Terror in the name of God haunts India

When it comes to security, India as a nation faces a basket of threats. Right from Maoist insurgencies and inter-tribal violence in the Northeast to Chinese aggression on the border to vulnerability on the marine front and the escalating danger of cyber attacks on strategic assets, the dangers are many-fold. 

But nothing can be as destabilising as faith-based militancy. 

The rise of religious militancy that now confronts India can be traced to three main sources — the unsuccessful jihad by the followers of Abdul Wahab, the founder of Wahabism, against the British during the colonial era, dubbed as the first jihad in modern history; the Independence-cum-Partition phase that saw one of the worst communal violences ever in modern history; and, the use of Islamic fundamentalists by the US-led West against communist regimes during the Cold War era, especially the anti-soviet armed campaign in Afghanistan. 

The "Wahabi revolt" — as the British called it — was part of a global attempt by the Ulema Al-Tijani in Algeria, Abdul Wahab in Arabia and Wahab’s follower Shah Waliullah in South Asia to use jihad as a weapon to throw out the Western occupation of Muslim lands. These radicals attributed the political decline of Muslims to its deviation from puritan faith since the days of the ‘pious caliphs’ and called for a return to the roots. 

Rise of Radicals 

In India the epicenter of jihad was in Swat, now in the Pakhtoon frontier of Pakistan. The adventure failed, but its protagonists retreated to seminaries that would later produce the Taliban. jihad today has radicalised the entire NWFPAfghanistan belt. The ‘war on terror’ was essentially a combat between the US-led West and the Islamic radicals led by the al Qaeda-Taliban combine. But India is now caught in the cross-fire of this ongoing conflict. 

The radical’s have — after the elimination of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — revived themselves under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria) and Al Zawahiri of al Qaeda in the regions around Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. The strand of radical Islam that endorses beheadings and suicide bombings has caught on in places like Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia as well. 

It is ironic that though India was a part of the US-led world coalition against terror even before Pakistan joined in, it is India that has suffered the most through Pakistan’s proxy war and cross-border terrorism inflicted with the help of militant outfits such as Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Hizb-ul Mujahideen, nurtured by ISI, Pakistan’s spy agency. These were the same elements that led the jihad for the US in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. 

Emboldened by its success, the Pakistan army lost no time in replicating the Afghan jihad in Jammu & Kashmir by diverting mujahideen onto this new front. This offensive was broadened into a full-scale "proxy war" in which terrorists infiltrated through the porous India-Nepal and India-Bangladesh borders attacking targets even in other parts of the country. 

Even the US was quite willing to look the other way when the Pakistan army was letting loose these India-specific militants. Many US analysts even made a spurious distinction between the likes of Jamaat-e-Islami — the parent organisation of HuM — and the Saudi-funded Markaz Dawah ul Irshad — the breeding centre of LeT — by labelling them as practitioners of “political” Islam as different from “radical” Islam that was the US’s enemy in the "war on terror". 

Emboldened by this collusive attitude of the West, Pakistan’s ISI carried out 26/11 that was rightly regarded as India’s 9/11 but the US went along with Islamabad’s deniability of any responsibility for it — possibly because Osama bin Laden was still keeping up the threat to Americans. It is a pity that the then government in India meekly accepted the Pakistani alibi that 26/11 was the doing of some non-State actors. 

Proxy War 

The Sino-Pakistani axis at the recent SAARC conference has further boosted Islamabad’s resolve to keep up the proxy war against Delhi. The US attitude on Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism connects with the geo-political history of how the US-led West during the Cold War favoured Islamists who were invoking religion to oppose pro-Left regimes in the Arab and Asian world. The West was delighted to see Hasan Al Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood taking on Nasser in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami founded by Maudoodi — an admirer of Banna — confronting Sukarno in Indonesia. 

India’s primary concern is that once the Americans are out of the frame in Afghanistan, the Pakistan army will find a way of reaching out to the radicals who are a part of the socio-political milieu of Pakistan and whose mentor, the Taliban, had been put in power in Afghanistan by the army. The ISI will not find it difficult to connect with Maulana Asim Omar, the Pakbased militant of Indian origin who is now the Al Qaeda chief of South Asia chapter. 

The vulnerability of India to faith-based militancy is also enhanced by a combination of factors that are operating internally as well. It is the Muslim elite represented by the Muslim League and not average Muslims who had demanded a religionbased entity called Pakistan and injected extreme militancy in India through Direct Action Day. When the inevitable Partition came, widespread communal violence of the most brutal kind followed in its wake. 

Communal riots rooted in the memory of Partition tapered off by the 1980s because of the advance of democratic process in India. But the rise of communal politics now took centrestage and as the polity became more and more fractured with the temptation to get the support of a large minority against a divided majority. This was typically symbolised by the not-so subtle statement of the outgoing prime minister that the Muslim minority had the first claim on nation’s resources. 

The domestic polity of communal divide is casting a shadow on national security as inimical forces outside are exploiting it to generate militancy. There is a compelling need for India to review the strategy of dealing with the widening arc of faith-based militancy affecting the external and internal situation of the country.