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I Sell Death - Autobiography of a Terrorist

by Raj

4.33 of 5 stars 4.33 · rating details · 3 ratings · 1 review

“Al – Qaeda is fake”;

“9/11 was a conspiracy hatched by the US government”;

“Jihad is just a recruitment strategy for the politically – motivated ‘pseudo – war’ propagating organisations created by various governments”;

“Post – Godhra Gujarat riots of 2002 were political, not communal”;

A true story of an Ex-Terrorist, trained in Pakistan by an off-shoot group of 'Al - Qaeda', ...more

Paperback , 254 pages

Published January 21st 2015

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May 27, 2015 S.H. Villa rated it 5 of 5 stars

(The book is discussed in its entirety. It might be considered a ‘spoiler’ by some, but Raj tells us in the forward where he is heading.)

Well, it’s an earnest book but a bumpy ride to transport us to the final destination, a destination I can whole-heartedly applaud – empathy, tolerance and opening our eyes to who and what is behind terrorism in the world.

There are insights of potentially great value in this book, so I don’t want to put anyone off reading it. But I should warn the formatting is (The book is discussed in its entirety. It might be considered a ‘spoiler’ by some, but Raj tells us in the forward where he is heading.)

Well, it’s an earnest book but a bumpy ride to transport us to the final destination, a destination I can whole-heartedly applaud – empathy, tolerance and opening our eyes to who and what is behind terrorism in the world.

There are insights of potentially great value in this book, so I don’t want to put anyone off reading it. But I should warn the formatting is curious, the punctuation erratic, there are no page numbers and no gutter margin so lines disappear at one end.

What is important is the message. But initially the first half of the book is confusing. Is it really a life story told to the scribe Raj, or is this a novel with some clumsy literary devices? I remember the first chapter of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi tells us, here is a writer in search of a story who hears about a man who had an extraordinary experience, and he will now relate it to us. He invites us to believe the story we are about to hear. Raj does much the same. While I enjoyed Martel’s invitation, wanting to believe in the young man crossing the Pacific in a small boat with the tiger aboard, I was never totally certain it was a novel, not until we got to the floating island. Similarly with Raj, he begins by telling us he met a man at the railway station who wanted to tell him the story of some third person. There follows quite a lot of hide-and-seek until they start to meet and the story is told. Raj claims he had no computer, no means of writing down what he was told at the time of the meeting. He later put it in his own words. All of this is making me think I’m looking at a clumsy thriller-type lead in, not a serious autobiographical story. Then, when the story is told, the man’s past is told as stages of awakening from a coma. What was that about? How are all these details to be found in a coma?

Also, we are left with the thought: here is an ex-terrorist who now sees he was duped and wants to tell his story, who tells it to a friend, who in turn tells it to Raj, who in turn takes the story home in his head – including long lists of things like arms and explosives – and writes it down for us to read. Aren’t we getting the feeling of Chinese whispers here? I am.

This book would have been improved by plainly saying – as he does at the end – that he was speaking to the ex-terrorist himself. A short preface to say he met a man who asked him to write his story, then on with the story, beginning with the man’s youth, the trauma of the loss of his family, his training for jihad, the type of operations he was involved in, and finally his long stay in hospital which led to his awakening. I would have found this straightforward and possibly even believable. For, given that the book is a novel, it shows us a deeper truth than the one we are being fed by politicians and the media. As Raj says himself, ‘it’s hard to segregate fact from fiction’.

However, when our protagonist finds himself in hospital, severely injured by the same bomb – one he helped to plant – those around him have suffered from, the story definitely picks up, although still with a strong sense of being contrived. But contrived or not, he discovers some important information, such as the fact that the tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims in India – he being a Muslim, believing himself to be fighting for the Muslim cause – is a fabrication of the politicians who find it convenient for getting rich or richer and staying in power by building on fears of the people. They finance the so-called terrorist operations, hence the title I Sell Death . Dhiren, as he is called in hospital, begins to suspect he has been duped by these powerful, greedy people. He meets other unfortunates, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, who have lost all their families, just as he did, who have suffered terrible injuries, blindness, extensive burns, and so on. How can the Muslim cause require him to bring pain and death to innocent people? In the ward is an old man who insists no God is to be found in India who instructs people to go out and kill innocent people. It is religions, religions which have little to do with a spiritual life, manipulated for political purposes, and so on.

Finally, there is a meeting with his colleague now dying in the same hospital. This colleague confirms that all the acts of terrorism, particularly the large ones which Dhiren has been part of have been bought and paid for by politicians and their lackeys for political ends which have nothing to do with some sanctified Muslim cause. He explains how Kashmir was purposely left divided when India became independent in order to keep Indian/Pakistani/Kashmiri tensions high, produce billions for the arms dealers, keep India weak as a world power, and so on. He tells him the US is behind much of world terrorism, carrying out 9/11 themselves in order to justify their invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in their greed for oil and minerals, and to keep Russia and China out of the oil and mineral-rich Middle East. Al Qaeda doesn’t exist, Bin Laden worked for the CIA, and so on.
Money, Power and Politics are the main reason for all the conflicts in the world today and we, the people, have failed to realize that we are responsible to a great extent for living the hatred propagated by the politicians and living it to the core day in and day out.

As far as I have researched these topics, he is on the right track, but no evidence other than reasonable counter-explanations for world events is offered here. He ends with a list of the names of 116 people known to have died in the Delhi blasts on 13th September 2008, and dedicates his book to those and other victims of terrorism and their families. Would that the world – or at least some part of it – hear the message for tolerance and that we open our eyes to the tricks played on us to keep us ignorant, in conflict with others and compliant. Ignorance is, after all, a choice. And so is the intolerance based on that ignorance. Forgiveness, including forgiveness for the people behind the manipulations, would be a wonderful first step towards world peace.
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