West takes cues from India on containing extremism

Unable to come to terms with and contain the growing violent extremist threats of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al Qaeda, western countries now want to learn from the Indian model of minority management and inclusive culture that has managed to keep the extremist threat at bay.

At the just concluded four-day White House Summit to counter violent extremism of about 60 countries, the western world, including the US and several European countries listened to the Indian experience carefully and showed an inclination to learn from India's minority management and inclusive culture that has successfully kept threats like ISIS under check despite having sizeable minority population.

Nearly 10,000 men and women have joined the ranks of the ISIS from 11 odd non-Muslim western countries. According to estimates, 3000 people have joined from South Africa, 2755 from Russia, 1258 from France, 350 from Netherlands, 400 from Belgium, 700 from United Kingdom, 500 from Germany, 250 from China, 100 from USA, 100 from Canada and 330 from Australia.

In comparison despite India having much larger share of Muslim pie than all these countries put together (India has 227.6 million population of Muslims) only 18 cases of youth have been found to have joined or tried to join the ISIS.

The Indian delegation led by joint intelligence committee (JIC) chairman R N Ravi and a senior officer each from external affairs and home ministry presented India's case of how the country has managed to ensure welfare and socio-development of 6 notified minorities – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis (Zoroastrians) and Jains and create enabling environment for equal opportunities for them.

"The western world has, apparently, not able to put these measures thorough and still have "Us versus Them" approach which is vastly different from the so far inclusive Indian approach. Most of these programmes were started during UPA government's tenure and we hope that the present dispensation will continue with them. The western countries too can learn a lot of cue from the Indian approach of minority management," a senior minority affairs ministry official said.

Ravi, sources said, stated unequivocally that the threat from extremism does not exist so much in India as from import from countries across the borders.

Interestingly, Pakistani envoy making a frank admission said his country can control extremism only if it manages to control the rogue Madarsas that provide leadership to 26 terror outfits like Laskha-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), lashkar-e-Jhangavi (LeJ) etc.

The Indian presentation talked about several measures that have been put in place at intermittent periods of post Independence history to understand and assuage the feelings of minorities, such as, establishment of national commission for minorities in 1992 and a separate ministry of minority affairs in 2006 that has adopted multi-pronged approach for the development of minorities with focus on educational empowerment, area development, economic empowerment, development of vulnerable minority communities and strengthening of minority institutions.

The delegation also showcased placement linked skill development programme for minorities that was launched in 2013-14 that ensure employment of 75% trained minority youth. So far the scheme has trained over 36,000 minority youth and placed them in organized by spending US $ 10.5 million.

Further, the presentation said that to address the development deficits in minority concentration areas of the country, programme like multi-sectoral development programme was launched in 2008-09 under which 1147 new school buildings, 21006 additional classrooms, 698 hostels, 137 it is, 46 polytechnics, 3760 primary health centres and 3,36,136 houses have been constructed.