The Thousand-Year Jihad

AS HE SPOTTED security personnel outside, Umar Nisar ran towards the back of his house in South Kashmir’s Achabal and threw his mobile phone into the waters of the Jhelum river below. The place is not far from where, four years later, terrorists would swoop upon a meadow, killing 26 civilians, leading to a face-off between India and Pakistan. The personnel Nisar spotted were officials of the National Investiga­tion Agency (NIA), who had been tipped through a technical input by the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). From the investigation that followed, Nisar turned out to be a crucial link between Islamic State operatives in India and their handlers in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That day, he had thrown the phone into the water to prevent it from falling into the hands of investigators.

Nisar’s father had been a state government employee. After graduating from a local college, Nisar ran a small garment shop in a local market in Achabal. But his heart had already been occupied with a cause that he strongly identified with—the cause of turning India into an Islamic Caliphate. As NIA officials began to understand how he got radicalised, they came across a name familiar to thousands of investigators looking into the murky and dangerous world of radical Islamists. Nisar said he had found a book in a local library containing the writings of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, an Islamic scholar from Palestine, who served as a mentor of sorts to the Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden—the American counter-terrorism expert Bruce Riedel once called Azzam the “father of modern Islamic terrorism.”

From Nisar in Achabal to Mohamed Atta in Cairo to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Jordan— Azzam served as a role model to many even after his death. Killed in a bomb blast in Peshawar in 1989, Azzam’s writings continued to inspire Islamist rad­icals all over the world. In fact, till the war severely hurt the US in September 2001, Azzam’s teachings would be circulated widely by a publishing house whose address, investigators found out, was a post­box in London.

But this story is not about Azzam; it is about how, for most believers of the Caliphate, from Sri­nagar to Syria, there is always some Pakistan con­nection or the other. The genesis of this partially lies in the very idea of Pakistan. As the historian Venkat Dhulipala reminds us, Pakistan was not only created as a new Medina for the Muslims of the sub­continent, but it was also envisaged as the harbinger of Islam’s rise and renewal in the 20th century.

As its neighbour and from whose umbilical cord it was sev­ered, hatred for India and a war (or Jihad) in continuum against it forms the bedrock of how Pakistan views itself. Modern strategic analysts feel this is also because Pakistan is wary of India’s rise as a global power and considers itself a bulwark against this rise. The other view is that for Pakistan’s military, enmity with India is how it sustains itself and ensures that its people do not rise against what a Pakistani scholar calls “cantonment colonialism.”

But there is also a visceral hatred for the “Hindu” India, for the kafir or the infidel. This stirs up a passion in which Pakistan’s mili­tary establishment and its de-facto rulers hope that the woes of ordinary Pakistanis are drowned and that they forget their issues like the severe food security crisis. In April, before the Pahalgam attack, when Pakistan’s army chief endorsed the two-nation theory and told his audience that Muslims were different from Hindus, he was just repeating the view held by Pakistan’s founding fathers. It is this view that made Pakistan launch attacks against India (or Indian interests) right from October 1947 when it sent tribesmen from NWFP, aided by its army regulars, to annex Jammu & Kashmir. They will keep doing this even if it takes a thousand years because for them it is a task that other invaders, after whom Pakistan names its missiles, could not achieve completely.

There is a general assessment that Pakistan turned its gaze towards India, particularly Kashmir, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, which set free a large number of mercenaries fighting against the Russians. But the truth is that Pakistan’s desire to bring about the destruction of “Hind” predates its occupation in Afghanistan. Perhaps nothing makes it clearer than an Islamist song (taraana) that Islamist mercenaries fighting in Afghanistan were made to learn:

Khoone-shahedaan rang laaya/ Mazhab ka parcham lehraaya/ Jaago jaago subah hui/ Roos ne baazi haari hai/Hind pe larza taari hai/ Ab Kashmir ki baari hai/ Jaago jaago subah hui. (The blood of the martyrs has come true, the flag of religion has been unfurled, wake up, a new dawn arises. Russia has lost the game, tremors have been initiated in India, now it is Kashmir’s turn, wake up, a new dawn arises.)

After serving its purpose in Afghanistan, the taraana made its way to Kashmir Valley in January 1990, serving as an effective tool to create euphoria against the Indian state and also to intimidate its Hindu minority, leading to its permanent exodus. Pakistan had done this to its own religious minorities. Before Partition, almost 33 per cent of its population was non-Muslim, and even after the mass post-Partition transfer of population, every fourth Pakistani was a minority like Hindu, Sikh or Christian. Today, of course, it is less than four per cent.

MANY IN INDIA, oblivious or deliberately oblivious to Pakistan’s designs, treated insurgency in Kashmir as an indigenous movement for freedom. By doing so, they ignored the writing on the wall even when the writing was glowing in their faces. Instead, they chose to invite radical Islamists like the late Syed Ali Shah Geelani to public events in the heart of New Delhi, even when in his speeches, Geelani was crystal clear about what he wanted Kashmir to be. In one of the speeches delivered during a period of terrible turmoil in the Valley, he says that in Kashmir, no democracy or secularism will work, that through Islam, Kash­miris are Pakistanis and that Pakistan belongs to the Kashmiris. It is through this “clarity” that, through 35 years of jihad in Kashmir, a much smaller population is now following the syncretic Islam, instead opting for more radical streaks. This is where organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba played an important role.

The Lashkar was formed in the mid-1980s after two organ­isations merged together to form the Markaz-ul-Dawa Irshad (Lashkar is its armed wing). One of them was led by Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi who put together a group of Pakistani fight­ers to fight in Afghanistan against the Russians. The other was formed by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and his associate Zafar Iqbal, both professors from the Islamist studies department of Lahore Engineering University. One of the earliest supporters of Lashkar was Azzam, whose teachings Nisar found in a public library near his home.

How come an organisation that was supposed to focus on tabligh (proselytisation) turned into a global terrorist organisation that the West barely paid heed to till Mohamed Atta came to say hello? And even after so much evidence that the jihad Pakistan espouses and supports today, even after bin Laden was found in a safe house, even after the gruesome beheading of the Wall Street Journal jour­nalist Daniel Pearl, the West largely ignores the perils of the very existence of the Pakistani state.

Pakistan, of course, did not stop at Kashmir. In the 1990s, foreign terrorists or mehmaani mujahi­deen as they would be called in Kashmir, began coming in droves to the Valley. The 1992 demoli­tion of Babri Masjid gave them a new impetus to mobilise jihadists. Soon afterwards, Masood Azhar arrived. Before coming to Kashmir, he paid a visit to the demolished structure, vowing to take revenge. Close on his heels, after his arrest, came Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, whom the Vajpayee govern­ment was forced to release (along with Azhar) in the IC-814 hijack episode. Then Ghazi Baba slipped in, plotting the Parliament attack while sitting unnoticed in a village from where, years later, a young terrorist Burhan Wani’s death would plunge Kashmir into yet another crisis. And with­in a few years, we had bomb blasts all over India, from Delhi to Coimbatore.

And then came the embarrassing Mumbai terror attacks. The way handlers in Pakistan asked terrorists on the ground to put bullets through the heads of victims should have made us acutely aware of Pakistan’s designs. But even then, we chose not to retaliate.

In 2019, a Kashmiri suicide bomber rammed his car into a CRPF convoy, killing 40 soldiers. How little we still understood radicalisation is evident from the fact that for days, intelligence officers refused to believe that a Kashmiri could have been the suicide bomber. In a video released after his death, the bomber, Adil Ahmed Dar, tells young Kashmiris not to get swayed by “Western influences” from the path of Islam. He calls India a nation of cow-piss drinkers. Meanwhile, every now and then, a masked man here and there began appearing in front of the cam­era, displaying one finger, a gesture used by Islamic State terrorists to reject any other view as idolatry.

It is through the same hatred that the Lashkar terrorists made innocent tourists in Pahalgam unzip their trousers to identify them as non-Muslims. In response, the Modi government has chosen to strike at the heart of Pakistan and also state that from now on, Operation Sindoor was going to be India’s official doctrine against terrorism. That is a welcome change. But it would be vital to keep Pakistan’s DNA in mind in the coming days. Because there is no chance that Pahalgam will be their last act against us.

Indian Airlines IC 814Islamic militancyjihadKandaharPakistanterror attack