Mumbai blasts: Azamgarh, the jihadist factory

We must return to Azamgarh once again to understand the roots of home-grown jihadist terror in India for, in many ways, the district is the microcosm of what went wrong and why there is an urgent need for reforms before things go out of control. Apart from the overall role played by the ISI and the LeT in the creation of the Indian Mujahideen, political governance is to be blamed equally as it created the conditions wherein certain cities became nurseries for jihadists.

The communal riots all over the country after the demolition of the Babri Masjid led to demographic changes with both the minority and the majority communities seeking security in numbers and forming conclaves. Villages like Sarai Mir, Sanjarpur, Faria and Phulpur on the state highway linking Azamgarh to Lucknow have been reduced to such ghettos in the absence of governance. The insensitivity of the police, the lack of mutual trust between the two largest communities, and lack of employment opportunities in rural India led to youth, particularly from the minority community, seeking menial work in conservative economically developed countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE. For the Azamgarh youth, a ticket on the Kaifiat Express to Mumbai was in many ways the first step towards attaining economic freedom. With economic and political insecurities partly removed, the Indian Muslim imbibed the puritan Salafi winds sweeping the area and got radicalised towards the Ummah. It is here that the subversive influence from Pakistan-based Takfiri groups (those who justify killing of fellow Muslims in the name of puritan Islam) like the LeT, who have had financial and moral support from the Saudi Kingdom in the past and are influential in the Gulf, got into the act.

The Pakistani establishment, which is paranoid about the Indian threat, tacitly supported this indoctrination of Indian Muslim youth as it fitted in with its larger strategy to counter New Delhi. While it is important to assert that only a small number of Indian Muslim youth opted for indoctrination and training, they used their newly found economic clout to attract their families towards the jihadi agenda. Given the close-knit Indian society, particularly in rural areas where joint and even extended families are still in vogue, once a family got subverted it was not difficult to find fresh recruits. In a nutshell, this was the feeder stock for the jihadist factory based in PoK.

Excerpted with permission from Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within by Shishir Gupta, published by Hachette India (Pvt) Ltd; 324 pages, Rs550.