Freezing in the bleak white snow, some 2,500 kilometres from his sun-drenched home, Abdul Jabbar had huddled behind a clump of pine trees when the first shots rang out. Earlier that month, in September 2008, Jabbar had arrived in the mountains of Kashmir’s Kupwara with four other volunteers from Kerala to train with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The men were marched up and down mountains, in gruelling combat-fitness drills, and taught to use firearms and explosives.
The bodies of his four comrades were now bleeding out on the snow, riddled with bullets fired by the Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir Police. To Kannur-born Jabbar, he would later tell police, what began as an adventure didn’t seem like such a good idea.
Earlier this week, police in Karnataka announced the arrest of five men they say were brainwashed by an incarcerated jihadist to conduct bomb attacks in Bengaluru. Facing trial for kidnapping and murder, police sources told ThePrint that the five men were promised they could atone for their criminal past by fighting for Islam.
Fifteen years ago, the man now alleged to have indoctrinated the Karnataka jihadists, Kannur-born Tadiyantavide Naseer, had recruited the Kerala men to fight and die on the high mountains of Kupwara. The bizarre story—involving a secretive mystic order, an asthmatic guitarist and a former parantha cook—shows that while India’s jihadist movement might have lost its lethality, the ideas that drove it have lost none of their power to seduce.
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An unlikely cradle
Naseer—also known to local residents as Haji Omar—had arrived at the sprawling Noorishah complex in Hyderabad, the Jamia Arifiya Nooriya, seeking work as an ustad, or teacher, at its seminary. The sprawling 40-acre complex, set up in the memory of the Sufi mystic Sayyid Ahamed Muhyudheen Jeelani, included a school and the al-Arif General Hospital, which provided free Unani treatments.
Each year, thousands of pilgrims would come from Kerala, where the mystic had set up the state’s first Islamic college in Malappuram, to attend a 40-day chilla—a rigorous religious course intended to liberate adherents from physical and psychological desires separating them from God.
Like many of the younger clerics arriving at Noorishah, Naseer had cut his political teeth not in the austere mysticism of Sufism but in the bloody street battles fought between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Abdul Nasser Maudhany’s Islamic Seva Sangh on the streets of Kannur.
For Naseer, the Noorisha spiritual legacy, with its emphasis on individual pietism, meant little. To him, the threat to Islam came not from inner moral corruption but the rising tide of Hindu-nationalist violence and the global war unleashed after 9/11.
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The guitarist-turned-jihadist
The political arguments made by Naseer represented a fringe within the Noorishah order—but it did have its supporters. Key among them, National Investigation Agency officials who later investigated the case say, was 1953 born Abdul Sattar. The son of ET Mohammed, a small farmer, and his wife Ayesha, Sattar was an enthusiastic student of 1970s pop and, for a time, taught the guitar part-time at the Farooq Fine Arts College in Malappuram.
Later, facing the unmusical realities of earning a living, Sattar opened a radio repair shop. Investigators then found that the landlord, Fazal Haji, nudged Sattar to marry, which ignited his interest in religion. Sattar then moved to Saudi Arabia to work at a cold storage facility. However, a long-standing battle with asthma led him back home to India in 1981. He reopened his businesses, repairing electronic and electrical appliances.
Even though the exact circumstances of Sattar’s turn to Islamism have not become clear, he was alleged—though never proved—to have produced crude pipe bombs for the Islamic Seva Sangh’s street warriors. For his part, Maudhany was tried—but acquitted by the courts—on charges of having organised serial bombings in Coimbatore and a separate attempt to assassinate former Kerala chief minister EK Nayanar.
Following the assassination attempt, under pressure from the police, Sattar moved to the Noorisha seminary. To those he asked, he claimed to have left Kerala because his wife had left him, and he was unable to bear the humiliation.
At the seminary, Sattar would marry for a third time, now to the daughter of cleric Abdul Kader, a 1960-born ustad. Kader had begun visiting the Noorishah hospital in 1996, seeking treatment for a mental health issue, and ended up teaching at the seminary.
Working under the cover of the Sufi centre, Sattar is alleged to have become a key figure in the urban terrorist networks led by fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Riyaz Shahbandri, also known as Riyaz Bhatkal. According to police in Hyderabad and Gujarat, Sattar fabricated electronic components for the timer-controlled bombs the group set off in Bengaluru and Surat.
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The Lashkar volunteer
Like Sattar, police records available with ThePrint say that Jabbar arrived at Noorisha amid considerable personal problems. The son of working-class parents from Kerala’s Puruthur, the 1973-born Jabbar had begun work at just 13, serving as a parantha cook in a roadside hotel. The family had few resources: father Kunzhu Bhavanu ran a tea stall, while one brother drove an autorickshaw, and the other worked as a roadside car mechanic. As a teenager, Jabbar had been drawn to Maudhany’s politics of rage, and ended up in trouble with the police.
To add to his problems, Jabbar’s first wife, Zeenath Ibrahim, filed criminal proceedings against him for dowry harassment and sought maintenance for their teenage son. His second wife, Ramola Mohammed, gave him two more sons, but the marriage also failed.
At Noorishah, Jabbar met Sattar, and forged a relationship founded on their common political beliefs. Sattar arranged for Jabbar to marry again, this time to his daughter Nasia Moinuddin. The couple had two daughters, and seemed to settle into life in the seminary.
Even as Sattar was engaged in his bomb-making activities, Jabbar was preparing to train in Kashmir. He hoped the Lashkar-trained cadre would become a nucleus for recruits from Kannur and Malappuram to stage assault operations across southern India. Funding for the operation is thought to have been provided by an Oman-based businessman, Ali Abdul Aziz al-Hooti.
The plot imploded when Kashmir police detected the five Kerala jihadists training in Kupwara and tracked Jabbar back to his home.
Large-scale recruitment by incarcerated jihadists inside prisons is a global problem: from France to the Maldives, police found that many Islamic State fighters discovered political Islam while serving their sentences. Kashmir has also seen active recruitment of small-time criminals. To former gang members with a history of drug use and antisocial behaviour, fundamentalist religion appears to offer the prospect of redemption.
The alleged recruitment in Bengaluru holds true to this pattern—but also holds out a dangerous message. Earlier cohorts of Indian jihadists drew heavily on organised political movements, like the Students Islamic Movement of India. The causes around which the mobilisations took place were visible events, like large-scale communal riots or the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1993.
For years now, there has been a subterranean but steady flow of recruits into jihadist organisations, even though those organisations have been dismantled. The communal violence that marks everyday life in India and the lack of political effort to address it provide conditions for the message of jihadist hate to survive.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)