No need to cry ISIS wolf

The previous Intelligence Bureau Director, Asif Ibrahim, cast the first stone about the ISIS's designs on India at a conference of the top police brass in Guwahati last year. Over the past fortnight, the number of oracles suggesting the ISIS' imminent entry into India has multiplied. Former Punjab Director General of Police K P S Gill hung the ISIS scare on the Gurdaspur incident peg. He did not specify how the day-long orgy of largely ineffectual shooting by three cornered men in a police station qualifies as the calling card of an organisation that specialises in ultra violence — executions and beheadings by the hundreds and forcing thousands of non-Sunnis into sex slavery and forced labour.

 The Indian media too has taken to advertising this irrational fear of an enemy that hasn’t progressed into the Shia parts of Iraq. In Afghanistan, the most fertile ground for its expansion, only a disgruntled rump of the Taliban has taken to calling itself the advance guard of the ISIS. Pakistan seems to have taken advance action by wiping out the entire leadership of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi that has carried out large-scale massacres of Shias. Former RAW chief AS Dulat has more accurately pinpointed the scenario that might lead to `lone-wolf' ISIS strikes.  

Inter-community divisions in the country have widened and in Kashmir, the ISIS’s five-star jihad appeal is tempting a small section of the Valley's youth. As Dulat has pointed out and much as the Delhi Durbar might resist, Pakistan cannot be wished away from the Kashmir issue. The people living in the Valley need to be given an exit from the current government's uncompromising stand on talks with Pakistan.  Police officers and intelligence operatives therefore must give a serious thought to overcoming the shortcoming in quickly eliminating holed-up terrorists. Any strike in the name of the ISIS will take this route and the police have faltered in urban warfare, both in Mumbai as well as in Gurdaspur. Drumming up irrational fears devoid of any understanding about the ISIS's methods and goals will only raise another spectre, one we can do without in these times of increasing inter-community polarisation.