How India Deals with Radicalization

Dr Adil Rasheed*

As global jihadist groups, such as the ISIS, seek to rise from the ashes of defeat in West Asia, they are looking at the vast population of the Indian sub-continent for new blood. Until this time, Indian security forces have mainly fought these forces at the operational and security levels, but the ideological challenge posed by these transnational actors, whose militant religious orientation is different from Indian schools of Islam, needs to be scanned, parsed and countered effectively. The good news is that India’s effective and non-obtrusive forms of counter-radicalization have been producing good results and have managed to quell the number of radicals joining global terrorist ranks. The current debate is whether the present approach continues to be effective or is there need for an upgrade.

Introduction: The Medium is the Message

Terrorism has often been called a diabolical form of communication and strategic experts often read such acts of indiscriminate violence as non-verbal forms of political messaging. In fact, the intended targets of terrorism are not just the hapless victims of its attacks, but people and governments receiving the dreadful news.

The targeting of innocent worshippers in the early morning of Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka on 21 April 2019, which claimed over 250 lives, was one such form of violent messaging that not only announced the rise of ISIS from the ashes of its defeat in Syria and Iraq, but also made its statement of intent about shifting its operations to a hitherto less explored region — the Indian subcontinent.

In fact, ISIS’ subsequent announcements of forming a so-called ‘Wilayat Al Hind’ (its fictitious province in India) and the appointment of a new leader (a certain Abu Muhammad Al Bengali) to lead its charge in India and Bangladesh validate this dubious messaging.

There are a variety of reasons for the growing attention of global jihadist organizations to focus their operations on South Asia now, which only accentuates the need for India and its neighbours to be wary of the rising threat.

Shift in terror’s cost-benefit analysis

To begin with, the depleting ranks of Al Qaeda and ISIS – following the decimation of their core bases in the Arab world and even Afghanistan — has increased their need for finding fresh blood in the immediate vicinity. Unfortunately, India with its second largest population of Muslims in the world, surrounded by four predominantly Muslim states in the region — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Maldives and Bangladesh — provides an attractive catchment area for global jihadist groups to swell their ranks.

The present political and socio-economic conditions in the region — with high rates of unemployment, communal angst and polarization of society — provide the right conditions for greater resonance of the radical message. Following madrassa reforms, a new crop of English conversant and tech savvy Muslim generation is getting exposed to the murky world of social media and insular chat rooms. In addition, the socio-political payoff in terms of the long term damage and fissures that a terrorist attack could cause to the social fabric to derive more recruits and stronger bases in future has further incentivized terrorist groups to strike at the seams of countries in the subcontinent. This is clearly in evidence from the level of communal acrimony and violence witnessed in Sri Lanka after the dreadful attacks.

For a long time, security experts believed global jihadist organizations (Al-Qaeda and ISIS) were not so keen on targeting the subcontinent for a variety of reasons.

Being Salafi-Wahhabi in orientation, global jihadists had to engage in a turf war with Pak-backed Hanafi-Deobandi terror groups (like the Taliban) already active in the region since the 1990s, with whom they had fundamental doctrinal differences.

Thus, Al-Qaeda could never subsume independent-minded Taliban into its Salafist fold, even though many of its leaders like Abu Qatada and Abu Musab Al Zarqawi did not accept the Taliban emirate as Islamic due to doctrinal differences.

Even ISIS (which is more hardline in its religious orientation than Al Qaeda) has found it difficult to convert Hanafi terror groups in Af-Pak region and Kashmir to its brand of jihadist Salafism. Thus, global jihadist groups never found greater doctrinal discordance with potential jihadist allies in other parts of the world than they have in this region.

This is one of the main reasons that radicalization of Al-Qaeda and ISIS has not found much resonance in a largely Hanafi India, and is only more resonant in some southern provinces of the country as well as in states like Maldives and Sri Lanka, which have a sizeable Ahl-e-Hadeeth and Salafi population.

In addition, Al-Qaeda and ISIS never found India as critical to their global campaign against the West-led international order. Since the time of Bin Laden’s fatwas of jihad in late-1990s, global jihadists identified ‘crusading’ Western powers as their primary adversary and have tried to gain religious legitimacy by projecting themselves as prophesized forces that would wage an apocalyptic war with the Christian West. India does not figure prominently in this narrative. Even, the recent Sri Lanka attacks were directed primarily against Christian worshippers and many Westerners staying in big hotels.

Moreover apart from gaining Indian recruits, India has offered little strategic value to global jihadists. From the beginning, Al-Qaeda and ISIS have targeted failing states, preferably Muslim, to carve their own areas of influence from which to operate. Therefore, they have preferred to focus more on countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia etc. to spread their menace.

India’s vigilant security agencies, a largely law-abiding Muslim population and a strong secular social fabric have hardly allowed global jihadists any prospect of growth. However, as there is growing tension between neighboring countries in the region and societies are getting increasingly polarized in the name of religion, the cost-benefit analysis of the wily terrorist groups is changing the earlier equations of profit.

Countering the Global Jihadist Narrative

For a long time, militaries and security agencies in the region focused primarily on the security aspects of the threat and did not care to understand the ideological literature that was fed to radicalize potential recruits to jihadist organizations. At best, security experts read a bit of Islamic scripture and a few speeches of terrorist leaders to find out the strategic aims and objectives of the jihadist militant.

However, the time has come to scan through an entire body of literature of Salafi-jihadist scholars , who have given a new meaning to the term ‘jihad’ and introduced hitherto unknown concepts in Islamic theology in order to wage an indefinite and asymmetrical form of warfare against the entire international order. It is this literature, which radicalizes the views of young, impressionable minds, which needs to be countered.

When one looks into the origins of modern globalist jihad,  one finds it to be the militant offshoot of the radical ideology of political Islam which emerged in the Arab world in the early 20th century, mainly out of the Salafi-Wahhabi movement. Having suffered failures at each stage of its political and violent campaigns, this movement introduced even more virulent and radicalized concepts to gain more potency in its extremist worldview and strategic thinking. Thus, global jihadism has kept evolving a more strident and sharper strategic ideology for sustained transnational and asymmetric warfare against the humanist and liberal socio-political and economic international order for achieving its end state in a Salafist global caliphate.

Be it non-violent extremist groups like Hizbut Tahrir, or global jihadist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, have principally emerged out of a collective pool of Salafi-Wahhabi post-modern interpretation of the world, which provide a largely similar alternative to the modern social, political and economic way of life. The young, rebellious and impressionable mind is naturally drawn to any new alternate theories to existing socio-political systems. It is partly for this reason that many educated youth fall into the spell of this new variant of Islam and even end up accepting its more radical and violent extremist ideas.

The main ideologues of Salafi jihadism who have created lot of radicalizing literature for the development and spread of this socio-political movement include Syed Qutb, Taqiuddin Nabhani, Ibn Taimiyya, Mohammad Farag, Abu Musab Al Suri, Abu Muhammad Al Maqdisi, Abu Bakr Naji, etc. Salafi jihadist organizations use a canon of books to radicalize young impressionable minds, such as Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniya by 10th century Islamic theologian Abul Hasan Al-Mawardi as a basis for the theoretical reconstruction of an Islamic polity state and the ideal Caliphate. They indoctrinate their ranks with books on jihad by 14th century scholar Ibn Nuhaas, the body of work by controversial theologian Ibn Taimiyyah and Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, etc.

The Economic System of Islam by Taqiuddin Nabhani is often used by jihadist scholars as reference in that it details the so-called ‘inherent structural anomalies’ of the modern ‘debt and speculation driven’ financial system and calls for the replacement of the ‘exploitative’ fractional reserve system of banking with a ‘non-usurious’ model of ‘Islamic finance’.

However, the principal inspiration for global jihadism to this day remains Syed Qutb’s seminal book Milestones (Ma’ alim fi al-Tariq), which speaks of the alleged incompatibility of Islam with the ideals of nationalism, capitalism and socialism and seeks the violent overthrow of most Muslim potentates.

For firebrand ISIS recruits, Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery provides instructions for using barbarity, terrorism and a protracted state of war to whittle down Western armies in a protracted war of attrition, while lone wolf terrorists find the online book of Abu Musab Al Suri ‘Call to Global Islamic Resistance’ a useful reference.

Much of this radical literature, often accompanied with manuals on combat training and other propaganda material (like the ISIS’ slick magazine Dabiq, Al Qaeda’s Inspire and Hizbut-Tahrir’s Khilafah), is easily accessible in the English language on the Internet. In addition to lot of radicalizing literature, much of jihadist literature provides a lot of material on conducting lone wolf attacks and making weapons out of everyday products available in the market.

When it comes to India, the country gets an additional dose of terrorist hogwash from Pakistan-based terror groups, the writings of Talibani ideologues and incendiary articles published in online Urdu newspapers like Al-Qalam as well as e-magazines, such as Wyeth that foment insurgency in the Kashmir valley.

Having scanned through the foundational literature of global jihadism, it is important that Islamic scholarship around the world develop effective counter-narratives against the poison of such incendiary texts. Many scholars in India, both theological and strategic experts, have currently started producing literature to counter the ideological challenge posed to impressionable minds in the country. There is also an attempt to devise ways for disseminating counter-narratives through effective strategic communication programmes to reverse the metastasizing menace of terrorism. However, it has to be admitted that the process has started very late in the day and there are few successes to write home about when it comes to counter-narrative messaging in the country.

India’s non-obtrusive approach

When it comes to reversing the process of radicalization, India has so far adopted a nuanced, unobtrusive approach. The central government has thus far given enough latitude to provincial administration and state police to carry out counter-radicalization and deradicalization programmes in keeping with the nature and sensibilities of each region at a given time and has avoided imposing any singular set of measures. However, there have reportedly been plans drawn by the central government to introduce a set of clearly articulated, standardized set of programmes, but such reports still lie in the realm of speculation.

Here, it is also important to differentiate the process of Islamist radicalization in the state of Jammu and Kashmir from the rest of India. From the Indian perspective, the problem related to the state of Jammu and Kashmir is not caused by religious radicalization per se, but is a politically motivated seditious campaign conducted by the state of Pakistan against the country — an unfortunate vestige of India’s partition in 1947. Thus, the political and social dynamics of the Kashmir problem has more elements to it than conventional jihadist radicalization.

In any case, the highly alert yet cautious approach of Indian security agencies in not to over-react to the threat of radicalization by conducting large-scale counter-radicalization programmes, in order to avoid their politicization even before their effectiveness has been properly established.

Thus, the effort of security agencies have been to isolate, localize and de-politicize operations so that no particular religious community feels unduly targeted. On the contrary, the attempt is to make the vast majority of the affected community a willing contributor towards solving the relatively few incidents of radicalization and terrorism.

Thus, Indian security agencies have so far engaged families of suspects, community leaders and elders, religious preachers and imams as well as civil society members in the process of counseling, apprehending, de-radicalizing and wherever possible rehabilitating suspects in order to contain the problem, without allowing sensitive matters to spiral out of control.

Curiously, Indian security agencies have preferred to employ sociological approaches instead of purely security-centric measures towards counter-radicalization and have employed social, theological, psychological and cultural means for defusing the problem without taking recourse to heavy handed measures.

As part of its de-radicalization measures, Indian security agencies have initiated post-surrender and post-detention programs, such as

a)   ideological or religious counselling,

b)   vocational education,

c)   recreational and psychological rehab,

d)   behavior modification programmes,

e)   Drug de-addiction centres

f)    Personality development centres for youth

g)   inter-religious or inter-communal discourse programs,

h)  post-release surveillance and care, as well as

i)    involvement of family members and civil society to foster rehabilitation etc.

In this regard, the state of Maharashtra has launched an effective deradicalization programme and has reportedly reclaimed many individuals affected by ISIS indoctrination. The programme is said to focus on the four aspects of the individual, family, religion and psychology and seeks to bring about a lasting change in the individual’s belief system.

In the state of Jammu and Kashmir, attention is being given to reclaim drug addicts who often become victims of terrorist designs. Various other states, such as Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have been running their own counter-radicalization programmes, which involve innovative and effective, multi-vector approaches.

The Indian government has also introduced schemes for greater engagement with communities affected by the scourge of radicalization, their religious and political organizations, civil society, educational centers (schools and colleges), research and social activist groups.

Various prison programmes have been devised to prevent radicalization, as well as to de-radicalize offenders etc. through religious and psychological counseling, vocational and other rehabilitation programmes. Greater inter-communal interaction through the hosting of literary and poetic symposiums, sporting events etc. are being conducted. Inter-communal housing schemes to prevent ghettoization and polarization of communities have also been initiated.

As stated above the government has also started research for developing effective counter-narratives and strategic communications measures, as well as for formulating appropriate legislative measures. Steps are also being taken to clampdown on drugs trafficking and to bust the linkages of drug addiction and radicalization.

However, there is room for improvement when it comes to tackling economic and social prejudice and inequalities, speedy dispensation of justice, as well as cracking down on the funding of certain radicalizing groups in the country. There is also a need for

a)   launching counseling programmes for parents over raising their adolescents,

b)   opening help lines for psychological counseling of the adolescents and teenagers,

c)   providing career guidance and employment opportunities for the youth.

Apparently, there is historical evidence to prove the correlation between increase in youth population, also known (as youth bulges), which in sync with rapid urbanisation, has been a major contributor to political violence, especially in contexts of unemployment and poverty.

Many Muslim youth in India have found employment in Arab Gulf countries in recent decades. Although, their presence in these countries is often said to have increased the threat of radicalization, it is possible that the economic prosperity of Indian Muslim expatriates in the Gulf may have mitigated their inclination towards extremism. With Gulf states increasingly nationalizing their jobs, the return of the Indian expats to the country might accentuate the problem of radicalization and violent extremism in the future.

On a positive note, a large number of national role models coming from all communities and in every walk of life serve as beacons for young members of the community in the country to follow and emulate — be they political leaders, religious luminaries, Bollywood superstars, sporting celebrities, artistes, journalists, etc. Their success stories in a strong and secular India have helped citizens to remain committed to nation building and in keeping themselves away from the divisive messages emanating mainly from foreign sources.

In conclusion, the big debate is raging among Indian counter-radicalization experts on whether to continue following a diffuse, region-sensitive, low-key approach that has until now provided fairly acceptable results or should a more centralized, standardized, upgraded and coordinated policy be implemented across the country given the prospect of bigger challenges rising from the neighborhood and witnessed in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The jury is out and it is difficult to side with any of the arguments completely.

This chapter on counter-radicalization featured in the book titled 'India-Nigeria Experience in Combating Terrorism' published by the Pentagon Press for the United Service Institution in 2019. Book ISBN: 9788194283720