has been consistently haphazard and weak-kneed. When faced with fundamentalist demands, India’s democratically elected leaders have regularly preferred caving to confrontation on a point of principle. The country’s institutions and culture have abetted a widespread sense of Muslim separateness from the national mainstream. The country’s diplomats and soldiers have failed to stabilize the neighborhood. The ongoing drama in Mumbai underscores the price both Indians and non-Indians caught unawares must now pay.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

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http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2389148.htm

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The Wall Street Journal Asia

The Trouble with Anita

By SADANAND DHUME

Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India
By Anita Jain
(Bloomsbury, 307 pages, $24.99)

Say you’re a 30-something woman in New York with a life that belongs in “Sex and the City” but a notion of romantic love that wouldn’t be out of place in a Victorian novel. Things haven’t quite worked out with the dashing Argentine who promised to write your name in his heart. The appeal of variety — a tête-à-tête with a French investment banker in a Soho lounge, or boozing it up with a laddish British journalist — has begun to wear thin. Observing the quotidian intimacy of a neck rub between your married friends drives you to tears.

If you happen to be Anita Jain, an Indian-American armed with a degree from Harvard and a resume that includes stints as a journalist in Singapore and Mexico City, you can always try your luck in the land of your forefathers. Or to put it bluntly, as she does: “People commonly go to India to find themselves or to find god, but I went to India to find a husband.”

Imbued with this clarity of purpose — and having landed a job at the Financial Times — Ms. Jain arrives in Delhi in the summer of 2005. Her quest quickly turns into an anthropological excursion. She discovers the pleasures of Grade A Manali hash and Old Monk rum with water. In her spare time, she hangs out with rock aficionados whose primary allegiance is not to God or country but to the Rolling Stones. Ms. Jain’s father, a vivid and endearing presence throughout the book, emigrated from a country where a family on the lower rungs of the middle class would divide a single banana among eight siblings. His daughter returns to a land where Mediterranean bistros serve Chilean white wine or a couple of double vodka-sodas at a fashionable night club can set you back about $20. (Not everything has changed; as Ms. Jain observes, the same amount can pay for the monthly services of a cook.)

Her peculiar status — both insider and outsider — gives Ms. Jain an unusual view of the changes rippling through middle-class India. She detects a welling of cultural self-confidence at a dance club that dedicates Saturday nights exclusively to Hindi songs. She notices — with delicious tartness — that these days it takes a lot less than chronic wife-beating to trigger a divorce; mere temperamental differences will do. On “gay night” at a popular club, she watches rich and poor mingle in a way that would be unthinkable for most of her friends. In the phenomenon of expatriate white women paid by companies to attend polo matches and cocktail parties, she uncovers the vulgarity and longing beneath the veneer of the city’s new wealth.

To her credit, Ms. Jain also turns her dry-eyed gaze inwards. She knows that she is “never the best-looking woman in a room.” She tells a would-be lover that she longs to stop being “this courtesan-type figure — skilled in the art of intelligent conversation and also game for a little bedroom play.” She acknowledges, but does not fetishize, the classic Indian-American lament of not fully belonging to either India or America.

Ms. Jain’s attempts to get hitched are oddly desultory — a casual fling here, a stolen kiss there, a brief tilt at the arranged route when her parents visit from California. At times one can’t help but wonder whether she set out to snag a spouse or merely to chronicle a rollicking search for one.

Either way, it soon becomes apparent that the odds of Ms. Jain finding romantic bliss are awfully slim. The qualities of a fine memoirist — self-deprecating wit, searing honesty — are almost fatally at odds with the measure of self-deception and capacity for subterfuge more common among the few who manage to have it all, the torrid affair with the young rocker and the respectable arranged marriage with the Manhattan investment banker. Ms. Jain is hopelessly sentimental about the idea of love, but unusually alert to its shortcomings in practice. If it were the other way round, she might have had better luck in Delhi’s marriage market. But “Marrying Anita” wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable and entertaining a read.

Mr. Dhume, a former India bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

The Wall Street Journal Asia

OPINION

By Sadanand Dhume

In recent years few countries have changed their public image as dramatically as India. But though pictures of starving peasants and rutted roads have given way to those of svelte supermodels and bustling call centers, in at least one respect India remains more a basketcase than a potential great power. As Friday’s bomb blasts in India’s software capital, Bangalore, and Saturday’s in the industrial city of Ahmedabad show, India is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the scourge of terrorism.

Reuters

Too little, too late: Forensic personnel inspect the site of a bomb blast in Ahmedabad on Sunday, July 27, 2008.

The Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, which killed one and 49 people respectively and cumulatively wounded more than 200, are only the most recent in a spate of attacks. In the past two years terrorists have targeted the northern city of Jaipur, the high-tech hub Hyderabad, the temple town of Varanasi and India’s financial capital, Mumbai.

Officials have pinned the most recent attacks on Indian Mujahedeen, a homegrown group linked to the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami and the banned Students Islamic Movement of India. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh — carved out of British India to create a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims — give shelter and succor to terrorists. But the fact that the most recent attacks were carried out by a made-in-India group shows it’s about time that India comes to terms with its own counterterrorism failings.

Among India’s worst mistakes is that instead of uniting behind the minimal goal of providing security for all citizens, India’s constantly bickering politicians have played football with counterterrorism policy. In 2004, one of the first acts in office of the ruling Congress-led coalition government — at the time supported by Communist allies — was to scrap a national terrorism law that allowed for enhanced witness protection and extended detention of suspects in terrorism cases. This had the twin effects of demoralizing law enforcement agencies and signaling to terrorists that the Indian state lacked fight. The paucity of arrests and convictions in the string of bombings that have followed have only strengthened this perception. For its part, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has stalled the creation of a much-needed federal antiterrorism force.

The problem is that India’s counterterrorism effort falls between two stools. As a democracy, it cannot adopt the heavy-handed but effective measures favored by, say, Russia or China. At the same time, India lacks the sophisticated intelligence and law enforcement capacities that allow European countries such as France, Spain and, of late, even Britain to safeguard individual rights and yet uncover terrorist plots before they are executed.

Yet although this may be an explanation, it’s hardly an excuse given that other countries have surmounted their own counterterrorism hurdles. Even Indonesia, a Muslim-majority nation where public sympathy for terrorism in the name of Islam runs deeper than it does in India, has done an infinitely better job of protecting its citizens. Thanks largely to Detachment 88, a special police unit equipped and trained by Australia and the U.S., it has been nearly three years since the last major terrorist strike on Indonesian soil.

Ultimately, though, terrorism is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The larger question is whether India’s Muslims will embrace modernity like so many of their Turkish, Tunisian and Indonesian co-religionists, or reject it like increasing numbers of their militant cousins in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On this front too India’s leaders have failed to get to the heart of the matter. The country tends to exercise a hands-off approach to its 140-million-strong Muslim community. Unlike in Europe or America, Muslims in India are governed by Shariah law in matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. This parallel legal system slows integration into the national mainstream and perpetuates backward practices such as polygamy and the neglect of education for girls. The result has been a disaffected minority, largely lacking the skills to compete in a modern economy and susceptible to calls for violence in the name of faith.

If India is to live up to its potential — and indeed to its hype — it must embrace both the short-term goal of upgrading its counterterrorism capability and the long-term goal of modernizing and mainstreaming its Muslims.

India’s Muslims have enriched national life in countless ways. The vast majority, like people of any faith, are nonviolent. But contrary to popular belief, Indian Muslims have not been immune to the rising global tide of orthodox practice and militant politics. Indian doctors played a role in last year’s failed attacks in London and Glasgow. At home, Muslim groups have assaulted critics such as the exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen. A survey by the distinguished Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed revealed that most educated Indian Muslims view as role models the late Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi, the 19th century Muslim supremacist Sayyed Ahmad Khan, and an influential Bombay-based cleric named Zakir Naik, who eulogizes Osama bin Laden and calls for Shariah for all Indians.

India’s Muslims hardly have a monopoly on either violence or obscurantism. Nonetheless the challenges they face are particularly acute. Will the community be forward-looking, eager to seize new economic opportunities, and at peace with a rapidly changing world? Or will it forsake the future for an idealized past, foster a culture of grievance that condones violence, and view globalization as a mortal threat? Depending on the answer, the Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings are either a passing event or a dark harbinger of things to come.

dhumeakbarahmed

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Akbar Ahmed, Brookings Institution Press, 323 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

At a time when a British teacher in Sudan barely escaped a prison term for allowing seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear Muhammad; a Saudi Arabian rape victim needed a royal pardon to evade the prospect of 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with an unrelated man; and Islamists from Gaza to Waziristan step up their war against video stores and barber shops, a book that seeks to explain what exactly is roiling the Muslim world is more than welcome. On the face of it, few people are better qualified to write it than Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and, since 9/11, a familiar face on television.

In Journey Into Islam, Mr. Ahmed, accompanied by a clutch of students, travels across much of the Muslim world. In Damascus he dines with mystic sheikhs. In Lahore he rubs shoulders with politicians beneath portraits of Mughal emperors. In Kuala Lumpur he chats with female professionals. In Jakarta he consorts with besieged moderates and militant students. Everywhere he and his students hand out questionnaires to gauge the attitudes and aspirations of the proverbial street. But, unusually for a book of this kind, it is in India that the narrative dwells the longest, and India that provides the analytical prism through which Mr. Ahmed views present-day Islam.

For Mr. Ahmed, three towns in north India—Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Deoband and Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh—capture the range of Muslim responses to globalization and the West. Ajmer, which houses a shrine to the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti, represents a retreat toward a mystical union with the divine. Deoband, birthplace of an ultra orthodox brand of Islam that is the subcontinent’s version of Wahhabism, symbolizes an attempt to defend the faith by adhering strictly to Islam’s core texts. Aligarh, home since 1875 to the famous Mohammedan Anglo-Indian College (now Aligarh Muslim University), stands for the attempt to engage Western ideas while preserving Islamic belief and practice.

Each of these models can claim its share of famous adherents. For the Sufis, there’s the Persian poet Rumi and the female Arab saint Rabia. The modernizers dominate the first half of the 20th century, among them the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and former Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. In the literalist Deoband tradition, Mr. Ahmed includes not just the Wahhabis but also such founders of modern Islamism—the drive to impose Shariah law on peoples and governments—as Abul Ala Maududi of the subcontinent’s Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmed finds the Sufis on the defensive, the modernizers in disarray and the Islamists, though he prefers not to use the term, on the ascendant. A popular Deoband writer in India announces that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the true champions of Islam. In Indonesia, one in four people surveyed calls bin Laden a role model. In Malaysia the majority profess admiration for such Islamist icons as Qutb and Maududi.

This book makes several important points. It stresses that the Islamic world is not monolithic, and that most Muslims are not on some kind of crazed jihad against the West. It explains that many Muslim women—including many of an Islamist bent—hold responsible jobs and are animated by ideas. It elegantly collapses the crux of Muslim anger into the so-called Taj Syndrome—the Islamic world’s glittering past juxtaposed against its wretched present. It identifi es the inherent tension between the American emphasis on individualism and traditional Muslim attitudes that place greater emphasis on family and community. Mr. Ahmed also deserves to be commended for wearing his erudition lightly; you don’t need to be an expert on Islam or Islamism to grasp his arguments.

And yet, on the whole this is a disappointing book. Nobody expects Mr. Ahmed to be unsympathetic to his faith, but his habit of simply dismissing any Muslim actions he disagrees with as “un-Islamic” is puzzling.

Thus attacks on (Christian and Buddhist) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are “quite alien to the Islamic values of justice and compassion.” The death sentence (by stoning) handed down by a Shariah court to a Nigerian woman who had a child out of wedlock has “more to do with tribal honor codes and response to globalization than with Islam itself.” The doctrine of armed jihad is defined away as merely “defense of one’s family and community in the face of attack.”

Unwilling or unable to take a hard look at Islam, Mr. Ahmed, predictably enough, turns to America and the West. The usual parade of villains soon surfaces: vengeful American foreign-policy hawks, insensitive Danish cartoonists, chief executive officers of multinational corporations, Christian creators of violent video games and a media “always on the lookout for some controversial issues surrounding Islam.” Globalization, we are informed with lofty certainty, lacks a moral core. Muslims hope to redeem their “honor and dignity” by turning to Mr. bin Laden. Of course, Mr. Ahmed quickly reassures us that this is not quite as alarming as it appears. He has somehow deduced that “many Muslims who sympathize with bin Laden in a broad and general sense would by no means support his more murderous or violent activity.”

When it comes to those who approach Islam and Islamism differently from him, Mr. Ahmed chooses to veil his attacks. Thus it is “scholars of Islam” who consider the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis to be “the quintessential ‘Orientalist.’” And it falls on unnamed critics to make the somewhat inflammatory allegation that the attacks of 9/11 “would almost be welcome” to Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld because they “would give a new momentum to their neocon worldview.” In a similar vein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, three of the most outspoken critics of Islam’s treatment of women, are dismissed as appearing “deliberately provocative” to ordinary Muslims.

This failure to grapple with uncomfortable ideas precludes a deeper analysis of what has gone so profoundly wrong. After all, Muslims, as any Vietnamese or Korean can tell you, can hardly claim a monopoly on recent suffering. Nor are they the only people whose past appears superior to their present. Many Indians and Chinese share similar sentiments. And all societies are struggling in their own way with the rapid change, for good and for ill, wrought by the closer integration of peoples and markets.

The trouble, then, is not globalization as such, but that an organized and tenacious minority of Muslims (the Islamists), believes that the cure for economic and political backwardness lies in embracing barbarism. To these true believers, the palpable failure of their project in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan offers little discouragement.

To suggest, as Mr. Ahmed does, that Islamists must be engaged, rather than unflinchingly opposed, reveals a curious blindness to this fact. For proof he need not look further than his native Pakistan where, as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto shows, an unchecked Islamist movement now threatens the state itself.

Mr. Ahmed believes that reform—though he prefers the term renaissance—must come from within an Islamic framework, and that it must be introduced by those considered credible by fellow Muslims. This appears plausible enough on the face of it. In practice, however, those calling for meaningful change—for the Islamic world to embrace minority rights, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry—seem to immediately lose credibility, and those who have credibility appear more interested in obfuscation and apologetics than in change. Unfortunately, unless Muslims can find a way to solve this conundrum, the odds of any kind of renaissance will remain exceedingly slim.

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

By SADANAND DHUME

Friday’s multiple bomb blasts in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh — which killed 13 people and injured about 80 — ought to give pause to those who see the world’s largest democracy as a linchpin in the war on terror. India’s leaders and diplomats seek to portray the country as a firebreak against radical Islam, or the drive to impose the medieval Arab norms enshrined in Shariah law on 21st century life. In reality, India is ill- equipped to fight this scourge.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati visits a man injured in last Friday’s bomb blasts in Varanasi.

Like neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, (and unlike Turkey or Tunisia) India has failed to modernize much of its Muslim population. Successive generations of politicians have pandered to the most backward elements of India’s 150-million strong Muslim population, the second largest in the world after Indonesia’s. India has allowed Muslims to follow Shariah in civil matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. An increasingly radicalized neighborhood, fragmented domestic politics and a curiously timid mainstream discourse on Islam add up to hobble India’s response to radical Islamic intimidation.

Most Indian Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism, and are more concerned with the struggles of daily life than the effort to create a global caliphate. Muslim contributions to the fabric of national life — most visible in sports, movies and the arts — should not be dismissed. Furthermore, religious zealotry in India is not a Muslim monopoly. Still, the notion that Indian Islam is uniquely tolerant, or somehow immune to the rising tide of world-wide radical sentiment, is a myth.

Last year, Haji Muhammad Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, publicly offered a $11 million bounty for beheading the Danish cartoonists who had drawn the prophet Mohammed. In high-tech Hyderabad, parts of which are Muslim strongholds, three sitting legislators of a local Islamic party recently roughed up Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author critical of her country’s treatment of its Hindu minority and her faith’s treatment of women. Last week, the government of West Bengal state in eastern India had to call in the army to quell Muslim rioters in Calcutta, whose demands included Ms. Nasreen’s expulsion from the country.

India’s historically weak-kneed response to radical Islamic intimidation only encourages such behavior. In 1988, India was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” (Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous death sentence on the author only after reading about disturbances in India.) In 1999, after terrorists hijacked an Indian aircraft to then Taliban-controlled Kandahar, New Delhi responded by releasing three prominent Islamic militants from prison in Kashmir. One of them, the British-Pakistani London School of Economics dropout Omar Saeed Sheikh, went on to mastermind the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. True to form, the authorities have responded to the latest outbreak of violence in Calcutta by bundling off Ms. Nasreen to distant Rajasthan, and from there to Delhi.

As in other democracies — Britain and Holland to name just two — a permissive approach toward radical Islam has only made the country more vulnerable to terrorism. In August this year, 42 people died in attacks on a Hyderabad restaurant and an open-air auditorium. Last year, a series of explosions on commuter trains in Bombay killed over 200 people. Two years ago, the Hindu festival of Diwali was rung in with bombs that claimed 62 lives in Delhi.

New Delhi has blamed the attacks on groups such as the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba and Bangladesh’s Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami. Though much of India’s terrorism problem is imported, part of it is homegrown. Instead of reflexively blaming Islamabad, Indians need to ask themselves why foreign terrorists appear to have little trouble recruiting accomplices from India. (The Uttar Pradesh attacks appear to be the work of a previously unknown outfit called Indian Mujahideen.) The bromide about the lack of Indian Muslim involvement in international terrorism, accepted unquestioningly by much of India’s liberal intelligentsia, must be called into question after the involvement of Indian doctors in this year’s failed attacks in London and Glasgow.

India’s experience offers important lessons to other democracies struggling to integrate large Muslim populations. It highlights the folly of attempting to exempt Muslims from universal norms regarding women’s rights, freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. It reveals that democracy alone — when detached from bedrock democratic principles — offers no antidote to radical Islamic fervor.

Washingtonpost.com

Sadanand Dhume

With last month’s consummation of a landmark agreement to cooperate with the United States on civilian nuclear programs, India took another large stride from the periphery to the center of the global order. Not many countries can boast a special relationship with the world’s sole superpower, an economy that’s expanding at upwards of 8 percent per year, and a democracy lauded for holding together a billion people of every conceivable class, color and creed.

Indeed, at times it seems as though most everyone has reason to smile upon a rising India. For idealists here’s proof that democracy belongs as much to poor countries as to rich ones, and that you don’t have to choose between democracy and development. For realists, a large English-speaking country with a free market and rule of law is a reassuring presence in a neighborhood that includes both an unpredictable China and the turmoil of Pakistan and Afghanistan. For the first time since India’s independence 60 years ago the West appears willing to see it as the pivotal power in an arc stretching from Singapore to Aden.

But as the world adjusts to India’s new clout, India itself is struggling to come to terms with new responsibilities. Nothing captures this as starkly as its relationship with Iran. Should India sidestep or stonewall the international community’s effort to thwart Iran’s apparent drive for nuclear weapons, it gives India’s detractors — including those in the U.S. Congress who would like nothing better than to bury the civil nuclear deal — proof that New Delhi sees global problems in narrow regional terms, and that it is yet to kick an old habit of conflating policy independence with anti-Americanism. On the flip side, nothing will dispel those doubts faster than an unambiguous message that a nuclear armed Iran is as unacceptable to India as it is to the U.S., the U.K. or France.

To put it bluntly then, India faces a simple choice. A tepid response to the Iranian threat will reveal an India too mired in Third Worldism and too heedless of the dangers of proliferation and global terrorism to be counted on as a reliable partner for the West. A robust response, on the other hand, will showcase a country ready to shoulder responsibilities commensurate with its size, ambition and growing economic heft.

Until now, India has veered between cooperation and confrontation. At the International Atomic Energy Agency, India voted twice in the last two years to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, successive Indian petroleum ministers have ignored U.S. concerns and publicly touted an Indo-Iranian gas pipeline that would undercut efforts to isolate the Iranian regime. A defense co-operation agreement has also raised questions.

And, just last month, India’s ruling Congress party, backed by its communist allies, nominated for the (largely ceremonial) vice presidency a former Indian ambassador to Iran publicly sympathetic toward its nuclear program.

Understanding India’s Iran policy requires unpacking a complex mix of interests, sentiment, politics and diplomatic habits. Many Indians view Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves as essential to quenching India’s long-term thirst for energy. Iran and India also share an interest in taming Afghanistan’s Taliban–and the brand of Sunni fundamentalism it represents–that predates U.S. involvement in the country. Finally, Iran offers India access to Afghanistan and Central Asia denied by a hostile Pakistan.

Then come intangible, cultural sympathies along with somewhat cruder considerations of domestic politics. Hindi and Persian, we’re reminded, both belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and in more recent times Persian was the court language of India’s Mughal empire. India houses the world’s second largest population of Shia (about 30 million people). Their concentration in pockets of north and central India, reputed affinity for Iran, and alleged tendency to vote en bloc, gives them an outsized voice in New Delhi’s calculations.

More broadly, Indian Muslim groups and communists have entered a loose compact that hinges on their mistrust of both market-friendly reforms and closer ties with the United States. They jointly spearheaded last year’s protests during President Bush’s visit to India, and scuttled a bid to honor him with an invitation to address parliament. Their voice is amplified by disproportionate representation among India’s intellectual elites, many of whom would like to see a foreign policy marked more by the anti-American rhetoric of Zimbabwe and Venezuela than by the quiet realism of, say, Korea and Japan.

This impulse is reflected in the matter of, for want of a better term, diplomatic style. The pipeline project, for example, is little more than a fantasy at this point, and Indo-Iranian defense agreements barely worth the paper they’re printed on. Yet when it comes to Iran some Indian politicians scarcely let pass an opportunity to tom-tom an “independent foreign policy” and “deep civilizational ties.”

In fact, despite all the talk about ancient ties, Iran’s ruling mullahs are completely at odds with India’s proud tradition of pluralism, and aren’t exactly known for their appreciation of Indic culture. Annual two-way trade is a relatively paltry $6 billion, most of it made up of Indian oil imports. People-to-people ties scarcely extend beyond visiting Indian pilgrims and the odd mullah-in-training in Qom.

Should India look dispassionately at Iran, it will see a regime whose nuclear ambitions only add volatility to an already volatile region. The two country’s approaches to nuclear weapons could not be more different. India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty on principle, but has been scrupulous about adhering to international non-proliferation norms. Iran signed the NPT and then cheated by surreptitiously shopping at Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market. And though Iran does not support terrorism in India, New Delhi can hardly expect the world to condemn Islamabad’s coddling of assorted jihadists while ignoring Tehran’s backing of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Ultimately India must weigh its interest in emerging as a responsible member of the international system against a bilateral relationship long on rhetoric but short on substance. The world will be watching to see which way India turns.

Far Eastern Economic Review

UNTOUCHABLES: MY FAMILY’S TRIUMPHANT JOURNEY OUT OF THE CASTE SYSTEM IN MODERN INDIA

by Narendra Jadhav

Scribner, 320 pages, $26

ONE NIGHT @ THE CALL CENTER

by Chetan Bhagat

Rupa & Co., 291 pages, INR 95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

As once autarkic India knits itself into the global economy, we’re frequently reminded that the country’s growth rate is galloping and that every sixth person in the world is an Indian. But buried beneath the talk of software parks and call centers, coffee bars and beauty pageants, four-lane highways and privatized airports, is another equally telling statistic: One in six Indians is an “untouchable”—or, to use the current appellation of choice, a dalit.

The word dalit, which means crushed or broken, embraces hundreds of disparate communities, from the desperately poor rat-catching musahars of Bihar to the relatively secure mahars of Maharashtra. Beyond the bounds of Hinduism’s four-tier caste system, they share a past of ritual degradation and backbreaking poverty. Their present circumstances are much more complex. On the one hand, dalits continue to comprise a disproportionate share of India’s poor. On the other, laws barring discrimination, a sweeping government-sponsored affirmative action program, and the power of the vote have combined to give them unprecedented power and influence.

In Untouchables, Narendra Jadhav recounts his family’s remarkable journey from penury to privilege. Mr. Jadhav’s barely literate father, Damu, traded a life of subordination in his ancestral village for a succession of menial jobs in Bombay. Mr. Jadhav’s mother, Sonu, hawked vegetables to supplement the family’s income. Their skimping and saving, and their emphasis on the sanctity of schoolwork, paid off: Their son has a doctorate from the United States and shapes national policy as chief economist of the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank.

The story, told alternately in the voices of Damu and Sonu, unfurls against the backdrop of historic ferment. Damu was a devout follower of B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), the dalit messiah and architect of independent India’s constitution. Ambedkar exhorted dalits to “educate, organize and agitate.” Damu gives us a worm’s eye view of Ambedkar’s movement in the years leading up to and following India’s independence from the British. We see Ambedkar at a protest in 1927 to demand equal access to a communal water tank in a town outside Bombay, or at a protracted sit-in three years later to force open the gates of a Hindu temple barred to dalits.

Mr. Jadhav writes with sensitivity and restraint. He credits Damu’s political awareness and unbending belief in education for his own success, but never allows his obvious affection for his father to descend into cheap sentimentality. His recounting of Damu’s childhood and youth in his village in Maharashtra is particularly deft. Too poor to afford clothes, he rejoices when a cousin makes him a shirt from sheets of paper glued together. Another gift, a pair of flip-flops, is the envy of his barefoot friends. For Damu, tamarind pods with jaggery are a mouth-watering luxury. Later in life, still true to his earthy tastes, he prefers Shivaji brand bidis to a gift of State Express 555 cigarettes.

Mr. Jadhav’s inspiring tale is, of course, far from typical. By most measures—literacy, life expectancy, access to clean water—India lags behind East Asia. It follows that dalits, who make up a disproportionate chunk of India’s poor, continue to lead some of the most wretched lives on the continent.

This is not to deny real progress. In Damu’s youth, dalits in his village wore a clay pot around their necks to catch their “polluting” spit and attached a broom to their rumps to clean the ground on which they walked. Such degrading customs have all but disappeared. In recent years, India has had a dalit president (K.R. Narayanan). Dalit chief ministers have headed its most populous state (Uttar Pradesh) and its richest (Maharashtra). The twin engines of affirmative action and urbanization continue to batter old rigidities. After all, you can’t live in Delhi or Bombay or Bangalore and worry about being polluted by the person beside you on the bus to work or at the office water cooler.

* * *

Indeed the characters in Chetan Bhagat’s new novel, English-speaking twenty-somethings, likely haven’t even heard of musahars and mahars, much less demanded that anyone wear a pot around his neck. One Night @ the Call Center tells the story of six employees of Connexions, a call center in the booming suburb of Gurgaon outside Delhi. They sleep by day and awake at night to answer phone calls from Americans troubled by their ovens, dishwashers and refrigerators. At work they take on new identities. Shyam Mehra becomes Sam Marcy. Radhika Jha turns herself into Regina Jones. Esha Singh is … you get the idea. Each has a personal problem—thwarted ambition, unfulfilled love and so forth. They must also contend with an evil
boss whose ineptitude is partly to blame for the threat of company bankruptcy.

Mr. Bhagat does a good job of recreating the ambience of a call center—the characterless cubicles, the flashing screens, the reminders to be polite to customers. An agent—that’s what they’re called—remembers to hit the mute button before screaming at racist American customers. Connexions’ employees have undergone “accent training” to soften their Delhi-Punjabi English. Their canteen serves cheese sandwiches rather than Indian food.

Mr. Bhagat works at an investment bank in Hong Kong, and at times his characters appear to have dropped out of the pages of a market-research report. A bike-and-car-obsessed youth who goes by the name Vroom eats pizza three times a week and combs the Internet for information on bikes and jobs, politics and dating. Esha, a small-town girl who is in the big city to make it as a model, flaunts her navel ring and her Calvin Klein perfume. A “semigirlfriend” gives Shyam, the book’s narrator, “Last Christmas” by Wham! as a cellphone ringtone.

Notwithstanding Wham!, this is the first generation of westernized Indians whose tastes and attitudes are shaped more by America than England. They casually pepper their conversations with words like “dude” and “dumbass.” They make out in the back seat of a Toyota Qualis, hang out at discos where they order Long Island iced teas and vodka crans, and meet for dates at the Pizza Hut in Sahara Mall (where the air conditioning is the biggest draw.) They combat depression by popping fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac. When Shyam feels queasy at the thought of his former girlfriend Priyanka marrying a rich Indian software geek who works, predictably enough, for Microsoft in Seattle, his stomach burns like “the oil for McDonald’s French Fries.”

Yet, for all their Americanization, or more likely because of it, Mr. Bhagat’s characters espouse a crude anti-Americanism. At work they are taught something called the 35=10 rule, which says a 35-year-old American has the brains of a 10-year-old Indian. They moan that their salaries, attractive by Indian standards, only come to about $12 a day, or what “an American burger boy makes in two hours.”

The novel finds its political mouthpiece in Vroom, the car lover who, in his cubicle in Gurgaon, has mastered arcana about Toyota Lexuses sold in America. They [Americans] toss their loose change at us,” he rants. “It seems like a lot of rupees. But jobs that pay less could be better. There could be jobs that define me, make me learn or help my country.” In the end, Vroom and his friends decide to quit Connexions for better things. But first they depose the evil boss and save the firm by cooking up a fake virus to scare thousands of dumb Americans into keeping Connexions’ phone lines busy.

In India, railing against call centers—as anyone familiar with the hysteria-tinged writings of Arundhati Roy can tell you—is nothing new. The arguments tend to be economically illiterate but nonetheless heartfelt. It’s a natural part of the pain imposed by globalization where lives once ordered by a village council or a bloated and benign state bureaucracy must now submit to the demands of anonymous shareholders scouring quarterly balance sheets.

The Indian middle class tends to blame politicians. In an earlier incarnation as a journalist, Vroom writes an article titled “Why don’t politicians ever commit suicide?” (Apparently because they’re too insensitive to feel anything.) Later he rants that “the losers who have run our country for the last 50 years couldn’t do better than make India one of the poorest countries on earth.”

This mistrust of politicians is echoed by Mr. Jadhav. When Damu asks him why he doesn’t enter public life like Ambedkar, he responds: “…today politics is peopled only by thugs and goondas.”

Fortunately for India, its political class—dimwitted and grasping though it may be—appears to have finally understood that the country’s future lies in embracing the world, including appliance-challenged Americans. India’s journey to prosperity will be arduous, but most people would prefer the motorbike and Pizza Hut life of Vroom to the mud floor and thatched roof world of Damu. And for that the phones lines in Gurgaon must keep ringing.