Pak May Fuel Indian Jihad, But India Has its Own History of Terror

Tracing the linking of young Islamists inspired by al Qaeda and the Islamic State with jihadist groups in Kashmir.

Muhammad Taufiq had just been born when the searing winds of history scorched his world, and began driving him towards his death. He recorded those events in a low voice, inflected with the rolling consonants of the Deccan. He began:

Twenty five years ago, our enemies destroyed a mosque, but their eyes were not only on the Babri Masjid. These perfidious Hindus will keep changing their tactics until their mission is accomplished – and that mission is the elimination of every last Muslim.”=

His face masked with a white handkerchief, an assault rifle cradled in his lap, and wearing the combat fatigues in which he would be buried, Taufiq’s appeared an al Qaeda video on 6 December to deliver his only testament.

“Lands in which Islam once reigned are now ruled by [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi and his stooges,” he went on. He concluded:

The time has come for every Indian Muslim to leave for the fields of jihad.

Killed in a Jammu and Kashmir Police-led assault on 12 March, three months after the video was released, Taufiq’s story sheds light on the sunrise of a new jihad: one linking the growing ranks of young Islamists inspired by al Qaeda and the Islamic State with jihadist groups in Kashmir.

Led by Mohammed Iliyas Yazdani, a 24 year-old college dropout, the cell is alleged to have have been in touch with Muhammad Shafi Armar – an Indian Mujahideen fugitive who made his way to Pakistan in 2008 before travelling to Syria’s war-torn Raqqa.

The fact that Taufiq used the code-name “al-Hindi” raises the prospect that he may also have had links with Armar, or other Indian Mujahideen jihadists: in his online conversations, the operative used the pseudonym “Yusuf al-Hindi,” and Indian Mujahideen manifestos have routinely used the signature “Guru al-Hindi.”

Resurgence of Terrorism in Kashmir

Efforts to tie together the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir with the larger Islamist project against the Indian state, date back over a decade — but failed. Now, the resurgent power of terrorism in Kashmir, coupled with the sharpening of communal strains across the country, has given this project a second chance.

Too caught up to read the whole story? Listen to it instead.

Lethal violence could lie ahead. In December, Al-Qaeda called for strikes on Indian cities, saying that “if it is attacked in Kolkata, Bangalore and New Delhi, it will come to its senses and release its grip on Kashmir.”

Figures like Taufiq hope to be the medium for this message.

Born in the coal-mining town of Manuguru in 1994 – the year after a Hindu nationalist movement demolished the Babri Masjid – there seems to have been little to distinguish Taufiq’s life from that of millions of others. His father works at the Department of Atomic Energy’s heavy water plant in the town, a key part of India’s nuclear programme. Like his two other sons, Taufiq’s father is not believed to have any connections to either Islamist political groups or jihadist terrorism, police sources say.

In 2016, Taufiq’s name figured on the margins of a National Investigation Agency operation targeting a five-member Islamic State cell that had stockpiled ammonium nitrate, which can be mixed with fuel oil to fabricate improvised explosive devices.

Telangana’s ‘Contribution’ to Violent Islamism

Before he disappeared from Telengana in October 2017, police sources said, Taufiq was twice counselled by officers concerned by his trawling jihadist websites. But with no evidence that Taufiq was plotting actual operations, and multiple active plots that stretched the police’s resources, he was not kept under active surveillance.

Telangana, home to 16 of 103 Indians arrested for Islamic State-linked activities, has long contributed cadre for radical Islamism – among them, Lashkar-e-Taiba-linked Azam Ghauri, the co-founder of the modern jihadist movement in India with Abdul Karim ‘Tunda’ and Jalees Ansari. Their group carried out attacks in 1993 to avenge the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

In 2016, the Islamic State released a video featuring several Indian operatives. The men included Hyderabad resident Talmeez-ur-Rahman, who abandoned his studies at a university in Texas before travelling to Syria.

The police in Kashmir believe Taufiq visited Kashmir at least once before 2017, where he met with the two terrorists killed alongside him — schoolteacher’s son Isa Fazili, and Syed Owais Shah, who had just completed an engineering degree.

The men joined the Tehreek-ul-Mujahideen, seeking weapons, but had far larger ambitions. Late last year, the men met with Zakir Bhat, the head of al Qaeda’s Kashmir wing, and joined his fledgling organisation. Separately, though, they made online contact with the Islamic State hoping to set up their own group.

For us to attribute Taufiq’s story to the toxic effects of online jihadi propaganda would be easy – too easy. In search of a deeper explanation of what happened and why, we must examine the stories of men who travelled before him to train in Kashmir. These stories are, in turn, just a part of India’s centuries-old jihadist tradition.

A Glimpse Into India’s Centuries-Old Jihadist Tradition

Like all good stories, this one began a long time ago, in a land far away. Rajah Cheraman Perumal Bhaskara Ravi Varma, the legend goes, saw the moon divide in two, as he lounged on the rooftop of his place in Kerala’s Kodungallore one night. In the desert of the Hijaz that same night, the same split moon shone on either side of the mountain of al-Nur, a sign to the pagans of Mecca that the Prophet Muhammad was indeed the messenger of god.

Cheraman Perumal learned of the meaning of the miracle he had seen, travelled to Arabia, and was converted by the Prophet himself – to whom, the legend has it, he presented a bottle of pickle. The Cheraman Jama Masjid, reputed to be over 1,370 years old, still stands – facing east, in the Hindu tradition.

The king’s legacy – religion as a personal experience and choice – lives on the Noorishah, one of South Asia’s largest sufi orders. The order is deeply hostile to political Islam – but the tensions between Hindu nationalism and Islamism which exploded in December 1992, slowly strengthened those who thought non-violent mysticism was an evasion of reality.

In 2008, Tadiyantavide Nasir, wanted for the Indian Mujahideen’s bombing of Bengaluru, found work as an instructor at the Noorishah’s Hyderabad centre. He succeeded in setting up a secret jihadist circle within its ranks. The group recruited several men to train with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir’s Kupwara mountains. Nasir hoped these new recruits would form the core of a reborn Indian Mujahideen, capable of armed assaults on political leaders and police.

Four of Nasir’s recruits, though, were killed by Indian soldiers inside weeks of arriving Kupwara; 1973-born Abdul Jabbar, a fifth-grade school dropout who made a living as a cook at a roadside hotel, was the only survivor. Later arrested, Nasir, along with Jabbar and several others linked to the plan, received a life sentence.

In the wake of these arrests, Indian Mujahideen’s remnants in India, and the Kashmir experiment wasn’t repeated – until, that is, Taufiq travelled towards his death last autumn.

To the end, Nasir refused to see himself as a terrorist. “Don’t teach me about patriotism,” Nasir shouted after his conviction. “I am a descendant of the Kunhali Marakkar, who fought foreign invaders.”

Now, as the jihad revives, Nasir’s shouted words ought be considered with care. Though the Indian jihad might be fuelled by Pakistan’s intelligence services and transnational terror groups, the stories of men like him show it is also uniquely Indian – rooted, that is, in our shared history and experience.

From the 1450s on, as the Portuguese sought to take control of spice trade across the Indian ocean, Malabar’s Muslim naval chiefs, or Kunhali Marakkar, fought what the contemporary historian Zain-ad-Din Ma’abari described as a “jihad against the worshippers of the cross.” This jihad, though, was fought under the patronage of Cochin’s Hindu king, the Zamorin.

The Zamorin switched sides and backed the Portuguese in 1600, but mujahideen armed only with cutlasses staged suicide attacks on ships, soldiers and church congregations for another two centuries.

Jihadists Venerated as ‘Protectors’?

In modern Kerala Muslim culture, these jihadists are venerated as protectors of the community against imperialist violence. For example, the story of Kotturpalli Malla celebrates the martyrdom of a seaman who is killed while seeking to rescue a Muslim girl kidnapped by Portuguese sailors. His severed limbs are thrown into the sea, and each place they wash up at witnesses miracles.

Elsewhere in India, there were also similar movements, chronicled by the historian Ayesha Jalal. The manifesto released by the Indian Mujahideen after bombing Delhi in 2008, notably, hailed the memory of Syed Ahmed Barelvi and Shah Ismail Dehlvi, who waged jihad to carve a shari’a-governed state out of British India’s northwest.

In their own eyes, men like Taufiq are inheritors of a great tradition, revived to defend their besieged community against a communal onslaught. They argue this onslaught is organic to Hinduism, and a Hindu-governed state. The jihadist project is deeply misguided – but at its core lie ideas that cannot be defeated by police alone.

In the absence of credible political action against communalism, the jihadist narrative will continue to draw angry, disenfranchised men.

(The writer is a senior journalist and author. He can be reached at @praveenswami. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them).