#dnaEdit: Spectre of al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s claim that an Indian branch of the jihadist group is being set up to wage war for Muslims in Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir and Assam is both a bluff and a reality. It is a bluff because al-Qaeda is not in a position to take on any State in the world, much less the Indian State. It is a reality because the rag-tag Qaeda groups can cause havoc only through isolated acts of violence. India has handled terror acts for more than a quarter century, in Punjab, in Jammu and Kashmir, in the North-East and in central and south India. Of course, hundreds and thousands of people have died in these protracted engagements and India had paid a heavy price. At the end of it all, the Indian State has emerged victorious. It has also been a complicated affair where many of the armed guerrillas negotiated and bargained for peace after a tortuous and futile struggle. 

While the intelligence and the security agencies need to be on high alert in the wake of the Zawahiri video, it has to be understood that the jihadi groups do not pose a challenge to India or to the Indian State. The Indian State derives it strength mainly from the people of the country who have a democratic stake in it. India’s political leaders and security brass have to tackle the jihadi challenge without resorting to religious profiling of India’s 150 million plus Muslims. All Muslims in the country are not liberal in the same way that all Hindus in the country are not liberal. There are conservatives, right-wingers, fundamentalists and evangelists in all religious groups. It reflects the diversity within the religious groups and the sense of plurality needs to be retained. It provides the cushion against extremism. The zeal of those in power to impose uniformity and homogeneity should be reined in.

Preserving democratic freedoms which enable people to express their views, however unpalatable, is the best way to combat the jihadi challenge.   

It is quite likely that political parties in the country would use the al- Qaeda threat to play their short-sighted partisan games. That would be a dangerous thing to do. In places like western Uttar Pradesh, where inter-community relations of Hindus and Muslims are frayed at the moment, there is a need not to play the incendiary Qaeda card. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP), the main political parties in the state, have a special responsibility not to incite sectarian passions. The communalists in the two communities will have no sting if politicians do not entertain them. 

The billion-plus Muslims across the world have no sympathy for the fanatics and jihadis. That is why, the number of jihadi recruits are so meagre. Their numbers are just in the thousands. And there are enough splinter groups among them, fighting and foiling each other. The jihadis do not represent either the global Muslim community or any of the Muslim countries, not in conservative Saudi Arabia and not in clerics-ruled Iran. The Western notion that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) represent Muslims or Islam has to be rubbished in order to win the war against jihadi terrorists. This is no ideological war. It is a fight between law-abiding people and outlaws.