Spread of Ideas

I heard this story many years back from my friend. His father, also my teacher much later than the incident described here, as a young member of the Communist Party in his younger days had participated in meeting to discuss the defeat of the Party in all seats in Punjab except one. I was told by my friend that in the meeting the young scholar had raised his hand and asked "would it not be better if, rather than dissecting the cause of defeat, we deliberate on how we won one seat and recreate those conditions elsewhere so that we could win more seats". He was hooted as a charlatan and soon after he ceased to be a member of the Party. I narrate this story as an entry to the somewhat scary story of the recent takeover of the Swat valley by the followers of Taliban and the stark fact that Amritsar is only 500 kilometres from Swat.
Apart from the obvious historical fallacy in the scaremongering [Amritsar has always been 500 kilometres from Swat and Swat has always been a land of warlords since as far as historical records go], it does give an opportunity to see how ideas spread or more importantly how the spread of ideas are restricted. Here are some examples to start a debate: Bihar is zero kilometres from West Bengal where CPM has been ruling for 28 years. The presence of a marxist party at its borders has made no impact to Bihar's own variety of politics. Ditto with Tamil Nadu and Kerala. North Korea and South Korea; China and Pakistan are other examples where the flow of ideas and therefore politics have refused to permeate each other's territories. It seems obvious to me that ideology does not spread by mere geographical proximity. Then how do ideas spread? I really don't know. Perhaps socio-economic situations help or perhaps political sponsorship does....
Be that as it may, I am not alarmed at what is happening at Swat for two reasons, a) what is happening at Swat has been happening there at least since the last 200 years or more [I think Birbal too got killed in one of Akbar's campaign in that region] without affecting any one outside that area; b) empirically, ideas do not spread by just being in the neighbourhood. So let us not rush to contain the spread of ideas by half cooked methods, that could prove to be the most effective way to bring home the idea. As the Bengali proverb goes "Dont dig a canal to bring the crocodile home".