Why would young, foreign-educated Indians from middle-class families with a tolerant religious outlook want to join a terror group that is trying to establish an Islamic State in West Asia?
Defying logic, at least 30 Indians, mostly engineers and doctors, have left or have attempted to leave the country to join Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s jihad.
Fact is, ISIS is no longer a threat that’s 4,000 kilometres away and only for Western forces to combat. With 210 million of our 1.2 billion population on the internet, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the go-to social media platforms for the terror group’s headhunters to pick potential recruits.
Radicalisation by Facebook
In 2014, former IB Chief and Deputy National Security Advisor Nehchal Sandhu warned that much of ISIS’ identification, enlistment and motivation of potential recruits, even in India, takes place on the internet.
Facebook and Twitter are patronised for exchanging trivialities, but there is a large segment of people who use the internet for less peaceful ends. There are groups and chat rooms that entrench radical positions in individuals. Those then sometimes translate to terrorist activity.
– Nehchal Sandhu’s keynote address during a workshop on ‘Realities of Terrorism in India’
In Salman Mohiudeen’s case fortunately, it did not translate into a terror act. The arrest of the US-trained, unemployed engineer at Hyderabad airport in September last year, led intelligence agencies to the woman who recruited him a year ago. 38-year-old Afsha Jabeen through her innocuous sounding Facebook page – ‘Islam vs Christianity Friendly Discussions’ - attracted and brainwashed people like Salman into joining the crusade for an Islamic State.
A single “like” or a comment can put you on the radar of IS recruiters like Afsha Jabeen who then engage with you personally and/or bombard you with propaganda material which include provocative videos and pictures suggesting the persecution of Muslims around the world.
Problems in Tracking Terror Headhunters
According to an ex-IB Chief, for Indian agencies to track what’s happening in online chat rooms remains a big challenge, for three main reasons:
1. “Unlike in America”, Sandhu says “we’re not permitted to look at all traffic that occurs”. Under Indian law, intelligence agencies can obtain warrants for specific targets, but those may or may not get approved and are subject to review.
2. Even when we do get traffic related to terrorism, our ability to decrypt that traffic is inadequate.
3. The law doesn’t allow Indian agencies to do Internet Based Human Sources (IBHS) wherein agents or operatives adopt a false online identity, enter a group and take it down.
ISIS Over LeT, Caliphate Over Kashmir
But why would one opt for a terror organisation in West Asia with negligible presence or impact in India?
The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s primary goal is to integrate Kashmir with Pakistan. Its aims are limited, if not vague, beyond challenging the sovereignty and security of India. ISIS on the other hand aims at establishing a Caliphate, a clearer pan-Islamic jihadist objective, easier to rally behind for an Indian recruit.
Indian recruits were willing to travel to Syria expecting to join in a theological war against an axis of “evil Western forces”, not the Indian Army. Spreading terror in India may also have been ideologically ‘problematic’ for these educated, middle-class, hitherto patriotic Muslim Indians. Their patriotism superseded only by the ‘higher cause’ of re-establishing the Caliphate.
ISIS Threat is Real, but can be Thwarted
In December last year, Home Minister Rajnath Singh used “negligible” to describe the level of support extended by Indian youth to ISIS. Less than a year later, he convened a top-level meeting involving 12 states, to review the “extent of radicalisation and invited ideas to draft a policy to counter radicalisation”.
But it can already be asserted that India has dealt with the threat better than countries like Australia and UK. It helped that Indians who had been swayed by ISIS ideology were from educated, middle-class or even affluent families. These families readily co-operated with the police in de-radicalising their wards, many of whom had never been deeply influenced by religion in the first place.
However, the threat that terror head hunters like Afsha Jabeen represent cannot be taken lightly. ISIS is spreading in India despite known deterrents – education, employment and affluence. The arrest of a young Hindu woman reported to the NIA by her father after she returned from Australia shows that even religion is no longer a bar.
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