Taming Pakistan: Modi Effect

[Dayuhan]

If I were Mr. Modi, I would put it along these lines: Any form of ideological indoctrination that discourages citizens from embracing modern education and incites them into taking law into their won hands and trying to unlawfully enforce/impose rules on an ideological basis will not be tolerated, as are violence acts against all citizens.

Are the freedoms of speech and religion constitutionally guaranteed in India? Efforts to suppress "ideological indoctrination" might run afoul if they are... certainly they would in the US, but India is of course a very different place. While recognizing the impact of indoctrination, I'd be uncomfortable with any effort to treat indoctrination as the equivalent of actual violence if that were proposed in my own neighborhood.

I will just list the abstract of my upcoming scholarship:

Many militant groups around the world are purportedly fighting to institute sharia as the governing law of Muslims. However, very few scholars have studied the relationship between sharia and violence, presumably because the former is largely viewed as dealing with internal governance issues. This perspective has likely led to the West’s policy of accommodating political and community groups that seek to promote sharia. In this paper, I argue that public surveys in Muslim communities are ill-prepared to identify the potential links between sharia and violence, especially when the majority of poll respondents identify themselves as peace-loving Muslims who perceive sharia as divine law. Moreover, I identify a radicalized subpopulation of jihadist clerics that benefit from sharia’s popularity. Empirical data is presented regarding the growth of clerical power in Pakistan and elsewhere, aided in part by this popularity, which the clerics themselves have helped to nurture. In particular, the analysis suggests that jihadist clerics and militant groups leverage sharia’s esteem in order to advance a violent agenda.

Interesting, but again difficult to comment without seeing the actual work. Do you intend to publish it?

The key really is not to let the problem get to this stage, and since it has, understand its ideological basis, and neutralize it at that level.

The big question, of course, is how does one neutralize the ideological basis?

It's not an easy thing to do. Generations of effort to neutralize the Communist ideology, ranging from "winning hearts and minds" to mass murder, accomplished very little: the Communist ideology eventually neutralized itself through its own abject failure to deliver on its promises. How does one "neutralize" the Islamist ideology?