The Cause of World Disorder

IN MY LAST COLUMN, I argued that the principal struggle in the Indian subcontinent was between swaraj and jihad. After the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, this may be an opportune vantage point to extend the scope of such an analysis. The subsequent ceasefire, however fragile, actually my point. We are in the midst of a global reset in which the ideology and strategic use of jihad are on the verge of comprehensive defeat, if not extinction.

We used to think that the two main adversaries of the liberal, democratic world order were authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Of the former, European Fascism and Nazism, and of the latter, Stalinist Socialism and Maoist Communism, with their regional and global offshoots, were prime examples.

We were also led to believe that World War II terminated the former while the latter, certainly its Cold War version, was brought to a close by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Not entirely so. The Cold War has, as we know, shifted to another theatre, with China, tightly under the grip of the Communist Party of China and its own version of state-sponsored capitalism, now the key adversary.

This antagonism cannot be taken lightly. For China is trying to tell the world that its “benign despotism” is actually better for the world and offers a viable alternative to chaotic, socially divided, and, now increasingly, economically troubled democracies. The free world is truly under siege. From within and without.

But who is buying the Chinese narrative? Not even its own people, if reports are to be believed. China’s inability to put boots and troops on the ground in distant operational theatres has put doubts in peoples’ minds about when, if at all, it can take the place of the former Soviet Union in the new great game of thrones.

There is, however, a third angle to this triangle of repression, if we don’t want to call it axis of evil. The repression is so massive and so violent, with utter disregard for human, especially woman’s rights. What is this third ideology that had gone practically unnoticed from historical accounts and textbooks?

Obviously, it is Islamist jihadism. We have started calling it so only recently, because it was neither well-understood nor properly named. British imperialism, which controlled much of the world and directly ruled over one-fifth of it, dismantled the Turkish Caliphate. They fomented Arab nationalism and independence movements, helping to engineer the removal of the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid II, after Turkey’s defeat in the Great War.

The repercussions in distant India are well-known in the horrifying brutality of the Moplah Massacre of 1921. Indeed, we might argue that movements like the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) only delayed the inevitable.

The Turkish national movement, following the end of World War I, fought a War of Independence (1919-23), which we have all but forgotten today. Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, seized power. Thus ended the nearly 600-year-old Ottoman Empire, which ruled large swathes of eastern Europe. Turkey’s national assembly abolished the institution of the Caliphate in March 1924.

But that wasn’t the end of global jihadism. After the OPEC embargo of 1973, the Middle East was flush with oil money. Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900-89) returned from his exile in France to Iran in 1979. The Islamic Republic of Iran was created, with Khomeini installed as its supreme leader in December.

What followed is a competition between Shia Islamist radicalism and its Sunni response, both attempting to win the battle for control not only of the Middle East, but of Islamic theology itself. Competing versions of Islamist jihadism received unexpected fillips and incentives in the great power rivalry in Afghanistan and, more recently, in Syria.

Clearly, jihad was the third ideology, belatedly threatening world peace and the liberal international order. Western imperialism and neo-imperialism, by whatever name or ruse, have also exploited the religious vulnerabilities of the so-called Third World or Global South, from time to time. Sikh extremism, Taliban, ISIS—these and other radical and violent movements, it is believed, have been started, funded, or sponsored by Western powers, the chief of which, after World War II is, of course, the US.

The liberal international order, such as it is, has many flaws and continues to exploit the rest of the world. There are also contradictions and cracks in its professed principles of democracy, individual liberty, and global cooperation. But, whether we like it or not, we have to take sides. During the freedom movement, the entire leadership of Congress, except for Subhas Chandra Bose, sided with our own colonisers against Hitler’s Third Reich.

Sri Aurobindo even went so far as to say: “We did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments [still less between good people and bad people] but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. … The victory of one side [the Allies] would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.…” (The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo vol 36).

In the 20th century, Nazism and communism emerged as the first and second ideological challenges to the free world, each seeking to reshape the world through authoritarianism, violence, and suppression of freedoms. The horrors of both, the Holocaust of the Jews, and the death of millions by communist regimes around the world, have been well documented.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a third ideology—jihadism—rose as a formidable threat to global peace and stability. Rooted in a militant and conquest-oriented strain of Islam, jihadism was rekindled by the economic and geopolitical shifts.

Now we also know that jihadism has unleashed terrorism and wreaked havoc worldwide and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. According to the French think-tank, Fondation pour l’innovation politique, between 1979 and 2024, Islamist jihad has mounted 66,872 attacks worldwide killing at least 249,941 people.

Unless the dark and destructive ideology of Islamist jihadism is defeated on real battlefields, it will continue to fester in the minds of men, creating a never-ending chain of murders and victims.

But it seems the world has finally said enough is enough.

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