The national conference of DGPs in Assam on Saturday would have been updated on what is emerging as a new threat — the radicalisation of youth by the ISIS. India’s top police officers must already be aware that face a wider issue in this emerging threat, and that the one youth from Kalyan arrested and grilled by the NIA in Mumbai on Friday on his return from a stint with the ISIS in Iraq is just the tip of the iceberg.
Such people should be extremely useful if they are made to sing like a canary on the networks recruiting for the terrorist organisation, which seems knowledgeable about the workings of the present-day world. The investigating agencies would have to change their mindset to use such resources intelligently to unravel the networks, which do far more damage than individuals.
The face of terror has changed much since India first faced sustained insurgency in the Punjab. Today’s recruits are far more educated than their predecessors, a fact the world was rudely awakened to in 2001 when the twin towers were brought down in New York by trained engineers and pilots indoctrinated enough to undertake suicide missions.
Today, India is not the only country that has become a fertile hunting ground for the terrorists of West Asia, who are tapping into the Internet and freely using social networking sites to spread their ideology to eager acolytes who are more sophisticated than the neophytes out of the religious schools of yesteryears. The intelligence agencies are changing their strategies to cope with new demands. They cannot afford to fall behind.
