Radicals picking teenagers online to target India: US expert

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 11

Terror groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan are no longer depending only on organised groups or ‘jihadis’ but are recruiting teenagers, university students and professionals, like doctors and engineers, via online radicalisation for triggering violence in India, especially in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab.

Underlining the threat to India, Dr Peter Chalk, an expert in counter-terrorism from RAND Corporation, US, while delivering the second KPS Gill Memorial Lecture here today, said the young recruits were shaped into lone wolves with no record or trail of anti-social activities so that it became difficult to detect them.

Punjab DGP Dinkar Gupta too supported this assertion, saying 60 per cent of the 31 Pakistan-sponsored terror modules busted in the past three years were set up via online radicalisation.

The best offensive mechanism to deal with Pakistan, suggested the US expert from RAND Corporation, was to work with friendly and partner countries to put pressure on Islamabad while convincing these nations that they too could be targeted by terror outfits operating from Pakistan soil. He warned that the US wasn’t taking a tougher stand against Islamabad because of its strategic interests in Afghanistan.

In the context of the growing use of drones and lone wolves attacks, Dr Chalk called for compulsory registration of such technology and legislations to counter the threat. He stressed that it was important to involve NGOs, human rights organisations and the community at large to counter such threats. He was responding to an observation that cent per cent radicalisation could not take place online and that human contact was a part of the process.

In an apparent reference to Referendum 2020, Dr Chalk observed that an intensive social media effort aimed at radicalising young Sikhs was being waged by pro-Khalistan militants in Pakistan and diaspora groups operating in the US, UK and Canada. “There are growing indications that the ISI is orchestrating much of this activity as part of a wider campaign to co-join instability in Punjab with the unrest in Kashmir,” he warned.

In his keynote address, Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh pointed out that in the globalised world today, terror could easily straddle geographical boundaries with the Internet and social media further contributing to promoting terror and terror ideology.

He lauded the leadership of KPS Gill and his contribution to restoring peace and normalcy in Punjab. “Gill’s leadership had been acknowledged throughout India,” he observed, telling the officers in the audience that “leadership begins with you.”