Lessons from the Red Fort blast

THE terrorist car bombing at Red Fort on November 10 has led investigators to an alleged radicalised network of individuals, most of them doctors, mainly from Kashmir but also from other states, who were reportedly influenced by pan-Islamist ideologies, namely al-Qaeda and the ISIS, and mentored by “handlers” in faraway Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.

This is not the first time that India is confronting a group of highly educated, radicalised persons who wanted to overwhelm the Indian state with acts of terrors. In the 2000s, a group called the Indian Mujahideen (IM) claimed or was blamed for a string of bombings in various cities of India — Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Varanasi.

IM still remains on India’s list of banned organisations though it has been considered to be inactive since the 2013 arrest of one of its founders, Yasin Bhatkal. Two others were reported to have found safe haven across India’s western border. IM itself was said to be an offshoot of Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). People’s Front of India is another such group.

India held that IM was Pakistan’s creation, an allegation that Pakistan denied. In the present case, a Kashmiri maulvi who preached at a mosque in Nowgam, is alleged to have worked as an “overground” operative of the Pakistan-based and protected Jaish-e-Mohammed. There is said to be no other evidence yet to say conclusively that the radicalisation of the doctors was mentored by the Jaish.

Irrespective of whether the group had Jaish links, or was a manifestation of global jihad, or even if the “module” was self-radicalised, the question really boils down to what lessons India draws from the Red Fort incident to check such radicalisation.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told an interviewer during his July 2005 visit to the US that he “took pride in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of al-Qaeda or participated in the activities of Taliban”.

Why is that, the interviewer, Wolf Blitzer of CNN, asked. “This is because India is a functioning democracy,” Singh replied. “We are a secular state where all sections of communities, regardless of religion, caste and creed, they may belong to — can participate in our mainstream national activities. Being a democracy, being a secular democracy where all religions are free to practice their respective faiths without fear, without favour. I think that’s something which has prevented that sort of eventuality.”

Singh did not mention things he must have known were already concerns for the security agencies. India’s secular compact was fraying by then. In Kashmir, the Pak-backed Hizbul Mujahideen, which had entered the fray in the1990s, had split and a cold peace had descended in Jammu & Kashmir, as the government embarked on a dialogue with Pakistan and separately with political stakeholders in the state. The battleground shifted to the Indian mainland. The IM came up around the same time that Singh made those remarks, and SIMI had been in existence for a few years.

In the radicalisation of the educated, professionally qualified, well employed young men who joined the ranks of IM, three themes dominated the narrative — the destruction of the Babri Masjid inb 1992, the cross-country trail of communal violence before and after this turning point, and the 2002 riots in Gujarat.

Over the last 10 years, the apparent political, economic, and social marginalisation of India’s Muslim community is no state secret. The acts of casual and deliberate and often deadly violence against Muslims, the bogeys of love jihad, land jihad, exam jihad, the bulldozing of homes of Muslim men suspected of crimes, the regular dog whistles by those in high office, plus concerted efforts to replicate the “Babri model” with demand in courts to dig up mosques across the country to find temples purportedly buried under them are hardly normal for a secular democracy where all religions co-exist peacefully, as Singh described India.

In Kashmir, the Red Fort car bombing revealed new dimensions to an old problem. Until now Kashmiri Muslims who have taken to the gun have cast their battle against the Indian state as one to liberate their land from an “occupying force”. This is the first time that Kashmiri radicals have sought to widen the battleground. The radicalised doctors also challenged the old wisdom that Kashmiri Muslims and other Indian Muslims consider themselves discrete communities that would never make common cause. Their network, which includes a woman doctor from UP, points to a small crack in that wall. Call it an unintended “integration” — of Muslim grievances.

As for the intended integration through the August 2019 constitutional changes in J&K, there is no concealing anymore that it was about territory, not the people. To those asking why Kashmiri students were flocking to Al Falah, firstly, as Indian citizens, they can go anywhere in the country to study.

But perhaps more importantly, this particular institution, located in Haryana’s Faridabad, a district with the second highest Muslim majority after Mewat, suggested more physical safety than colleges in UP or Maharashtra. The harassment of Kashmiris in Delhi and other cities in North India has been so routinised that their mistreatment after the Red Fort attack barely made the news.

But the ugly fracas over the admission of mostly Muslim students to a medical college in Jammu, named after the region’s famous Hindu diety, Mata Vaishno Devi, frames why Kashmiri students leave the state to find higher education. Meanwhile, the statehood promised by the Centre to the Supreme Court is nowhere in sight. Last year’s election was celebrated for the record voter turnout, but the elected government remains powerless.

India today is not the same country that Singh described proudly in 2005. Fraying then, the secular fabric has now developed huge holes. But the former PM’s words should serve as a reminder at this time when people are asking, why doctors, why Red Fort? The answer is not to bulldoze the homes of suspects as a form of instant justice.

The reasons Pakistan’s ISI or purveyors of global jihad such as ISIS or al-Qaeda and its purported Kashmir wing, Ansar Ghazwat’ul Hind, failed to find more than a handful of converts to their agendas or ideologies in Kashmir or elsewhere among the nation’s two hundred million Muslims is in large part due to the constitutional guarantees to the nation’s minorities. They remain India’s most important weapon against radical agendas.