When Hizbul Mujahideen militant Rauf Khanday, 21, from a village in Anantnag was killed in March 2018, thousands attended his funeral, and the footage was streamed across social media in Kashmir.
Amongst those watching was Zubair Ahmad Wani, who lived just a kilometre away from Khanday’s home, and had known him well. Wani, an M.Phil student in political science at a university in Madhya Pradesh, said not a word at the funeral, according to his family. But three weeks later, Wani, who was not known to have expressed a desire for militancy ever before, took up the gun.
Changing profile
The cases of both Khanday, who, too, had given no inkling that he would join militancy, and Wani are evidence in studies that show that extremist ideology and pan-Islamic discourse have much less to do with the recruitment of militants in the latest round of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. The studies found that only 2% of the militants had ever studied at a madrassa or religious school.
Instead, local factors like geography, involvement of friends, family and neighbours, and social media shares amongst close groups have had a much higher role to play in motivating these men, mostly in their 20s to become militants and terrorists.
Officials say that despite a year-on-year escalation in the numbers of militants in Jammu-Kashmir, a series of official reports by Jammu and Kashmir police, and at least one by a notable international think-tank have found that pan-Islamic, Wahhabi or Salafi Islam and Islamic State ideology have had a negligible impact amongst those taking up the gun.
The results were put out by security agencies in the State, and considered important during the Central government’s decision to extend a “Cease-Ops” to the Kashmir valley in an effort to break the cycle of violence caused by connections such as the one between Khanday and Wani, to create more militants.
The results were put out by security agencies in the state, and considered important during the Central government’s decision to extend a “Cease-Ops” to the Kashmir valley in an effort to break the cycle of violence caused by connections such as the one between Khanday and Wani, to create more militants.
156 case studies
Their studies analysed about 156 militants recruited between 2010-2015 (Radicalisation and Terrorism in J&K), and two studies of the situation since 2016 when terrorist Burhan Wani was killed, and about 265 militant recruits unleashed a new wave of violence in the valley (Analysis of recruitment by terrorist groups and Recruitment v/s Militant killings).
The studies found that only 2% of the militants had ever studied at a madrassa or religious school, and amongst the largest militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, which is considered a “local Kashmiri group” as opposed to Pakistan-based Lashkar e Toiba and Jaish e Mohammad, as much as 64% of the recruits had not indicated strong religious inclinations before becoming militants. Only 3% of those surveyed through interrogations or questions put to their friends and families had identified themselves as “Salafist” or “Wahabbi” the more radical ideologies followed by pan-Islamic terror groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
Middle-class roots
“The new age militant comes from a middle class family with all the ingredients of a normal Kashmiri family. This militant who is the new poster boy of radicalisation wave is quite interestingly from the Hanafite family background with [only a] medium percentage ideologically inclined towards the puritan/revivalist version of Islam like Salafi, Jamaat- e- Islami etc. and his parents sharing cordial relationship, debunking the notion that this militant is child of broken family,” one of the reports concluded.
The studies found that nearly half (47%) of the militants recruited in the last two years lived in a radius of 10 kilometres of a militant who had been killed, and an additional one third (35%) lived within 20 kilometres of the militant’s home, raising a high probability that the recruit knew the militant personally, or knew someone who did. In addition the earlier studies had found that 95% of the recruits had shown strong “bonding” with their neighbours, 80% were very close to classmates and 81% of the recruits lived in an area, which had the presence of local militants.
“This is the exact opposite of the profile of the radicalized international terrorist we have seen,” explains a senior official working on the issue, who asked not to be identified. “All studies of ISIS and Al Qaeda recruits abroad found that the radicalized individual will give up their family, will move into the company of other terrorists and people online who share their values etc., and increasingly would justify the killing of innocents by speaking of their own death and the afterlife. None of these fit with the studies [in Jammu and Kashmir].”
Marginal presence
As a result, despite a few instances of ISIS flags being used at militant funerals, and the ISIS mouthpiece claiming credit for the killing of a policeman on the outskirts of Srinagar in February this year, officials estimate that the Islamic State-J&K and Al-Qaeda-motivated Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind have cadres in the single digits at present, and have not increased their numbers in the last year.
“Obviously, we can never discount the potential of such groups to radicalise youth in Jammu and Kashmir, but statistically, what we have seen is that peer pressure, neighbourhood influence, social sanction and romanticised notions of heroism are much more responsible for militant recruitment, than any religious ideology,” Inspector General of Kashmir S.P. Wani told The Hindu, adding that compared to the rest of India, where about 104 Indians had joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, only 2 from Kashmir had joined the brutally violent movement, and neither Kashmiri had been directly recruited. Even the figures of all Indians who had travelled to join ISIS are meager, given that only 47 went to Syria directly from India from a total Muslim population of 174 million.
Significantly, the studies in the Kashmir and for the rest of India have been backed by a new international study, that has found a very negligible presence of “cluster points” that denote online activity related to ISIS today. The study, called “Spiders of the Caliphate” which maps the Islamic State’s Global Support Network, was published in May 2018 by two British authors for the “Counter Extremism Project”. It found that while the ISIS network still exists on online networking sites like Facebook, “cluster maps” of South Asia found only one Indian ISIS supporter connected to ISIS communities in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, making India a “circuit breaker” in the region. The report mentions the ISIS claims in Jammu and Kashmir, but doesn’t find support for it on the ground.
“The South Asia data confirms the long-standing belief that India’s Muslim population is largely resistant to both al-Qaeda and IS recruitment. This large geographic gap in the IS online network helps to separate the Afghan [Pakistan] and Bangladeshi networks,” the report concludes, adding that India would require to remain vigilant along its borders which were frontiers of the “virtual caliphate”.
“What is most interesting is the fact that in this matter, the pan-Islamic radicalisation in Jammu and Kashmir has not been very different from the rest of India, unlike what is seen directly across the LoC and Border” the senior official said, indicating that even Pakistan’s influence over the current wave of militancy may be limited.
(with inputs from Peerzada Ashiq)
