Ajai Sahni - Breaking news: ISIS is not coming! ISIS is not coming!
“Why is there no storm in your ocean?”
After nearly 18 years of efforts to extend its jihad into
India, an objective first proclaimed and justified by Osama bin Laden in 1996,
al Qaeda issued a statement with this plaintive query directed at the Indian
Muslim in 2014.
There is, today, a powerful political constituency – not of
the Muslim persuasion – that appears equally bewildered by the failure of the
Indian Muslim to respond in large numbers to new provocations from the Islamic
State (IS, formerly, Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, ISIS, also Daesh).
Straws in the wind: Unable to reconcile reality with
their preconceptions, and desperate to whip up a paranoid frenzy among the
gullible about the “imminent threat” of mad Muslims joining IS to overrun
India, these elements have been clutching at straws.
Indeed, one notable security expert recently argued at a
public forum that “catching straws in the wind” was the essence of intelligence
assessment and counter-terrorism response. They gather together every visible
instance of possible or potential linkage to Daesh – a handful that has
actually joined IS; another handful that has been detained or arrested while
attempting to do so; fragments of chatter over the internet; a few posters, and
occasional flag waving – to drum up the illusion of a grave, indeed
overwhelming, threat.
Where facts or data do not support these constructs, it is
argued that data is not everything; if no terrorist attacks linked to Daesh have
occurred, they could occur; if there is no evidence that Muslims
are planning to join Daesh in large numbers, they must be
thinking of doing so; and if they are not thinking of doing so at present, they
could think of doing so in future.
If reality will not yield to bigotry, it can be reinvented.
One leading light, for instance, publicly voiced the obvious canard that at
least 537 Indians had joined IS in Iraq and Syria, and more than 10 times this
number were likely to be trying to do so – numbers that have never been seen in
any source, credible or otherwise, anywhere.
These are not security assessments; they are simply measures
of communal prejudice and hatred.
Perception vs reality:
The reality is, levels of Islamist extremist terrorism – a movement
that has thrived essentially on Pakistani state support – are at a low ebb at
present. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, 4,529
persons were killed across India in Islamist terrorist violence in 2001 – the
worst year by far – including 4,507 in Jammu & Kashmir alone; 2015 saw 174
such fatalities in J&K, and another 13 elsewhere in India. Indeed, Islamist
terrorist violence across South Asia has declined sharply. Even in Pakistan,
the fountainhead of this malignant current, Islamist terrorism linked
fatalities dropped from their peak at 11,704 in 2009, to 3,682 in 2015.
As for the "armies of Daesh poised to invade
India", the reality is that just 23 persons have actually joined IS in
Iraq-Syria from this country, of whom six have been confirmed killed, and two
have returned to India. Another 26 have been arrested while attempting to
travel to the war-zone to join IS, while some 30-odd individuals have also been
detained, counselled and returned to their families. These are tiny numbers,
especially in view of the population of over 175 million Muslims in India. Crucially,
much of the information leading to these detentions has come from family or
community members, indicating that, while a few individuals have certainly been
radicalised, their families and the larger community are under no illusion
regarding the nature of Daesh.
Much emphasis is also being laid on the fact that Daesh has
already "arrived" in the Indian neighbourhood, particularly in
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh – and consequently its movement into India
is also impending. The reality is, there is no significant change in these
countries as far as the profile of terrorism is concerned, other than the fact
that fragments of groups that were already operating there have declared their
allegiance to Daesh – as many had earlier done with regard to al Qaeda when
that group was the "flavour of the season". There has been no
augmentation of capacities, no movement of resources, personnel, technologies
or structures of command and control.
Indeed, existing local movements have
split and are engaged in fratricidal confrontations in Pakistan and Afghanistan
as a result of this shift of fealty. These changing affiliations are only
opportunistic posturing by weak local formations trying to secure prominence by
declaring alliances with what is currently perceived as the most powerful jihadi formation
in the world.
This assessment of Daesh is, itself, based on distortions
and deliberate falsification. IS has consistently exaggerated both its excesses
and its victories. The truth is, it rampaged across regions of disorder and its
initial ‘conquests’ were of areas under the control of other non-state armed
formations. Where it confronted state forces, as in Mosul, if found an
adversary terrorised by the wide propagation of videos documenting tortures,
crucifixions and mass executions, and unwilling to defend Sunni majority areas.
The most dramatic instance of this was Mosul, where a state force of two
Divisions (30,000 men), armed to the hilt with tanks, armoured vehicles,
artillery, attack helicopters and a more than sufficient arsenal of small arms,
simply abandoned their weapons and fled in the face of a tiny rag tag bunch of
under 1,500 Daesh fighters, who rode into town in open pickup trucks.
However, the moment IS hit the sectarian (Shia) and ethnic
(Kurdish) faultline thereafter, its advances stopped, and the performance of
Daesh fighters has been far from exemplary wherever they have met with any
determined opposition.
The myth of Daesh power also augmented as an ever-expanding
of coalition of Western and Arab states engaged in a half-hearted and
ambivalent fight against the terrorists, even as it sought to provide the
group, and various other armed formations, with operational spaces and
capabilities to weaken the Assad regime in Syria. The Western air campaign
against IS was accurately described by one American commentator as “a drizzle,
not a storm”. To distant analysts, however, it appeared that Daesh had the
capacity to resist the combined force of a global alliance of some of the most
powerful nations of the world. This myth was exploded with the unambiguous
entry of Russia into the fight in Syria, and the Daesh legend is quickly
disintegrating in the face of a relentless succession of reverses.
The 'root cause' : While the sensational activities
of Islamist terrorist formations tend to exhaust public attention, it is,
consequently, far more important to look at the conduct of colluding states. It
is the irresponsible adventurism of strategically retarded Western states and
their regional allies that have created the conditions within which Islamist
terrorism has flourished across the world – beginning with the
Afghanistan-Pakistan – or AfPak – complex. In the case of IS, blind efforts to
provoke regime change – in countries where the West had supported brutal and
lawless regimes for decades – without any rational strategy to secure a
transition to democracy, collapsed these states, or large parts of their
territories, into what the jihadi ideologues have described as
‘conditions of savagery’, leading to the consolidation of the power of the
terrorists. Despite the rising threat and incidence of terrorism, including
attacks on the soil of the colluding states – the petty ‘great games’ of
regional and global powers continue.
Daesh’s attractiveness to extremist fringe elements will
progressively wane as the group faces defeat on its home soil. This will not,
however, end the problem of Islamist terrorism. Some other group will
crystallize, propped up by the same colluding states; and Pakistan’s terrorist
proxies will remain the principal source of Islamist terrorism in India. These
are challenges that India will have to deal with.
Far more insidious, however, is the tremendous challenge of
Islamist radicalisation that has been knowingly neglected by successive regimes
in India, including the present. There has been a proliferation of Salafist
institutions – mosques and madrassas – across wide areas of
the country, overwhelmingly funded illegally from abroad, which have been
tolerated, even encouraged, by various state governments and by the Centre.
Agencies have wilfully ignored the reality that they propagate Islamist
supremacist ideologies that posit a fundamental and inexorable conflict between
the people of Islam (strictly defined as those adhering to their specific
interpretation of the faith) and all others. While hysteria is whipped up about
the Daesh threat, nothing is said or done about this deeper and more enduring
danger.
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