A new face of terrorism

Today a major question related to terrorism has occupied the centre of attraction among the society of intellectuals and academicians and they are looking quite busy with establishing whether education and poverty are major cause of augmenting terrorist activities. Different people have different perceptions on it. The terror incident occurred in recent times has further aggravated the question.

Education is a significant tool to fetch awareness in the society and empower every individual. Education is supreme for those who take it as an enterprise focused on human welfare. A fundamentalist education is simply the accumulation of armor-facts designed to fit into pre-determined theories, and reasoning of right and might.

After the shocking upshot of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly come out that poverty and lack of education were major cause of terrorist acts and spread and support of terrorism.

However, the consensus is bipartisan. George W Bush, the President of United States said in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, “because hope is an answer to terror… we will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize.”

On the other hand, Al Gore, at the other end of political spectrum, argued at the Council on Foreign Relations that the anger that underlines terrorism in the Islamic world stems from “the continued failure to thrive, as rates of economic growth stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to increase.”

Many intellectuals also accord the ‘education + poverty=terror’ theory. For instance, Elie Wiesel assert, “Education is the way to eliminate terrorism.” While the Nobel laureate Kim Dae Jung maintains, “at the bottom of terrorism is poverty.”

So the question rises as whether education has a role to play in curbing violent instincts. The Protagonists believe education trains our minds to lay distinct between decency and indecency-morality and immorality. An educated person is rational enough to deal with issues using reasoning rather than resort to violent means and is less likely to commit a crime than an uneducated one. Education helps a person to rise above petty things like caste, creed, and colour.

If such are the facts then how the literate persons are get obsessed to commit crime. What happens every person has two sides of personality-a positive and a negative one. An educated person knows well to maintain balance between the positive and negative habits. However, when poverty, illiteracy, or upbringing- the negative side of a person owing to various factors overpowers the positive one, the person tends to commit outrageous acts of violence to give vent to his frustrations.

Also economic theory suggests the reason for joining terrorist organisations or commit terrorist acts. Involvement in terrorism as according to economic theory is viewed as a rational decision depends on the benefits, costs, and risks involved compared to other activities.

Another theory can be termed as ideological one that supports terrorism among literate people is to achieve the political goal of the organisations. Affluent, educated people care more about the political goals of a terrorist organisation than illiterates do.

Today, the face of terror has changed. In Bangalore, the Silicon Valley alone, in less than two years, seven highly educated youths (doctors, engineers, techies, software professionals) have been held in the drive against terror.

The number is set to increase as the state police probing the links of involving more literate youths, who are absconding.

The list of the arrested literates involving in terrorist activities is long and it started with the arrest of Muzammil Shiekh, a software engineer in Bangalore in connection with the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai. The next case was the arrest of Ahmed –brothers from Bangalore- Sabeel Ahmed, MBBS, and Kafeel Ahmed, a PhD scholar in aeronautical engineering in connection with a London Terror plot and the attack on Glasgow airport in the UK.

The latest name in the literate-terror list is of Yahya Iyash Kamkutty alias Yahya Khan, an electric engineer, who was arrested in Bangalore on Feb 21, once again point to the increasing use of highly-trained professionals being lured into terror groups which have used sophisticated methods and planning in their attacks.

The terrorist organisations has changed today the strategy of appointing members to lead terrorist acts by providing ample opportunities for the educated, skilled in using latest technology of sending messages, cracking high-security internet zones, communicating or for triggering IEDs.

However, the available data at the national level are weaker. To sums up, it can be said that both types of evidence point in the same direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite weak.