Elegantly written on yellow silk, sewn into the waistcoat of a new convert to Islam, Shaikh Abdul Haq, the words were to be carried across the Khyber Pass, and set India on fire. From his desk in Kabul, the cleric Ubaidullah Sindhi had laid out his plans for a war against English rule in India, involving a revolt by the tribes of Pakistan’s northwest, backed by the emirate of Afghanistan and the rulers of the Hejaz, as well as the guns of imperial Germany and Turkey.
Like so many insurrectionary fantasies, this one was “crazy in the extreme,” one colonial civil servant noted, even “pathetic.”
For reasons that have never become entirely clear, Haq handed the letters over to Khan Bahadur Rab Nawaz Khan, a one-time major in the British Indian Army, whose sons had left their studies to join the would-be insurrectionaries in Afghanistan. Khan’s third son was a police officer, though, and the family remained loyal to the Empire.
The district commissioner in Multan, to whom Khan handed over the letters, deemed them “childish rot.” The Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, was less sure and handed the documents over to the Punjab Police’s Criminal Investigation Department. The translators opened the doors to one of the most incredible stories of the freedom movement.
For Indian security services examining the fallout from the murderous Israel-Hamas war, the story of the so-called Silk Letter Movement should be a cautionary tale. The Islamic State and its Tehreek-e-Taliban allies are resurgent across Pakistan’s northwest.
Local communal hatreds, of the kinds that drew some Indians into the Islamic State, have often been kindled by wider geopolitical events: The triumph of the Taliban gave birth to jihadist movements like the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), and 9/11 fired the minds of a new generation of jihadists.
A hundred years ago, imperial intelligence services worked adroitly with stations in the Hejaz, Kabul and Istanbul to extinguish the threat. There are real questions, though, over whether modern Indian intelligence services have the skill and sophistication that’s needed.
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The dawn of danger
Like so many stories about complex political struggles, the Silk Letter Movement doesn’t have a neat beginning. Every story has to have a beginning, though, and this one could start with the teenage Buta Singh Uppal, who converted to Islam in his teens. Later, as he studied at the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoband, Ubaidullah attached himself to Mahmud Hassan, the institution’s first student and mentor to generations of anti-colonial clerics.
Historian Shehroze Ahmed Sheikh has noted in an unpublished journal that, from at least 1912, the iconography of Turkish power being martyred at the hands of predatory European powers had embedded itself in religious processions in India. The globalised Muslim identity, which emerged as a consequence of imperialism, was considered a potent threat.
Like his ideological predecessor, Syed Ahmad, Ubaidullah turned to the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands as base for revolution. The insurrection against Sikh power led by Syed Ahmad had been crushed in 1842, historian Ayesha Jalal has recorded. Learning from that bitter defeat, Ubaidullah sought to create a disciplined army with the support of Afghanistan’s emir, Habibullah Khan.
From Peshawar, Chief Commissioner George Roos-Keppel informed his government that some 15 students—most from the prestigious Government College in Lahore—had joined Ubaidullah in Kabul.
The group was joined by Mahendra Pratap, third son of the ruling family of Hathras in UP, graduate of the Aligarh Muslim University, and self-appointed revolutionary envoy to Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Sultan Mehmed Rishad of Turkey. Mohamed Barakatullah Bhopali, after whom the Barkatullah University in Bhopal is named, was appointed prime minister of the Indian state-in-exile, while Pratap was president and Ubaidullah home minister.
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The empire strikes back
Through sub-inspector Muhammad Sheikh of the Mumbai CID, colonial authorities succeeded in mounting undercover surveillance of the operations of the cell in Hejaz by 1916. The sub-inspector searched the baggage of the cleric Mahmud Hassan as he carried Ubaidullah’s message to Hejaz. The sub-inspector found nothing—and the cleric made no anti-British speeches—but, as per historian Saul Kelly, the British deported them from Suez to Malta, where they were held until after the end of the war in 1919.
King Hussein bin Ali, the notionally independent ruler of the Hejaz, stonewalled efforts by the British to crush the anti-India movement, rejecting a proposal to allow Mumbai Police inspector Hamid Said to stay in Mecca and surveil pilgrims, traders, visitors and political emissaries.
Together with his colonial superiors, Kelly has recorded, Hassan continued to regularly intercept Silk Letter missives. The authorities also stepped up surveillance of the Anjuman-i Khuddam-i Kaaba, or the Society of the Guardians of the Kaaba, through military officer Khan Bahadur Mubarak Ali. The organisation, set up in 1912, was funnelling funds to Turkey through the First World War, colonial spies came to believe.
Eventually, the course of the First World War shattered the Silk Letter revolutionaries’ hopes. The Hejaz rulers decided to sit out the conflict. Turkey, faced with successive defeats, was barely in a position to protect itself, let alone provide assurances to arm Afghanistan. King Amanullah Khan, who took power in 1919, saw no reason to confront England’s might.
Thousands of Indian Muslims who sought to migrate from the Land of the Infidels to join the anti-English jihad Afghanistan, scholar Dietrich Rietz records, were set on by tribespeople and left to die on the wastes of the Khyber Pass.
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Ignoring Dangers
Even if the Silk Letter movement was extinguished by blood, the millenarian impulses that powered it didn’t go away. Following the savage anti-Muslim communal pogroms that took place under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s watch in the 1980s, a new generation of young Islamist radicals was drawn to SIMI. The rapid growth of the organisation represented a breakdown of faith among young Muslims in India’s democratic promise and the ability of State institutions to protect them.
Since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1993, SIMI’s language became increasingly pro-jihadist. The organisation’s jihadist ambitions were also powered by the triumph of the Taliban in Kabul, which brushed aside its opponents to form the First Emirate in 1996.
At SIMI’s Kanpur convention in 1999, seven-year-old Gulrez Siddiqui was held up before an estimated 20,000 cheering members: “Islam ka ghazi, butshikan, mera sher, Osama bin Laden [warrior of Islam, destroyer of idols/My lion, Osama bin Laden],” the child intoned. SIMI called for a caliphate, claiming democracy had failed India’s Muslims, and even appealed to God to send an avatar of the temple-pillaging 11th-century conqueror Mahmud of Ghazni.
Large numbers of former SIMI members would later form the Indian Mujahideen terrorist group with the support of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, seeking to avenge the post-2002 riots in Gujarat.
The Indian Mujahideen was eventually crushed by police, but fresh jihadist networks formed—again inspired by global events. Ever since 2016, members of the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) joined the flow of foreign fighters for the Islamic State.
Kerala resident Shajeer Mangalassery Abdulla, accused by the National Investigation Agency of recruiting for the Islamic State in Afghanistan, was a supporter of the PFI’s political wing, the Social Democratic Party of India. Safwan Pookatail, a graphic designer with the PFI house journal Thejas, is alleged to be among Shajeer’s recruits, along with Manseed Bin Mohamed, who researched Hindutva for the now-banned group. Elements of these networks also joined al-Qaeda, as well as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Even though politicians often promise to annihilate terrorist threats, the ideas that power them are remarkably hard to kill—especially in the absence of deep political action to transform the conditions that empower them. Every past wave of Indian jihadist mobilisation, inspired by events thousands of kilometres away, was ignored until bombings began at home. This time, India’s intelligence and police services ought to see the distant rising of the bloody tide—and prepare for it to wash up on shores near home.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)