Re: Islamic groups warns of more destruction in India
LEADER ARTICLE: The terror within
Ranjan Roy
For years, we’ve heard pompous exhortations from our leaders about how no Indian was ever found to be part of any international Islamic terror group. A true tribute to secular politics and democracy in a country that has as many Muslims as the West Asian nations put together.
We were told that no Indian was part of Al-Qaida and that almost always the leadership of groups responsible for domestic terror came from without, i.e. PoK. All that was roughly true. So how come we suddenly find ourselves hemmed in by, as one top official put it, “concentric circles” of terror.
Because as those pronouncements were being made, a quiet radicalisation of a few Muslim minds in non-conflict areas of India has happened and gone unnoticed.
And to the point where our intelligence agencies are realising that while they take on the enemy in this global, asymmetric war, the foot soldiers confronting them are young boys from the most unlikely hinterlands of India. What happened here?
The easy answer is that frustrated young Muslims are being brainwashed and lured with dollars arranged for by extreme Wahabi and Salafi groups and passed through agents in Dubai, Doha or Qatar or ISI operatives in Nepal and Bangladesh.
That’s part of the answer. It will take a while till we understand how Marathi and Telugu-speaking Muslim men have crossed linguistic and regional boundaries and made common cause with Urdu, Arabic, Kashmiri and Bengali-speaking men to stand on the frontlines of the South Asian jehad.
In the days after the Mumbai blasts, a scary grid of terror has emerged, connecting Pune, Aurangabad, Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Hydera-bad, possibly Kathmandu and most definitely a nondescript village called Kamalpur in Tripura’s Dholai district