Sudha Ramachandran
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.
