How JeM is using Muslim insecurities to radicalize them
Abhinav Pandya
In May 2022, AQ chief Ayman Al Zawahiri released a video in which he compared Kashmir with Palestine and called it a ‘recurring tragedy’. Drawing parallels between Indian policies in Kashmir and Israel’s policies in Palestine, he categorized the former as the cause of the ‘oppressed Muslim ummah that had its natural resources stolen and land divided’. Inciting the Kashmiris, he said that repealing Article 370 is like a ‘slap on Kashmir’s face’, and the masses should rise in revolt against this. The video also praised terrorists like Burhan Wani, Zakir Musa and Adil Dar. In 2017, AGuH had emerged as the AQ’s Kashmir affiliate. Its commander, Zakir Musa, stated that they struggled to make Kashmir a Shariah-governed state and part of the Islamic caliphate-making it clear that the fight was not for political freedom but the Islamic cause.
AQ has also established sleeper cells and proxy units in the Indian hinterland. The thirteenth report of the UN Analytical and Sanctions Monitoring Team mentions that AQIS has changed the name of its magazine from Nawa-i-Afghan Jihad to Nawa-i-Ghazwa-e-Hind, which suggests its renewed focus on the Indian subcontinent. The reports confirm that AQ’s relationship with the Taliban continues to be strong and cordial. After the Taliban’s return, AQ has consolidated in Afghanistan. The UN report also says that JeM and LeT maintain training camps in Afghanistan. The former has ten camps and three of them are directly under Taliban control. During the recent hijab row in Karnataka, Ayman Al Zawahiri released a video message purportedly to radicalize Indian Muslims on communal lines.
Over the last three decades, religious radicalization among Indian Muslims has been fast and intense, primarily due to an increased awareness of religious knowledge, their exposure to global Islamist movements, the spread of Islamist organizations like PFI, and extremist ideologies like Deobandism and Wahhabism. Additionally, Hindu fundamentalism has also intensified and hastened Muslim radicalization. After PM Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014, Muslim polarization on communal and extremist lines has picked up at an unprecedented pace. Abetted by global Islamist organizations and Pakistan, rising Hindu nationalism, and a perceived sense of alienation, deprivation and discrimination, a significant segment of India’s Muslim leadership and Islamic organizations see the Modi government as anti-Islam and anti-Muslim. Getting into the details of this debate is not the main focus of this study; however, in such a communally polarized socio-political milieu, TTGs like AQ and Taliban are likely to get traction in India. The reason for the renewed interest of Zawahiri and AQIS in India, expressed in some of his recent videos, seems to be the presently fertile environment of Hindu-Muslim communal rivalries. Such fault lines provide a suitable milieu to radicalize misguided and vulnerable youth from India’s Muslim minority.
In this task, JeM can be of immense value as it already has robust links with AQ in cooperation and coordination in intelligence sharing, logistics, training and funding. With its local human resource network and sleeper cells, it can help AQIS penetrate and conduct terror attacks in India. The possibility of AQIS outsourcing the task of organizing terror strikes to JeM cannot be ruled out. JeM’s pan-India vision has been evident since it began its operations in the country. In the Pulwama fidayeen attack, JeM targeted the convoy of the CRPF, which recruits from across India, not merely Jammu and Kashmir. The objective was to send a message to the entire country. Most recently, two terrorists of a JeM-affiliate group, Lashkar-i-Mustapha, were arrested in Bihar. After the Pulwama attack, JeM was training fidayeen squads for organizing similar fidayeen attacks in various other parts of India. In another instance of JeM’s ties with TTGs, after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, Masood’s brother Mufti Rauf was recruiting Indian Muslims for Hamas from Jharkhand, Kashmir, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Bangladesh. Reportedly, the organization has sent twelve Indians to Palestine via Afghanistan and Turkey after training them in PoK. He also motivated them to carry out Hamas-styled spectacular attacks in India.
JeM subscribes to the Deobandi ideology, which has followers across the entire Indian country (20 per cent of Indian Muslims follow its doctrines). LeT, on the other hand, follows the Ahli-Hadith philosophy, which has not gained much traction in India—out of the 17 crore Muslims in India, only 1.8 million or 18 lakh followed this ideology in 2014. Hence, JeM can penetrate into the consciousness of Indian Muslims more easily—especially given the long history of Deobandism in the country. It can quickly establish sleeper cells in Deobandi pockets, and carry on radicalization and recruitment, apart from orchestrating terrorist attacks in the Indian hinterland. JeM can find safe shelters, recruits, logistics and other kinds of support in the areas of robust Deobandi influence. The August 2022 arrest of Muhammad Nadeem, a JeM terrorist from Saharanpur—the global headquarters of Deoband Islam—by the ATS of the UP police substantiated my assessment. Muhammad Nadeem belongs to Kunda Kala village of Saharanpur district. He was tasked to kill Nupur Sharma the former BJP spokesperson, who allegedly made insulting remarks about the Prophet. As per the ATS’s interrogation, he had been in touch with JeM and TTP leaders based in Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2018 through WhatsApp, Telegram, IMO, Facebook, Clubhouse, etc. During the preliminary investigation, the ATS recovered a PDF document titled ‘Explosive Course Fidayeen Force’ from his mobile phone. A Pakistani named ‘Saifullah’ was training him to execute a fidayeen attack on government buildings and police installations. Saifullah was also asking him to visit Pakistan for special training. Most recently, on 26 April 2024, JeM’s communication office Maktab-ul-Rabita announced that Masood Azhar would directly answer questions from his followers every morning and afternoon on WhatsApp, Telegram and text messages. This announcement comes ten years after Masood Azhar’s last major public appearance. Many security experts are reading this development as a desperate attempt to find more recruit due to India’s tough anti-terror policies in Kashmir. However, it seems that this measure of JeM is more about the Indian hinterland. They want to enhance communication with the lay Muslims of India, who are going through intense radicalization, as mentioned above.
On the Kashmir front, the relative lull in JeM activities after Pulwama led some veteran intelligence officials and counterterrorism scholars to argue in muted tones that the organization no longer poses a threat like it used to. They argued that given India’s formidable posturing and retaliation after Pulwama, Pakistan was most unlikely to allow or support JeM to indulge in any misadventures like Pulwama. However, after the Balakot strike, there was hardly any change in Pakistan’s state policy of supporting proxy terrorist groups in Kashmir. Instead, after the abrogation of Article 370, the country made several attempts to infiltrate a large number of foreign terrorists and intensify the militancy in the Valley. Secondly, the Balakot strikes emboldened JeM, instead of demoralizing it. Umar Farooq’s telephonic conversations suggest that he wished India and Pakistan go to war after Balakot so that he could use that situation to infiltrate a large number of cadres into Kashmir.
Post the abrogation of Article 370, militancy has undergone many strategic and tactical changes, Initially, leading outfits like JeM and LeT created front organizations with secular-sounding names to reduce their exposure in front of global terrorism watchdogs. Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan led to tremendous euphoria in Kashmir among ordinary Muslims. Militancy appears to have taken on an Islamist turn. The burgeoning rise of Islamist groups combined with communal polarization in the Indian mainland and Hindu nationalism’s high-pitched rhetoric in mainstream electronic media and social media, along with academic, social, cultural, religious and political spaces, has given a fillip to the process of deeply entrenched religious radicalization in Kashmir. It has encouraged terrorist groups to exploit people’s vulnerability and incite violence on religious lines. The militants are killing members of the Hindu-minority Kashmiri Pandit’s which include ordinary civilians like teachers, clerks and business persons. In May 2022, militants killed a local Muslim film artist, Amreen Bhat. Reportedly, she was killed for working in films, which is considered un-Islamic. The enhanced interest of the pan-Islamist agenda of AQ and Taliban may accentuate these Islamist tendencies. In the tactical domain, the militants have shifted to hybrid militancy in which civilians like students, professionals and workers are given small weapons—like a pistol—by OGWs to commit an act of terror and then merge into the crowd. Reportedly, thousands of pistols have been distributed in Kashmir. This model is being implemented because it is challenging to find and eliminate hybrid militants as they are civilians who commit such one-off acts of terror. If they are killed later, civilians agitate against SFs.
INSIDE THE TERRIFYING WORLD OF JAISH-E-MOHAMMED
Abhinav Pandya
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