India's sons live the dream - and wage jihad By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The alleged involvement of several Indians in the attempted
bombings in London and Glasgow late last month has punctured the myth that
Indian Muslims are immune to the call of jihad. It has sent alarm bells ringing
in India's security establishment.
While the full role of the Indians who are being questioned or are under arrest
is yet to unfold, police believe at least one of them - Kafeel Ahmed, the
28-year-old aeronautical engineer who
allegedly drove a flaming Jeep Cherokee into Glasgow International Airport
terminal on June 30 - was central to the plot. He and his brother Sabeel Ahmed,
26, a doctor, have been arrested.
Whether their cousin Mohammed Haneef, also a doctor, who was picked up in
Brisbane, Australia, while trying to catch a flight, was a part of the plot or
of the terror cell is still unclear, although growing evidence of his playing a
fundraising role for the cell has been reported.
All three hail from the southern Indian state of Karnataka and had studied in
Bangalore, its capital. What has come as a shock to many Indians is that these
young men did not emerge from impoverished ghettoes with little beyond a madrassa
education and jobless but from India's information-technology capital known for
its cosmopolitan culture. These were men who had degrees in medicine and
engineering and had secured jobs in Britain and Australia. They had achieved
the Indian dream.
Friends and teachers recall the two Ahmed brothers as non-interfering, good
students from close-knit middle-class families. Kafeel's schoolteacher
remembers him as "a quiet, above-average boy, who fit into the school quite
easily despite coming from another country". The boys spent their pre-teen
years in Saudi Arabia, where their parents were working as doctors. Sabeel, or
Motey (Fatso) as he was called by his friends, was more outgoing and a soccer
fanatic.
So when did the soccer fanatic turn fundamentalist? Where did the change
happen? Initial reports in the media claimed that the two became radicalized
after they moved to Britain a couple of years ago. This is no so. Kafeel came
under the influence of fundamentalist organizations in 2001 when he was an
engineering student in Davanagere, a town 250 kilometers north of Bangalore. In
2003, he joined the Tablighi Jamaat, an organization that preaches puritanical
Islam.
According to Samiullah, secretary of the Hazrat Tippu Mosque, opposite the
Ahmed family's residence in Bangalore, the brothers got into a fight with
mosque authorities. They wanted the mosque to follow the tenets of Wahhabism, a
hardline stream of Islam followed in Saudi Arabia that is not popular in India.
"They opposed the decoration of the mosque on Eid and the visiting of dargahs
[shrines that Muslims and Hindus visit] by Muslims as un-Islamic," he said.
"This annoyed the mosque's members, who asked the two brothers to stop coming
to pray at the mosque."
The seeds of the Ahmed brothers' radicalism were sown in India. These views
blossomed in Britain. It is likely that their radicalism attracted the
attention of international terror outfits who would have recruited them knowing
well that as Indian Muslims, the brothers were likely to be less monitored by
British intelligence.
Until last week, Indian Muslims living abroad were not the focus of scrutiny of
counter-terror agents. They, unlike their counterparts from Pakistan, were not
seen to be very active in the jihadist network. This perception of the Indian
Muslim was fueled by the fact that although India has the second-largest Muslim
population in the world, no Indian Muslim figured among those captured in
Afghanistan in 2001-02 or being held in prison camps such as Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
Not one of the scores of international terrorist cells that intelligence
agencies identified in the course of investigations following al-Qaeda attacks
in the United States, Europe or Southeast Asia was tracked back to India. In
2004, Dhiren Barot, a Hindu of Indian origin who converted to Islam, was
arrested and subsequently convicted for his al-Qaeda links. But Barot had moved
to Britain with his parents when he was a few months old. His socialization,
Indian analysts could smugly point out, was not Indian.
Indian Muslims, it seemed, were not drawn by calls for jihad or to join up
international terrorist groups. That myth appears now to have been shattered.
Muslims in India have carried out terrorist attacks in India. But these attacks
were responses from fringe elements in the community to the destruction of the
Babri Masjid by Hindu hardliners in 1992 or to the anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai
and other cities in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002 - all events or situations in
India. Indian Muslims who carried out terror attacks here might have been
indoctrinated, funded and armed from abroad or at the behest of Pakistani
intelligence, but their anger was rooted in Indian situations.
The incidents that allegedly triggered the men to plot the London/Glasgow
attacks, however, were Iraqi, not Indian. They were apparently provoked by the
US/British invasion and occupation of Iraq.
A retired Indian Home Ministry official said the government, "smug in the
belief that India's secular democracy had immunized its Muslim citizens against
the jihadi virus and keen to convince the world that its Muslims were different
from those elsewhere, had come to believe its own propaganda". In the process,
"its intelligence agencies did not see the al-Qaedaization of sections among
Indian Muslim radicals".
The alleged involvement of Indians in the London/Glasgow attacks has come as a
shock to many Indians. But there were several pointers of things to come.
"The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the country have categorically
rejected extremist Islam and the rising tide of violence associated with it,"
terrorism analyst Ajay Sahni, executive director of the Delhi-based Institute
for Conflict Management, wrote in the English-language Daily News &
Analysis. "However, it has long been the case that this insidious ideology has
won at least some adherents among Indian Muslims, and these elements have
engaged in terrorism on Indian soil over an extended period of time.
"There was, consequently, no rational constraint - other than the absence of
specific mobilization to such an end - that would necessarily exclude the
possibility of their involvement in acts of terrorism abroad."
There have been reports from time to time of al-Qaeda having arrived in India.
Even if al-Qaeda itself hasn't actually arrived here, organizations such as
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed and
Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HUJI), which are known to have very close links with
al-Qaeda, have been operating here for years. These organizations are
constituents of the International Islamic Front (IIF) - an umbrella
organization founded by Osama bin Laden in 1998 - of which al-Qaeda too is a
part.
An Indian intelligence official told Asia Times Online last August that "while
al-Qaeda might not have an Indian arm, organizations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba
have acted as such. The Pakistani constituents in the IIF have acted as Osama's
elves in India" (India
awakens to al-Qaeda threat, August 22, 2006).
Indians have cooperated with "Osama's elves" to carry out attacks on Indian
soil. They have drawn on the expertise and funds that groups like LET or HUJI
offered.
Carrying out attacks abroad was therefore the next logical step.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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