Strategic Comments  – Volume 15, Issue 3 – April 2009

Islamic extremism in India

Rise of home-grown terrorism

In March, India announced that its prestigious cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League (IPL), would move to South Africa, citing security fears during the country’s elections, which also take place in April–May. Organisers were most concerned about a ‘spectacular’ like that in Mumbai in 2008, or an attack similar to that on the Sri Lankan cricket team recently in Pakistan.  

Muslims and Sikhs were killed in ethnic riots. In the  following years, serious Hindu–Muslim riots  took  place  in Jabalpur (1961), Ahmedabad (1969), Moradabad (1980), Neli (1983) and Bhagalpur (1989).

Despite this violence, and despite pervasive poverty in Muslim communities, most Indian Muslims remained peaceful and moderate. Democracy and the rule of law provided redress of local grievances, while India’s pluralistic and secular nature offered religious tolerance and warded off Muslim alienation. For the local ulema, or  Muslim legal scholars, India is Darul Sullah (abode of coexistence),  not Darul Islam (abode of Islam) or Darul Harb (abode of war). While the dispute over the status of the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley has caused wars with Pakistan, non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims have largely ignored the secessionist struggle, perceiving it as an ethnic, not a religious, issue.

Two key developments served to radicalise a small part of the Muslim community. The first was the demolition by Hindu mobs of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, on 6 December 1992. Hindu nationalists claimed the sixteenth-century mosque had been built over a temple marking the birthplace of Hindu god Rama. Right-wing politicians led the charge, while the Congress Party government in Delhi, and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), failed to prevent the mosque’s destruction. With passions inflamed on both sides, anti-Hindu riots broke out across northern India, followed by anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai, leaving more than 2,000 dead, mainly Muslims.

The second event was the anti-Muslim rioting in the western state of Gujarat in 2002. On 27 February in the town of Godhra, a fire broke out on the Sabarmati Express train carrying Hindu activists and 59 people were killed. Blaming Muslim youths for petrol-bombing the train, Hindu mobs went on the rampage. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in March and April. The local police were impassive or supported the Hindus. Gujarat’s BJP chief minister, Narendra Modi, and the BJP-led central government of PM Atal Behari Vajpayee failed to stop the killings.

Islamic extremism

These events had wide implications. In apparent revenge for the Babri mosque’s demolition, Mumbai mafia don Dawood Ibrahim planned bombings in Mumbai on 12 March 1993 that killed 257 people. Aided by criminal networks, terror organisations in Pakistan and Bangladesh – including Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT), the Jaysh-e-Mohammad and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami – began recruiting Indian Muslim extremists to help carry out terror attacks in India, for the first time outside the state of Jammu & Kashmir. On 11 July 2006, bombs on trains in Mumbai killed 187 people. The attack was blamed on the Pakistan-based LeT, but some radicalised Indian Muslim supporters provided significant help.

Meanwhile, divisions grew between India’s Muslims. Owing partly to being descendants of converts from Hinduism and partly to local mystical Sufi traditions, two-thirds of India’s predominantly Sunni Muslims follow the local Barelvi liberal school of thought; the others chiefly follow the conservative Deobandi school. Barelvi mosques seek to prevent stricter interpretations and practices of Islam, but this became increasingly difficult with the encroachment of fundamentalist Wahhabist ideology, helped by external funding. In February 2001, a government report expressed concern that establishing new madrassas (religious schools) with Saudi and Gulf funding would cause ‘systematic indoctrination’, even though less than 4% of Muslim children attended madrassas.

Muslims’ grievances were exacerbated by their low socio-economic status; the official Sachar Committee report of 2006 said this was only just above that of dalits (formerly known as ‘untouchables’) and tribal people. Muslims only account for 3% of the Indian Administrative Service, 1.8% of the Indian Foreign Service and 4% of the Indian police.

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