The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) has not just changed the jihadi landscape in West Asia, but its tentacles have also reached India. We now have the unenviable spectacle of the two transnational jihadi organisations, Al Qaeda and the ISIS, actually competing with each other for the attention and support of Indian Muslims. In June, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, from his hideout in the mountains at the Pak-Afghan border, recalled the great ongoing jihadi battles and reminded Indian Muslims that even those who rejected armed jihad are now joining this path after being disillusioned with democratic ways. His associate, Asim Umar, chastised Indian Muslims: how can you remain in slumber when the Muslims of the world are awakening?
A major propaganda effort has been mounted that is at once strident and alluring. In September this year, in response to the increasing successes of the ISIS, Zawahiri announced the setting up of an Al Qaeda branch in South Asia which would raise the flag of jihad, return India to Muslim rule, and enforce Sharia across the country. A new body, the Ansar al-Tawhid al-Hind (Supporters of Monotheism in India) — made up of Indian, Pakistani and Afghan Taliban members — has released a series of videos directed at India. One calls upon all the global jihadi leaders to pool their resources to attack Indian targets to protect the Muslims.
Another invites Indian Muslims to participate in the global jihad, while a recent one refers to communal riots against Muslims in India and calls upon them to take revenge. Not to be outdone, the ISIS has directed some equally aggressive messages through social media, including a recruitment video helpfully translated into Urdu, Hindi and Tamil.
The achievements so far have included: four Indian youngsters joined the ISIS, of whom one has returned disillusioned with the menial tasks assigned to him; some T-shirts with the ISIS symbol have been distributed in southern India, while some ISIS flags were displayed in Srinagar. And then, a lone, virtual activist, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, has been arrested for running an ISIS publicity and recruitment site from his residence in Bengaluru, in which he had 129,000 tweets and acquired a following of about 17,500, including a few hundred English-speaking jihadis at the war-front in Iraq and Syria. These are rather modest results given that several thousand foreign jihadis have joined the ISIS over the last year, including nearly 3,000 from Western countries.
It is not that Indian Muslims have not reacted with anger and violence to provocations at home. The Muslims’ first foray into organised resistance began with the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in 1977, which initially focused on resisting Western cultural inroads into Muslim society; later, it became more militant as the communal situation in the country deteriorated in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly after the destruction of Babri Masjid and the widespread riots that followed.
A breakaway group emerged as the Indian Mujahideen (IM) in the mid-2000s, largely in response to the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat, which carried out a series of lethal bombings across India. Much of this violent activity was carried out in close collaboration with terrorist outfits sponsored by Pakistan, such as Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Some SIMI elements were perhaps training with Pak outfits even in the early 1990s.
Indian Muslim militancy has been entirely instigated by domestic grievances. These grievances too have been similar over the years: communal riots in which Muslims were the main victims, with no attempt made to identify and punish the guilty, increasing sense of marginalisation, particularly in the economic area and widespread abuses by the police across the country, in terms of which hundreds of Muslim youth have been arrested, incarcerated and abused in custody, with no judicial processes being initiated in most cases.
Thus, the agenda of Indian militant organisations has focused on specific grievances, showing little interest in pursuing a proper jihadi vision of an Islamic caliphate based on Sharia. Again, a very small number of persons have been mobilised to take up arms against the state: earlier, SIMI members were estimated at 400 full-time ansars and about 20,000 ordinary members; the core membership of the Indian Mujahideen is believed to be not more than a hundred. This is because they obtain most of their members from familiar, localised communities: though active across the country, their major recruitment has been from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, Bhatkal in Karnataka, and recently from Pune and Patna. Again, unlike other jihadis, Indian Muslim groups have not carried out suicide bombings.
Now, in the face of two recent developments — the BJP government in Delhi and the robust blandishments of the two jihadi organisations — is the situation pertaining to organised Muslim violence likely to change? I don’t think so. Though there are recent reports of contacts between Al Qaeda and IM elements in Pakistan and even some joint training, the Indian Muslim, who rejected jihad 35 years ago when it was truly global and enjoyed considerable international support, will not change his attitude today: he just does not have any new enthusiasm for the caliphate or Sharia.
However, the domestic situation is quite different: here, the communal divide seems to have become deeper, particularly after the Modi-led government has taken over, with a significant increase in what Muslims view as deliberate provocations, such as the so-called “love jihad”, irresponsible communal remarks from senior political leaders, the re-conversions, and the continuing communal flare-ups which appear to be deliberately engineered for local political advantage. This could encourage extremists at the margins to continue their sporadic acts of violence and terror.
Muslims’ concerns can be easily addressed by the toning down of communal rhetoric, strong intervention to handle emerging communal situations, even-handed police machinery, and a judicial system that dispenses justice quickly and effectively. This is not just an issue between two communities: it pertains to a national consensus on the idea of India. We are all part of this debate.
The author is a former diplomat
