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In India, Hindu and Muslim extremists are dancing the tango. Fundamentalists on both sides have needed each other in order to prosper and, from time to time, each side has given the other a gift, a big or small fillip.
So, for instance, many observers felt that it was no coincidence that the killings that took place from late February 2002 in the state of Gujarat, then run by current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, happened soon after 9/11. There was a strong sense that those terrorist attacks, and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan, gave the Hindu extremist groups a “licence” to act against Gujarati Muslims. And those killings, rapes and displacements, and the paucity of justice in their aftermath, in turn provided a slow-release fuel that is still being used by Islamist groups in south Asia.
As far as Salafi-jihadi groups go, India and its environs already have a rich variety; over the past two decades there have been a fair number of Islamist terrorist organisations operating in the area, attacking people in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. So it’s no surprise that bloggers and members of the twitterati are comparing Ayman al-Zawahiri’s formal announcement of al-Qaida’s Indian wing to KFC or Burger King announcing an entry into the Indian market, following McDonalds and Dominos. Words and phrases such as “franchise”, “brand expansion” and “competition” are doing the rounds as if people were discussing the launch of a fashion label, and not what until recently was the most feared terrorist organisation in the world.
Zawahiri’s speech, delivered in Arabic, which is opaque to most Indians, is being seen as having far more to do with bolstering confidence in al-Qaida’s own ranks and fighting off the steep growth of the maverick Isis, than it is about recruiting new volunteers from Indian’s disenchanted Muslims. The fact is, Muslims in India are not a homogenous mass and they have suffered through too many different disenchantments to agree on any stock, predictable response.
Over the decades, the Pakistani establishment has always liked to imagine that Indian Muslims are on the verge of some great Islamic revolt against the Indian state, and this is a notion that has transferred to the various militant Islamist outfits that rose from the 1980s onward. However, things are not that simple with a demographic of 177 million Muslims distributed over a vast, ethnically and linguistically diverse country.
As the parliamentary election results began to come in, someone I know in the country’s security agencies – a Muslim himself, as it happens – told me: “It’s startling, but there’s no doubt many young Muslims have ignored their community leaders and various mullahs and voted for Modi.” As India Today reported a few days after the results: the BJP won 45 of the 87 Lok Sabha seats identified by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) as having a high concentration of Muslim voters. In Uttar Pradesh alone, the party won all but one of the 27 seats with a sizeable Muslim electorate.
Though they may eventually find they’ve been duped, Muslims are unlikely to be queuing up to join al-Qaida any time soon – their main complaint against the Congress and other secular parties was that economic promises were not kept; and their main hope remains that they will find a place on the gravy train that Modi has been promising everyone.
In fact, as a senior UK-based human rights advocate pointed out to me, “there are far more international Islamist militants from Britain, with a population of under three million Muslims, than there are from India which has nearly 200 million.”
It’s not that one can dismiss the effects of increased al-Qaida activity in India, especially its loose cooperation with other jihadi groups and the ISI, Pakistan’s state security agency. Commentators have pointed out that al-Qaida has, recently, gone through something of a “Pakistanisation”, and India may bear the brunt of this mutation.
However, the most immediate question raised by Zawahiri’s speech is how the Hindu extremist groups, emboldened by the installation of Modi, will use this al-Qaida franchise-expansion exercise to their own advantage, to expand their own brands and operations. Modi may have won the election on a plank of economic reform, but for the various Hindu rightwing groups his victory appears to have provided justification to begin attacks on Muslims, including launching a campaign to “protect” Hindu women from a Muslim “love jihad” and attacking text books and histories that don’t toe their obscurantist lines.
For Zawahiri and al-Qaida this may be an attempt to fight off Isis and increase their international influence, but the sharpest repercussions in India might be increased power and profit for the local traders in religious hatred, for al-Qaida Inc’s Hindutva dance-partners.
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