Countering religious propaganda

The militants are exploiting the religious faith and sentiment of the youths and also the religious education that they are being imparted in madrassahs. And the result is an ideological onslaught on Islam itself by a fringe group of fanatics whose politics is based on violence and bloodshed, which deserves condemnation in unequivocal terms.

Now, the question is what have we been doing all these years to neutralise the fundamentalist activities? Obviously, the matter never received the kind of attention that it ought to have until recently. And the religious extremists got the time to organise themselves and began to execute their evil plans.

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True, the ideological challenge has to be met by a similar counter offensive that can lay bare the flaws of what the militants are preaching in the name of Islam. But a word of caution would not be out of place here. First, any motivation campaign sponsored by the government itself might not be able to generate enough enthusiasm among the people because of its all too explicit political undertone. So the campaign has to be neutral in the political sense and party priorities must not be allowed to influence the campaign. Second, the government has to dispel the doubts that had crept into the public mind about its role vis-à-vis religious fanaticism, which was greatly bolstered by the ruling alliance's stand on the issue in the past. The government always tried to establish that no religious extremists existed in this country.

So the motivation campaign has to be designed and conducted in a strictly objective manner. Finally, if the government acknowledges that a "kind of education" is working as the driving force behind creation of zealots and fanatics, it should go deeper into the matter and think in terms of redesigning the education system that is liable to breed religious extremism.