NEW DELHI: India put several provinces on heightened alert yesterday after Al Qaeda announced the formation of a wing of the militant group in India and its neighbourhood, a senior government official said.
In a video posted online, Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahri promised to spread Islamic rule and “raise the flag of jihad” across the “Indian subcontinent”.
New Delhi regards the message as authentic and has warned local governments, said an official who attended a security briefing in which it was discussed with Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who is responsible for policing and internal security. “This matter has been taken very seriously,” the official said. “An alert has been sounded.”
Until now there has been no evidence that Al Qaeda has a presence in India. The timing and content of the video suggests rivalry between Al Qaeda and its more vigorous rival in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State, which anecdotal evidence suggests is gathering support in South Asia.
According to media reports, Islamic State pamphlets have been distributed in Pakistan in recent days.
Zawahri’s announcement made two references to Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist. Modi has long been a hate figure for Islamist groups because of religious riots on his watch as chief minister of the state in 2002. More than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, died in the spasm of violence.
“In the wake of this Al Qaeda video, we will be on a higher alert. We will work closely with the central government to tackle any threat posed to the state,” S K Nanda, the most senior bureaucrat in the home department of Gujarat, said. A high security alert in the state involves activating informer networks in sensitive areas.
A senior police official said that Gujarat has been high on the list of militant organisations, including al Qaeda, since the 2002 riots. “It will be more so now because Narendra Modi is prime minister,” the official said.
Zawahri described the formation of “Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent” as glad tidings for Muslims “in Burma, Bangladesh, Assam, Gujarat, Ahmedabad, and Kashmir” and said the new wing would rescue Muslims there from injustice and oppression. Ahmedabad is the main city in Gujarat state, which borders Pakistan.
Assam is a state in India’s far-flung northeast where religious tensions are high after massacres of Muslims by tribal populations in the past two years. A senior intelligence officer in the state said security forces there were “well prepared” to face any threats.
Muslims make up 15 percent of the Indian population but, numbering an estimated 175 million, theirs is the third-largest Muslim population in the world.
Intelligence sources in Kashmir said that they had so far detected no traces of Al Qaeda in the Himalayan region. The appearance of Islamic State flags at recent protest rallies in Kashmir was the work of an individual and did not point to any involvement of the group there, one said.
At one of the world’s most influential Islamic seminaries, Darul Uloom Deoband, in northern India, an official said that extremist groups routinely try to recruit young, uneducated and poor Muslim boys as militants.
“We inform our students about the dangers faced by Islam, and rising militancy is one of the key subjects discussed in the seminary,” said Ashraf Usmani from the seminary, which is known for its conservative Muslim thought. “I can say this with confidence that no student from Deoband can be recruited by al Qaeda or any other terror groups.”
Reuters
