Friday, April 3, 2020

A Kautilyan Solution to Kerala's Rise as a Terrorist Recruitment Hub


It took might of a pandemic for Kasargod, to find a place in the mindscape of ordinary Indians. Even as the nondescript town in North Kerala emerged as a Covid-19 hotspot, it has skipped popular attention that this was the hometown of Muhammad Muhsin, one of the terrorists who massacred Sikhs at the Kabul Gurudwara on 25 March 2020.  Kerala’s linkages with the international terror landscape had come into transitory limelight post Sri Lanka’s Easter-weekend terror strike in 2019. However, it got drowned in the sea of corona-related broadcasts even after Al Naba, the propaganda wing of ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province) published Muhsin’s (alias Abu Khalid Al-Hindi) photograph flaunting the one-finger Towheed gesture.   

Kerala used to take pride in its socio-religious syncretism, where Islam arrived peacefully and communal relations soured only for a brief period in its entire history, during Tipu’s reign. The Mappilla rebellion, support for Jinnah and flirtation with the idea of a sovereign Moppilistan on the eve of independence never affected the region’s social harmony. Today, the Malayali muslims enjoy superior economic status, political say and literacy rates than any other part of the country. Why is it then that the state has accounted for nearly a quarter of the IS related cases in India?

Abul A’la Maududi’s ideas of political Islam found roots in the state through Jamaat-e-Islami, post the 1979 Iranian revolution. Even as the communist dream fascinated the Malayali population at large, subtly-secularised intellectual Islam captivated the educated Muslims. Salafism which has existed as a minor strain in Kerala’s polity for over a century, gradually gained ground. Outfits like Islamic Seva Sangh and National Democratic Front (now the notorious Peoples’ Front of India / PFI) gained from political opportunism of those in power and facilitated radicalisation. The leadership of these groups has had close ties with the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The Kerala Muslim who was not influenced by the likes of Al Qaeda and Taliban because of the language barrier, found resonance with the ideology of IS as it gave them the hope of realising their utopian fantasy of living in a “pure Islamic milieu”. It is this dream of the caliphate conveyed in Malayalam by internet-based influencers that ignited in the already radicalised minds. Kerala’s links and easy connectivity with the gulf-region, money pumped into already-subsidised Islamic educational institutions and the onset of social media acted as catalysts in the process, as they took flight to Syria and Afghanistan.

There has been a recent realisation in the Indian security establishment that it is the radicalisation that has to be tackled rather than merely the symptoms of terrorism and Kerala is leading the way in de-radicalisation drives. The security agencies and police have been endeavouring to exploit the critical time of movement of radicalised persons from ideas to action, to intervene and bring them back to the mainstream. This approach however, is woefully inadequate in these times of “Do-It-Yourself terrorism”. When will the utopian dream in distant Syria or Khorasan transform into strife for a caliphate right here in Kerala, is anybody’s guess. Do we have to wait till the signs emerge?

What would the great Kautilya have done under these circumstances? My guess is he would have envisioned and laid out an ingenuous long-term course rather than go for symptomatic responses. The root of the problem lay in the seemingly harmless organisations (Jamaat-e-Islami, Tabliqi Jamaat, Towheed Jamaat and the like), that ingrain the seeds of fanaticism in impressionable minds. They act as system drivers of the “terrorism software” with an inherent capability to take over the hardware as well, under favourable circumstances. The solution is to corrupt these drivers, firstly by targeting their credibility in the eyes of their adherents and secondly by gradually crippling their strength financially. I trust, that the decision makers of India’s security apparatus are well-versed in Kautilyan thought and are capable of implementing his counsel despite our largely “secular” media, minority-rights narrative and naïve population.

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