Fire cloaked his body, as Kafeel Ahmed danced toward the hydrogen peroxide cylinders loaded in the boot of his Jeep Cherokee: This final macabre sacrifice, he perhaps hoped, would work where science and his prayers had failed. A highly-regarded PhD in computational fluid dynamics, Kafeel had designed detonators using mobile phones, wired to light bulbs surrounded by match heads. The detonators, though, failed to generate enough energy to set off the hydrogen peroxide and fuel mix. Kafeel had won the race against MI5 to get his car-bomb to Glasgow airport—only to lose it all to a quirk of fate.
Ever since Monday’s blast in Delhi—the largest bomb strike in India since the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, allegedly plotted by at least four doctors from Kashmir and a fifth from Lucknow—there has been bewilderment over why highly-educated, professionally-successful individuals would seek to engage in mass killing.
The question is misplaced: Education doesn’t insulate individuals from radicalism. From Al-Qaeda co-founder Ayman al-Zawahiri to Jalees Ansari, who staged the 1993 Mumbai bombings to avenge Babri Masjid, doctors have participated in the unfolding story of the global jihad. Bilal Abdullah, Kafeel’s associate in Glasgow, was a doctor.
Engineers—most infamous, Osama Bin Laden—are significantly overrepresented in jihadist movements, scholars Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have shown. For the most part, C. Christine Fair has recorded, terrorists “tend to be better educated relative to the communities from which they are recruited.”
The real lesson from the Delhi bombing has been elided over. For more than three decades of the Kashmir jihad, there have been surprisingly few significant attempts to attack the Indian state in its heartlands: The 2001 Indian Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and the strike on the Pathankot air force base in 2016.
All of these attacks involved foreign jihadists from Pakistan, with ethnic Kashmiris playing minor roles, or none at all. The most lethal attacks—for example, the 1993 bombings in Mumbai, the 7/7 train bomb in Mumbai—involved Indian jihadists from states other than Kashmir.
The real answers lie in a dangerous process unfolding in Kashmir. A new generation of jihadists is emerging, convinced the keys to the secession of Kashmir lie in inflicting pain on the heartland, not battling its army in the streets of Srinagar or the forests of the Pir Panjal.
The war on India
Twenty-five years ago, standing on a stage erected just a few hundred metres from the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’s headquarters in Islamabad, Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed vowed to “fly the flag of Islam over the Red Fort.” The polemic pointed to a grim reality: Even though jihadist groups had escalated violence to record levels after the Kargil war, their battle of attrition with Indian forces was heading nowhere. To succeed in Kashmir, jihad commanders argued, other Indian cities and industries would have to be hit.
For years, Inter-Services Intelligence commanders had discussed much the same idea. In 1992, unsuccessful efforts had been made to link Khalistan terrorists with the logistics of groups in Kashmir.
The Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front, set up specifically for operations outside Kashmir, had met with 1993 bomber and organised crime figure Abdul Razzaq ‘Tiger’ Memon in 1995. And Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Ali Mohammad Dar had sketched out the same idea in his private diaries, recovered after he was shot dead in 1996.
Lashkar commanders unleashed several operatives in cities like Hyderabad from 1996, succeeding in staging minor bombings. The strategy, however, proved to be a high-risk one, with the arrest of Pakistani nationals exposing the country to embarrassment in the West.
Then, in 2001, a small group of one-time activists of the Students Islamic Movement of India set up a study circle called Al-Isbah—literally, “a group in search of the truth”—in Bhatkal, Karnataka. Led by the cleric Muhammad Seesh, the group affiliated itself with groups linked to Lashkar-trained jihadists Sadiq Israr Sheikh and Atif Amin. This network would coalesce into the Indian Mujahideen, the most deadly terrorist network ever to operate in the country.
Even though the Indian Mujahideen was broken up by Indian investigators, a new Al-Qaeda grouping sprang up in Afghanistan, led by the Deoband-educated Indian jihadist Sana-ul-Haq. Indian jihadists from Kerala and Karnataka also joined Islamic State units in Afghanistan.
In Kashmir, a new generation of jihadists drew lessons from the Indian Mujahideen story. From 2008, the state had seen a series of popular mobilisations against India, which culminated in a bloody uprising eight years later. For all practical purposes, the Indian State was swept out of southern Kashmir in 2016. Yet, in 2019, New Delhi reasserted its authority, crushing Islamist networks and jihadist recruits.
Following these events, the jihadist Zakir Bhat, a college dropout from Chandigarh, sought to create an Al-Qaeda affiliated organisation in Kashmir, free of ties with the ISI and traditional jihadist groups. To Bhat, it seemed such a group would be free to hit India at will, free of pressures brought to bear by the Inter-Services Intelligence’s need to avert a full-scale crisis with India.
Arguments over jihad
Little attention was paid when Jaish-e-Muhammad posters—crudely printed on an inkjet, without the organisation’s logo—began appearing in the Srinagar suburb of Nowgam earlier this year. Police investigators, though, soon linked the posters to Irfan Ahmad, a cleric who had briefly studied at the historic seminary in Deoband. A paramedic at the Government Medical College in Srinagar, Irfan, had set up an Islamist study circle, which became popular with a set of doctors drawn to the religious Right-wing. At the centre of the group’s discussions was what kind of jihad was needed to liberate Kashmir.
The answers, 26/11 National Investigations Agency detective Sajid Shapoo has written in a stellar essay, can be found in a set of six works. In these, the Hyderabad-born Islamist theologian Abdul Aleem Islahi explored what it meant to be a Muslim in India that, in the view of some, was drifting towards Hindu-nationalist totalitarianism. Aleem’s books circulated extensively among young Muslims seeking a political vocabulary rooted in their faith.
Eighteenth-century theological debate framed the debate. Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, an 18th-century theologian, argued against the metropolitan syncretism of Mughal India. To him, it seemed imperative that Muslim rulers strengthen communal boundaries by immersing young people in Arab culture and conducting jihad against non-Muslims.
This project, though, collapsed after the fall of the Mughal empire in 1857. Shah Waliullah’s son, Shah Aziz, declared that India was Dar-ul-Harb—a land where Islam was at a state of war. Even though Muslims could practice their faith, he argued, the loss of Islamic sovereignty subjugated its followers.
From the 1920s, tens of thousands of Indian Muslims marched toward Afghanistan, in an act called hijrat—modelled on the exile of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Fuelled by the theologians Qayamuddin Abd al-Bari and Abdul Kalam Azad, the movement had a tragic end. The migrants were often robbed and killed on their hazardous journey across the Khyber Pass.
Large numbers of self-described jihadist rebellions against the British also broke out, though, from conflagrations in the Afghan borderlands to rebellions in Bihar.
The rise of independent India led theologians like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Maulana Hifzur Rahman Seoharwi to declare that the country was neither a Dar-ul-Harb, at war with Islam, nor a Dar-ul-Islam. They designated India instead as a Dar-ul-Amn, or land of peace, where the rights of Muslims were guaranteed through citizenship. This theological formulation led the famous Dar-ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband and political groups like the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind to make their peace with the new republic.
After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Abdul Aleem Islahi broke with this consensus: India was a Dar-ul-Kufr, or land of the disbelievers. According to him, non-Muslim Indians were “actually planning to annihilate the Muslims of this country.” He claimed “‘wanton attacks on Muslims are a routine and the dignity of their women is violated.” For his work, Aleem was expelled from the Jamaat-e-Islami—but embraced by the young jihadists who were beginning to form the Indian Mujahideen.
Failing in their efforts to travel to Afghanistan, the doctors of Irfan’s study circle then began plotting bomb blasts: Exile proving impossible, war was the only choice they were left with. The plans were marked by remarkable ambition: The thousands of kilograms of ammonium nitrate the group stocked would have been enough to devastate entire buildings.
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The political context
Lack of movement on building a genuine democratic culture in Kashmir after 2019 is helping the region’s jihadists. Large numbers of young people have retreated into the twin prisons of extreme religiosity or drugs, having no hope of exercising meaningful agency in their lives and society.
The principal engagement between young Kashmiris and the Indian State remains the military check-post. Even though growing numbers are finding work across India, like the members of the doctors’ terror cell, the country’s climate of anti-Muslim chauvinism pushes them into communal ghettos, marginalised from the mainstream.
Kashmir’s police and its intelligence services deserve credit for saving India from the murderous fallout of the multiple bombings the cell had planned. The challenge ahead, however, is to choke the political space that has been ceded to jihadism.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)