Just as the world changed after 9/11, the world will no longer be the same after the Paris attacks. Change however doesn’t mean that the world will become safer. Quite to the contrary, the odds are in favour of more terrorism, more violence, more alienation and more instability.
The resolve being expressed by world leaders to fight the abomination called Islamic State (IS) aside, it appears as though there still isn’t enough clarity on what they are going to have to fight – an organisation or an ideology. The former is easier to fight and defeat, the latter less so.
The IS is only an ugly manifestation of an ideology that is common to jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaatud Dawa and Hizbul Mujahideen in Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Boko Haram and Ansar-e-Dine in West Africa, the Al Shabaab in East Africa, the Abu Sayyaf group in Philippines, the Al Qaeda and its various affiliates and franchises in many countries of the Muslim world – it’s a long list. This means that you cannot want to get Taliban in power in Afghanistan and at the same time fight its clones in other parts of the world and still expect to win this war. What is more, as long as countries keep playing with fire for pushing their own agendas – Turkey is a notorious example for the way it has allowed IS to flourish just so that its Kurdish problem is tackled – the IS will keep expanding by playing one country against the other and carving out greater space for itself through these conflicts.
For India, the IS challenge is far closer to home than we would like to believe. It would be a monumental mistake to underplay the IS threat because of the immediacy of the ISI threat – there really isn’t much to choose between the IS and ISI given that IS in its previous avatar of ISIS was just the plural of ISI. Both the IS and ISI therefore pose a clear and present danger. As far as the IS is concerned, the threat that it poses has four dimensions: internal, neighbourhood, regional and finally global.
Unlike the middle-east, in India the danger isn’t that armies of IS will launch a military offensive. A large or even medium scale military manoeuvre is something that for the foreseeable future only the ISI can try to do. The real danger posed by the IS is in terms of its manoeuvres to capture the mind-space of Indian Muslims through its pernicious propaganda. True, until now the IS has to influence only an infinitesimally small number of Indian Muslims. If we really stretch it, not more than 200 people (including the Indian diaspora) have got taken in by the snake oil that IS is selling. But this number could easily skyrocket if the government and the community isn’t careful. Worse, even a handful of people influenced by the IS can cause immeasurable damage to not just the country but also the community. After all, when the Indian Mujahideen were active, they didn’t number more than a few dozen and yet were able to carry out multiple terror strikes in different Indian cities, of course with the assistance and support of the ISI.
Although there has been no detailed study which is in the public domain about the trends of online and offline indoctrination in India, there are a few clusters in various parts of India – for instance, Bhatkal – where people are taking to jihadism in fair numbers. Most of these guys are motivated not so much by any local grievance but by an internationalist religio-political narrative of jihad. Worryingly, this trend is also visible in Kashmir, where it could be easily exploited by the ISI to re-ignite the fires of terrorism while maintaining plausible deniability.
In India’s immediate neighbourhood, we are already seeing rising militancy inside Bangladesh, including by elements that claim to be affiliated to IS. The saving grace in Bangladesh is that the Awami League government is implacably opposed to the Islamists. On India’s west, however, the story is very different. Both the state and the society in Pakistan is deeply steeped in jihadism. A recent Pew survey reveals that only 28% Pakistanis view IS negatively as compared to almost 100% in Lebanon, 94% in Jordan and 73% in Turkey. 9% Pakistanis support the IS and an astounding 62% have no view! Unless this 62% is confusing ISIS with ISI and are therefore ambivalent, most of them are probably fence sitters who aren’t exactly repulsed by what the IS represents.
Although there has been no detailed study in the public domain about the trends of online and offline indoctrination in India, there are a few clusters in various parts of India – for instance, Bhatkal – where people are taking to jihadism in fair numbers. Most of these guys are motivated not so much by any local grievance but by an internationalist religio-political narrative of jihad.
Already there are indications that self-radicalised individuals influenced by the IS are becoming active inside Pakistan. The massacre of Shia Ismailies in Karachi and the spate of pro-IS walk-chalking all over Pakistan suggest a growing footprint of IS in Pakistan. Worse, the Pakistani state has been actively promoting and supporting jihadist groups – in particular the Taliban and its associate, Haqqani Network – that are virtual clones of the IS in terms of not just barbarity and savagery but also Islamofascist worldview. In Afghanistan, there is already a breakaway faction of Taliban that is swearing fealty to the IS. If the security situation deteriorates further and the Afghan state starts crumbling, the resulting vacuum will be filled by the Taliban and the IS. The impact of such a development will not remain limited to the Afpak region but will be felt in Central Asia, China, Iran and of course India.
Beyond the immediate region, in the middle-east the rise of IS and other groups espousing the same ideology is a strategic nightmare for India. Around 7 million Indians live in this region and apart from the possibility of some of them coming under the IS spell and then returning home to wreak havoc, there is the issue of the safety of the huge diaspora if more countries in the middle-east get destabilised. Plus there is the whole dimension of India’s economic and energy security that is critically linked to stability of the middle-east. Globally, of course, there is the threat that the West could undertake measures that instead of controlling the problem might end up worsening it. What is more, the growing security concerns could lead to the West imposing severe restrictions on the way it engages with the rest, which will have both an economic as well as a political impact on India.
Paris is therefore a rude wake-up call for India to seriously start thinking of all the possible negative scenarios that could unfold in the months and years ahead and start putting in place plans that will mitigate the problems that will confront India if things go really bad, as indeed it seems they will.
The author is Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation.
