With the Games to come, 2010 looking rosy for India tourism
Tourism is big business in India and according to new figures released on Wednesday, business is booming.
Despite continued warnings of the threat of militant attacks in the country and sluggish growth in international traveller numbers following the global downturn, India’s tourism numbers bucked a downfall last year to post close to double-digit growth last month, resulting in an almost $1 billion windfall for the industry.
Foreign visitors jumped 9 percent during August compared to last year, with 382,000 entries during the month. A cumulative total since January of 3,467,000 is up 9.7 percent on 2009, according to India’s Ministry for External Affairs.
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For India’s hotels, restaurants, tourist sites and shops, higher visitor numbers means higher revenues — in August, revenues touched $992 million, an increase of $70 million from the same period last year.
Perhaps most encouraging for industry players, and the government’s Incredible India tourism campaign, the rise in visitors comes during a year that has seen bomb attacks and civil unrest.
Are Indian Muslims leading the way in condemning terror?
For those Western critics that say Islam does not enough to to condemn terrorism, perhaps they should look at India, home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations — around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India’s 1.1 billion people.
On Wednesday, it was the turn of Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa in the northern city of Lucknow — a traditional centre for Muslims and religious scholarship. He rejected terrorism as anti-Islamic after he and his colleagues had been accused of apostasy over their pacifist stance by at group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen.
Indian Mujahideen made threats against the madrasa in which they also claimed responsibility for last week’s bomb blasts in Jaipur, western India, which killed 63 people.
“The reaction of terrorists to our stand against terror has shown that we were moving in the right direction,” Rasheed said.
Apparently a “Movement Against Terrorism” has been created by clerics to exhort imams to use Friday prayers at mosques across India to speak out against terrorism.
This was no flash in the pan. Earlier this year, tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting near Delhi at the 150-year-old Darool-Uloom Deoband — whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan — and denounced terrorism as against Islam.
It is not surprising that Rasheed said they had received support from Darool-Uloom Deoband, Indian clerics appear to be increasingly outspoken, perhaps not surprising in a country where there is a centuries-old tradition of preaching religious tolerance.
Deoband is often wrongly accused inspiring the Taleban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The early madrassas established in the NWFP were, in fact, modeled after Deoband as their founders themselves received education in Deoband prior to 1947. However, all of this changed with the US/Pakistani (CIA/ISI) efforts to recruit, train and equip the students of these madrassas to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The divergence between the Indian and Pakistani Deobandis became very clear when the religious leaders from NWFP and Deoband met for a summit in mid-2001 (just prior to 911) and disagreed strongly on the strategies/tactics used by the Taleban in Afghanistan. In fact, Maulana Marghoob, the leader of Deoband, condemned the destruction of Buddha carvings in Bamian by the Taleban. The Indian Deoband leaders clearly understood that they could not condone the destruction of Buddha statues in Afghanistan while at the same time protest against the destruction of Babri mosque in India.
Time for India and Bangladesh to work together
For years India has always looked west to Pakistan when bombs exploded in its cities, powerless to influence its old foe.
Now, it is talking peace with Pakistan, and casting aspersions eastwards to Bangladesh, a country it helped establish and should have much more leverage over.
Isn’t it time for some serious diplomacy, to improve relations with Bangladesh and work together to combat violent Islamist extremism?
While homegrown Indian Islamists may have carried out the attack in Jaipur, and a previously unknown group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen has claimed responsibility, initial investigations have also thrown up a possible link to Bangladesh .
Police have released a sketch of a man in his mid-20s who was seen near the site of one of the bombings, who was apparently speaking Bengali. Dozens of Bangladeshi migrant workers have also been rounded up for questioning.
Police say they also see similarities between these blasts and others in Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad last year, which were blamed on Indian Muslims backed by the Bangladeshi group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.
HuJi, whose name means the Movement of Islamic Holy War, was first established in Pakistan to fight in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then moved into Kashmir.
Look, Bangladesh handeles terrorism cases better than any country in the region. When Bangladesh was attacked by fundamentals, it took the crinals to justice and hanged them (some HUJI top leaders are also being trialed). Some of the stupids in India say that Bangladesh govt. is a fundamental islamist govt. They should know that People of BD have never elected a right wing religious party like INDIANS (as they elected hindu nationalist BJP) to power.So get your info. right first before commenting. And BANGLADESH also have the best record in communal relationship in the region (way better than india as we never had any incidents like gujrat) and it is termed as the MOST PEACEFUL NATION in the region according to WORLD PEACE INDEX.
Does anyone have statistics for the number of tourists who visit Delhi more than once? Surely that is a sign of whether or not tourism in the area is going to continue growing.