It would not be an exaggeration to say that terrorism has become ubiquitous in our world. A terrorist attack happens and makes it to the headlines so often that the existence of terrorism and the horror associated with it has become ingrained in all our minds – either due to the news-media, social media, politics, or even national and international policy. Terrorism has permeated all aspects of our lives. It is no longer a remote phenomenon in the outside world, but a harsh reality that has infiltrated into the safety of our drawing rooms.

Even a global pandemic does not seem to deter terrorists from carrying out their deadly activities, as we all saw with great sadness recently. In March of this year, gunmen and suicide bombers killed dozens in an attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul. On 2 May 2020, five security forces personnel were killed by operatives of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in an encounter in Handwara, Jammu&Kashmir.

While much of the focus is on the act itself and the grief and suffering it brings, the peculiarity of people taking such violent actions is largely ignored. Terrorism is so ghastly in scope and grotesque in nature, that despite the upsurge in international terrorism, we typically avoid talking about its causes and such a discussion occupies a relatively small space in the public imagination. While we never fail to condemn and give due criticism to terrorist acts, we fail to acknowledge why terrorists resort to actions that result in the deaths of several people.

Terrorists tend to lay bare their motives, along with their identities (especially the organisation and the larger collective identity they are associated with) and the identities of their targets. The Pulwama bomber’s video from last year comes to mind. But we give these motives and identities only a perfunctory acknowledgement and dismiss them quite hastily.

Why do terrorists do what they do? What sustains this endless progression of criminal carnage?

Many believe that terrorists are bad people or cruel monsters, or that they are human beings whose minds do not function as they normally should. Some would go on to say that they are people with a distorted sense of morality, or that they lack morality itself. But we know that terrorists are recruited from the general public. We also know that they believe that a perceived injustice in the world morally justifies the killing of innocent men, women and children. This injustice was either directed at them, their family or their community at large. Terrorists being able to recognise that a supposed injustice exists would mean that they do have a moral code.

By accepting terrorism as extraordinary crimes planned and/or committed by hate-filled and unwell minds, we seek to distance ourselves from the unpleasantness accompanying the difficult job of examining the premise of why such acts occur, or why terrorist organisations are so successful in recruiting members from the society at large.

Most of us, however, would concede that a doctrine — invariably political or religious in nature — provides the foundation for terrorism. These political or religious motives would thus serve as the ideological causes for terrorism, one may think. Yet, no specific religious or political convictions are to blame, since terrorism has become embedded in a variety of ideologies – from animal rights and eco-terrorism to religious extremism, militant self-determination and communism.

How then should we define terrorism, if terrorism has taken root and flourished everywhere, irrespective of geography and ideology? Do we define terrorism based on who the victims are or who the perpetrators are? Is it terrorism only when civilian non-combatants are killed? Or is it terrorism only when such acts occur in a certain part of the world, and when such crimes occur elsewhere it is perhaps a case of civil war or insurgency? Do attacks orchestrated by known terrorist organisations on a State’s military or paramilitary forces constitute acts of terrorism? Would it be terrorism if a certain individual seeks revenge and in due course embraces a particular ideology, and then kills people in a suicide bombing?

These questions are hard to answer, but these questions need to be asked and each of us need to think about what the answers could be.

Is terrorism a special kind of ‘mass-murder’? 

This brings us to yet another important question. What separates an act of ‘mass murder’ or ‘serial killings’ from an act of ‘terrorism’? Mass murders and serial killings too are violent crimes perpetrated by seemingly ordinary but ‘troubled’ people. These crimes do succeed in perpetuating horror and fear in a society, just like terrorism. They are also similar in magnitude when it comes to the number of victims, and may have a socio-political agenda. Can we distinguish between such violent crimes and terrorism?

Perhaps, the question that we ought to ask is — what makes an extraordinary crime of murder or mass murder, terrorism?

That is the question that SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover seek to address in their paper The Saint, the Criminal and the Terrorist: Towards a Hypothesis on Terrorism. The authors contend that “terrorism is a particular form taken by crime” and it is crime that is “transformed” into an act of terrorism.

the act [of terrorism] goes beyond transformation … [T]errorism is transubstantiated crime. ‘Transubstantiation’ in theology refers to the miraculous transformation of some particular substance into another one. This happens in the case of terrorism as well: crime becomes morally praiseworthy. It does not concern so much a particular crime, but rather the transformation of the entire domain of crime. This transubstantiation results in the re-presentation of crime as morally praiseworthy and the criminal as a saint or a hero.

Terrorism, in itself, does not seek to give moral justification or legal defense to crime. The authors state that the mechanism of terrorism transforms crime, and through this transformation, it lends legitimacy to violent crime — a legitimacy that makes the crime and the criminal a moral exemplar, a role model.

This would mean that a terrorist’s moral or ethical virtues are not too different from ours, since, to become a praiseworthy role model in a group despite the fact that this role model is a criminal, a set of morals and the concept of crime need to exist in that group beforehand. This can perhaps explain why terrorism finds its recruits in the masses.

The mechanism of transforming violent crime into terrorism 

The other question that the authors deal with is this — How does crime then get transformed into something morally praiseworthy, or how does the mechanism of terrorism transform crime into a moral-ethical ideal?

Crime is transubstantiated into acts of supererogation. ‘Supererogation’ names the sets of actions that have the force of moral exemplars without being obligatory. Heroism, bravery, kindness, love for one’s neighbor, saintly actions, and so on are all examples of supererogation; they are the acts of ‘saints and heroes’. They are not obligatory, since a failure to perform these actions does not make someone immoral. Still, they have the force of moral exemplars, but not because we ought to act in this way. These actions are ‘over and beyond the call of duty’ and as such are beyond the realm of moral obligation. That is, they are outside the domain of ‘moral laws’, but yet within the ethical domain.

The criminal act committed by the terrorist becomes a higher, noble calling. It is not expected of him; it isn’t his duty, and yet he does it out of his ‘virtuous’ nature. He is likened to a soldier giving the ultimate sacrifice for what he holds to be most sacred and valuable. It was not expected of him. It wasn’t part of his usual job. But he still did it because it needed to be done, it was the right thing to do and it was necessary for the greater good of his group.

The mechanism of transformation of the criminal act of murder into a morally praiseworthy one, involves three steps:

1 – The act should not be obligatory. In other words, it is not at all intended that all members within that group do the criminal deed. Since the act is a criminal one — even in the eyes of the terrorist and his group — it should be forbidden by the moral standards that the collective or the group typically adheres to.

2 – The crime is repackaged or revisited, and is given a new narrative. It remains a crime, and yet it attains an ethical value that elevates it morally. The act of violence stays well within the boundaries of crime, but a certain virtue is attached to it to ennoble the crime and the criminal. In other words, the non-obligatory criminal act is appreciated and a positive value is attached to it because the act is seen to have an overall positive effect on the community. The crime, which is a normally prohibited act, is thus seen as a selfless and ‘saintly’ deed that serves the community.

3 – A narrative of this non-obligatory, forbidden criminal act emerges and is established firmly. This makes the act unique and self-descriptive. The narrative here is that the act of crime committed now transcends or lies beyond the scope of both ‘crime’ and ‘obligation’/‘duty’, while simultaneously keeping the two spheres of crime and obligation separate. This narrative then becomes superimposed on the crime, and the crime and the narrative become inseparable from one other.

In effect, terrorism takes a means with a prohibitively negative moral value and combines it with an end that has an amazingly high positive moral value. It runs a narrative with the specific intention of ensuring that the ends justify the means. However, the end has such a special positive value, an end of central importance to any community, like security, survival and justice, that it successfully manages to justify very dangerous means used to deliver those ends (An example of such an end is the establishment of a utopia governed by a religious treatise in Jammu and Kashmir). To achieve this, the narrative plants the idea that these central concerns of a community like security and justice and survival, are being trampled on, and therefore, the ends cannot be achieved by any other means.

What this leads to is an act that is both desirable and prohibited by the same set of mores, an act that the moral paradigm is incapable of handling. This leads to a community responding in unpredictable and dangerously counterproductive ways, ways that may even be reprehensible, and rightly so, to those outside the community. And when a community is constantly forced to deal with such acts that defy categorisation through their moral paradigm for a long time, it makes the moral paradigm itself suspect in the eyes of outsiders to the community and makes the community itself unsure as to their position on the soundness and consistency of their moral paradigm.

And to achieve all this, mores are actually necessary and therefore, acts of terrorism can only be committed by people recruited from the common public, and not immoral and evil monsters without mores as is popularly believed.

What happens next?

The crime is still crime, but it is now lifted into the realm of heroism. It is associated with moral-ethical values of reckless courage, unrelenting bravery in the face of odds, strength and valour, undying love for the group and so on.

The criminal becomes a saint, a hero and even a martyr.

This perspective and myth is foisted upon the crime that kills innocent people and the perpetrator of that crime.

Furthermore,

[N]either religious nor secular doctrines form the intellectual basis of terrorism. They are used in morally justifying an act that has already achieved the status of a supererogatory action. The transubstantiation of crime into supererogation is not something that these doctrines and beliefs accomplish. The mechanism of terrorism has already done that before either religion or political beliefs are pressed into service.

This act of supererogation — the attaching of merit and moral ideals to an otherwise heinous act and raising the criminal onto a role model’s pedestal— puts the criminal’s entire group into jeopardy. People from within and outside that particular group or community question their ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. People begin to assume and stereotype the group’s moral standards or assume a lack thereof, by using the terrorist as a yardstick.

“If that man, whose actions resulted in the death of so many people is a role model for them, one can only imagine …” becomes the trope.

The murderous-criminal-who-is-also-a-man-of-upright-virtues is paraded as representative of the entire group, not only by people who do not identify with the group, but also by people who belong to the group. This puts the group’s moral standards, and the group itself, at risk.

This is why the terrorist and his act of terrorism must be condemned and addressed by the community from which the terrorist hails, since the terrorist and his acts become an ideal to aspire for by people who identify with the terrorist. The society at large and the community in question cannot afford to remain silent and nor can it proffer platitudes. There must be an eternal, active and forceful resistance from within the community against the terrorist attaching his morals and acts to theirs. This ‘resistance’ can take many forms — direct and public condemnation from all factions of the group that the terrorist identifies with, abandonment of certain parts of the group’s ideology that glorify and call for violence against non-members of the group, religious or socio-political reformation, complete dissociation and dismantling of violence-inciting groups from within (through legislature and law enforcement agencies), etc. In this day and age where terrorism is rife in the world, such resistance must be continuous no matter how tiresome or repetitious.