Through the looking glass, the bright red words of the Coca-Cola logo seemed to scream blasphemies: “There is no Muhammad, there is no Mecca.” Everywhere, jihadist pop writer and cleric Sana-ul-Haq saw signs of the coming apocalypse. From the bowels of the Bermuda Triangle, the devil was reaching out to snatch planes, ships, and souls. The devil’s rule, he warned, would see “the truth presented as falsehood and the falsehood presented as the truth.” A time was coming when “the sky would rain and the earth yield crops, but neither would give succour to the people, who would face drought.”
For the pious, there was only one path left to fight the devil. He wrote: “The Lord has declared that if jihad is not carried out, the earth would be filled with fasaad [conflict].”
Last week, officials in New Delhi learned that one of the men drawn to Sana-ul-Haq’s call is now being held in a prison in Lahore. Mohammad Usman, a former resident of Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh, travelled to Pakistan, investigators claim, as part of a conspiracy to build an al-Qaeda unit that would wage war on India.
Eleven years after slain jihadist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri proclaimed the founding of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, the organisation has yet to conduct a single operation of significance. Leaders like Sana-ul-Haq, better known by his pseudonym Asim Umar, have been killed in American drone strikes. Lieutenants he dispatched to India are in prison. And al-Qaeda’s relationship with jihadist groups fighting Islamabad, as the story of Usman suggests, has deprived the group of safe havens.
Is al-Qaeda’s project in the Indian Subcontinent dead?
There is no simple answer. Earlier this month, a United Nations monitoring group reported that Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was housing low-level al-Qaeda operatives in Kabul neighbourhoods like Shahr-e Naw and Wazir Akbar Khan, while also setting up safe-houses for its top leadership in remote villages like Bulghuli in Sar-e Pul province.
Even more critically, the communal fractures that shaped the Indian jihadist movement remain a toxic part of our present.
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A time of madness
To understand the rise of al-Qaeda in India requires a journey through the mirror, into the millenarian frenzy that took root in the 1990s. To many jihadists, it seemed that a long-awaited, decisive battle with the West was dawning. The discovery of Coca-Cola’s purportedly blasphemous iconography occurred in Lucknow that year, spreading worldwide through a new medium—the internet. Fringe ideas, like the prophecy of an apocalyptic war involving the army of the Prophet Muhammad, found a growing audience.
Like other jihadists of his generation—Sana-ul-Haq was likely born between 1974 and 1976—his worldview was shaped by communal violence. From 1977, communal clashes in India escalated savagely, culminating in the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992.
Across India, small jihadist groups began to spring up. Abdul Karim ‘Tunda’, so nicknamed because he was maimed in a bomb-making accident, is alleged to have carried out multiple bombings. The Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), banned by the Indian government in 2001, began lurching further rightward, eventually heading down a path that would lead some of its members to form India’s most lethal urban terror network—the Indian Mujahideen.
Although Sana-ul-Haq does not mention this in his writings, he likely had firsthand encounters with such violence. As ThePrint’s Vandana Menon has noted, Sambhal has a history of communal violence dating back to the early twentieth century. After spending a few months at the famous Dar-ul-Uloom seminary in Deoband, Sana-ul-Haq dropped out of his clerical education and left for Pakistan in 1995—a year, perhaps not coincidentally, marked by intense communal tension in Sambhal.
Later, he would write: “Democracy is one of the evils that has had a bad impact on the Muslim nation, replacing the system of Allah with an alternative that gives power to human beings, who are merely the creation of Allah. Democracy is evil, and if you want to fight it, you have to destroy its four essential pillars: parliament, judiciary, civil bureaucracy and media.”
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The rise of al-Qaeda
For a time, Indian intelligence officials claim, Sana-ul-Haq studied at the Jamia Uloom-e-Islamia, a Karachi seminary that has produced several jihadist leaders, including Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Mohammad Masood Azhar Alvi. In late 1990s, he briefly taught at the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania seminary—one of the fountainheads of the global jihadist movement— in Akora Khattak in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where he encountered the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group. Later, intelligence officials say, he served at Harkat-ul-Mujahideen camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, lecturing recruits from India.
Following the events of 9/11, Sana-ul-Haq moved back to Karachi and lived from 2004 to 2006 at the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s office in Haroonabad. His turn toward al-Qaeda began in the summer of 2007, after General Pervez Musharraf cracked down on jihadists opposing his rule.
By 2013, there was some evidence that he was embedded in the struggle against American forces in Afghanistan. Writing in the pro-Taliban magazine Azan that year, he declared: “There is no fasaad greater than the world being ruled by man-made law instead of Allah’s law! When this happens, the world is filled with fasaad! Even the animals and birds start crying out; the earth stops growing its produce.”
Court records reveal that these linkages led Sana-ul-Haq to recruit from among his friends and fellow students. The trial of former Sambhal resident Mohammad Asif showed that support networks for Jaish-e-Mohammed operations had been set up as early as 1999. From 2013 onward, several Indians—including Mohd Sharjeel Akhtar, Mohammad Rehan, Zafar Masood, Syed Anzar Shah and Aligarh Muslim University-educated engineer Arshiyan Haider—travelled to Pakistan for training.
By late 2015, funding from supporters in the Indian diaspora—including Glasgow suicide bomber Kafeel Ahmad’s brother, Sabeel Ahmad, and Karachi-based ganglord-jihadist Farhatullah Ghauri—allowed the network to expand.
Why al-Qaeda failed
Why did these efforts fail? Likely, it wasn’t due to intelligence or policing. Indian authorities were unaware of these networks—or that al-Qaeda’s regional chief was an Indian national—until the 2015 arrest of Odisha-based cleric Abdul Rehman. Even today, parts of the story remain unknown. Arshiyan, for example, is imprisoned in Turkey, but despite completing his sentence, he has successfully resisted deportation to India. Figures like Farhatullah Ghauri, meanwhile, remain in Karachi, out of reach of Indian investigators.
The key question is: Even crude, cash-strapped networks like Abdul Karim’s were able to stage effective terror campaigns—let alone better-funded groups like the Indian Mujahideen. Why, then, did al-Qaeda, with its vast resources and ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed, fail?
The answer likely lies in shadowy shifts in Pakistani policy after the 26/11 attacks. Facing international pressure and the threat of financial sanctions, Islamabad was forced to curb its support for jihadists targeting India. The Indian Mujahideen leadership, which had sought refuge in Pakistan, was pushed out and forced to fight alongside al-Qaeda’s units in Iraq and Syria, where they were decimated by American, Russian, and Iranian bombs.
Few survived; those who did, like Arshiyan, are in prison camps. There is no clear information on when Mohammad Usman was incarcerated, but being an anti-India jihadist no longer guarantees gentle treatment in Pakistani prisons.
More importantly, al-Qaeda’s jihadist message never resonated with Indian Muslims as it did in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Sana-ul-Haq’s calls for violence, analyst Hari Prasad notes, drew only a tiny following. For Indian Muslims, violent jihad against their homeland seemed absurd.
All this, of course, could change. Pakistan’s slow descent into anarchy could once again provide safe havens for jihadists. Large-scale communal violence in India could also radicalise a new generation. Even small numbers, as the Indian Mujahideen’s story teaches us, can cause significant damage.
The case of Mohammad Usman and the death of al-Qaeda’s Indian enterprise should remind New Delhi that developments in Pakistan have gifted it time and space. That opportunity should not be squandered by reigniting the communal fires that once gave birth to jihadism.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
You wrote everything the agencies wanted to make you write didn’t they?
As usual, a well-researched article indeed, thanks a lot. The Coca Cola blasphemy was something new – quite imaginative of the jihadist mind to read it that way, haha. Indian Muslims have always posted their faith in the Congress – the predicament of the Congress is due to Muslim reaction to 1992 Babri demolition – and then the ascendancy of the bjp who filled the vacuum is now biting the Muslim. Yet, Indian Muslims will go on supporting the Congress.