On the face of it, India, with its stable democratic institutions, vast middle class, and

clutch of world-beating companies, appears an unlikely candidate for the company of

such blighted lands as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, as recorded by the National
Counterterrorism Center in Washington, between January 2004 and March 2007 the
death toll from terrorist attacks in India was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq. Since then,
bombs have gone off in Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Guwahati.
In that sense, the Nov. 26-28 terrorist assault on Mumbai, though exceptional in its
audacity and scope, is also part of a larger pattern. With Iraq experiencing a spell of
relative calm, the world’s largest democracy now likely holds the dubious distinction of
also being the one least able to safeguard its citizens’ lives.
Long praised as an example of how democracy can defuse the threat of radical Islam—
the ideology that seeks to order everything from the personal to the political according to
the orthodox precepts of Shariah—in fact India is a text book case of how not to deal
with the problem. New Delhi’s counterterrorism effort has been weak-kneed, ham-fisted
and hopelessly politicized. Instead of standing up for bedrock democratic principles, its
leaders reflexively kowtow to fundamentalist demands. Public discourse on Islam
oscillates between the crude anti-Muslim rhetoric of Hindu bigots and the absurd
platitudes (“terrorism has no religion”) favored by the chattering classes. More broadly,
unlike Turkey and Tunisia, India has failed to modernize its 150-million strong Muslim
population.
India’s foreign-policy and military posture show a proclivity for symbolism over
substance that is easily exploited by highly motivated Islamist radicals. The country’s
diplomacy consistently focuses on acquiring the trappings of great power status—
underscored by the quest for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council—
while neglecting the more pressing task of stabilizing the neighborhood. India boasts a
blue water navy and aspires to guard vital shipping lanes between the Middle East and
Japan. Meanwhile, it can’t deter jihadists from causing chaos in its cities every few
months.
To be sure, not all of India’s troubles are of its own making. No country has been
immune to the pendulum swing among Muslim populations over the past 35 years that
have forced secular modernizers to cede political, intellectual and moral ground to
radicals peddling a toxic version of their faith. In Pakistan, carved out of British India in
1947 as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, India faces a viscerally hostile neighbor
that also happens to be, along with Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading exporter of militant
Sunni fervor. (The revolutionary regime in Iran plays a similar role among Shiites in the
Middle East.) Bangladesh, known as East Pakistan until it gained independence in 1971,
appears to be evolving into a somewhat tamer version of its fraternal twin.
Of course, any generalization about a nation of 1.1 billion people—with a Muslim
population of 150 million—is impossible without caveats. Indeed, many of the most
common clichés about India aren’t entirely without merit. The vast majority of Indian
Muslims are indeed nonviolent, more concerned with the tribulations of daily life in a
desperately poor country than with transnational jihad. The community enriches the
fabric of national life in countless ways—most visibly in movies, music and the arts.
Moreover, Muslims hardly have a monopoly on intolerance or violence. In a country of
such dizzying diversity, there’s more than enough of it—based on caste, creed, language
or land—to go around.
Nonetheless, the threat to India’s pluralistic culture and open society from radical Islam
—global in its reach, uncompromising in its ambition, often nihilistic in its tactics—is of
a different order from anything else the country faces. If India is to prevail in this fight, it
first has to acknowledge the extent of the problem.
To begin with the formal leadership of India’s Muslims is almost uniformly
fundamentalist in persuasion. The community, steeped in a culture of grievance
mongering, fails to acknowledge the many opportunities offered by a secular and
increasingly capitalist society, and refuses to look inward for explanations of Muslim
backwardness. As in Europe, many Indian Muslims place a tribal loyalty to their faith
above adherence to basic democratic values such as freedom of speech and freedom of
expression. Most alarmingly, in recent years terrorist groups nurtured in Pakistan and
Bangladesh have had little trouble attracting local accomplices.
Before the most recent attacks in Mumbai, the consensus view in India was that the
country could sprint toward development while ignoring the growing radical footprint
within its borders and in the region at large. Only now is the folly of this approach
becoming apparent.
With a foundering counterterrorism policy, India typically loses more lives to terrorist
violence in a year than most countries do in a decade. A rundown of relatively recent
violence is instructive. In October 2005, on the eve of the Hindu festival of Diwali,
bombs in crowded marketplaces and on a public bus in Delhi claimed 62 lives. In 2006, a
series of blasts on commuter trains killed 209 in Bombay. Last August, 42 people died in
attacks on a restaurant and open-air auditorium in Hyderabad. This year alone, terrorists
have struck in six major cities including Mumbai. The toll: 365 dead and hundreds more
wounded.
Unlike their counterparts in the West, or in East Asia, India’s perpetually squabbling
leaders have failed to put national security above partisan politics. The country’s
antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Indeed,
the reflexive Indian response to most every act of terrorism is to apportion blame rather
than to seek a solution that will prevent, or at least minimize, its recurrence.
By contrast, even Indonesia—a still-poor Muslim-majority nation where sympathy for
militants runs deeper than it does in India—has done an infinitely better job of
recognizing that the protection of citizens’ lives is any government’s first responsibility.
There a superbly trained federal antiterrorism force called Detachment 88—aided in large
measure by the U.S. and Australia—has ensured that the country has not suffered a
significant terrorist attack in more than three years. Despite murmurs of dissatisfaction
from the country’s Islamists, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has often caved
under pressure on issues of tolerance and pluralism, has refused to allow counterterrorism
to become a political football.
By contrast, India’s leaders—who tend to use the country’s best trained commandos as
personal bodyguards—can’t even agree on a legal framework to keep the country safe.
On taking office in 2004, one of the first acts of the ruling Congress party was to scrap a
tough federal antiterrorism law called the Prevention of Terrorism Act, or POTA, that
strengthened witness protection and enhanced police powers. It has stalled similar state-
level legislation in the opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state of
Gujarat. Human-rights activists argue, with some justification, that antiterrorism
legislation in India is routinely abused by the police, and that other laws give the state
more than enough leeway to do its job. But in the law enforcement community there’s a
strong consensus that scrapping POTA made it harder to prosecute suspected terrorists
and sapped police morale.
Despite a penchant for tough talk, the BJP hasn’t exactly distinguished itself either. In
1999, the hijacking of an Indian aircraft to then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan led a BJP
government to release three hardened militants, including Omar Sheikh Saeed, the former
London School of Economics student who would go on to murder Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl. The then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh personally escorted the
militants to Kandahar, from where they were immediately whisked away to Pakistan.
Two years later, the BJP mobilized tens of thousands of troops on the border with
Pakistan after an attack on India’s parliament by the Pakistani terrorist groups Lashkar-e-
Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. In the end, however, despite its saber-rattling New Delhi
failed to get Islamabad to hand over a single one of the 20 terrorism suspects whose
extradition it demanded. More recently, the BJP has failed to demand the same tough
treatment for alleged Hindu terrorists as it does for Muslims. Instead it has fanned a
childish debate on whether Hindus can be terrorists. (Short answer: They can.)
The attitude of minor parties is, if anything, even less responsible. Those that depend on
the Muslim vote regularly fall over each other to curry favor with fundamentalists. The
Samajwadi Party, for example, a powerful force in India’s most populous state, Uttar
Pradesh, is a fierce defender of a militant group called the Students Islamic Movement of
India, or SIMI, an offshoot of the subcontinent’s leading Islamist organization, the
Jamaat-e-Islami. The communists, confined to three states in electoral terms but with a
disproportionately loud voice in the national media, consistently propagate the notion that
“neoimperialism” and “neocolonialism” are bigger dangers than terrorism.
Tolerance Gone Awry
A confused response to terrorism is in many ways the reflection of a flawed approach to
secularism. Unlike in Western democracies, Muslims in India are permitted by law to be
governed by Shariah in civil matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. A
consequence of this autonomy has been the development of parallel societies in
ghettoized enclaves of the sort that the Dutch, British, and French are scrambling to
contain. Most of India’s Muslim middle class emigrated to Pakistan at partition 60 years
ago. In much of the community that remained, cultural markers of backwardness like
high birthrates and an aversion to educating girls have persisted. As a result, Muslim
literacy rates and incomes lag behind the national average.
The community has also given birth—via Deobandism, the subcontinental cousin of
Wahhabism—to an outlook whose purest form is embodied in the Taliban. Abul Ala
Maududi, who along with the Egyptians Sayyid Qutb and Hasan al-Banna was one of the
founders of modern Sunni Islamism, spent more of his life in India than in Pakistan, the
country with which he is usually associated. It was in India that Maududi formulated and
expounded many of his ideas about a society and state run strictly according to the
dictates of Shariah. In a survey of Indian Muslims conducted by the distinguished U.S.-
based Pakistani scholar and diplomat Akbar Ahmed for his book Journey Into Islam, a
majority picked as their contemporary role models Maududi, the 19th-century Muslim
supremacist Sayyed Ahmad Khan, and an influential Mumbai-based cleric named Zakir
Naik, who publicly praises Osama bin Laden and calls for all Indians to be governed by
Shariah.
For the mainstream Indian media, a frank discussion of such matters is out of bounds.
Even if this were not the case, though, the configuration of Indian politics is a recipe for
paralysis. Muslims are believed to vote as a bloc—a notion that, whether true or not,
gives them enormous influence in a fragmented polity with a first-past-the-post electoral
system where 35% of the vote often ensures victory. Since Muslims constitute upward of
20% of the electorate in about 80 parliamentary constituencies, and at least 15% in
another 40 or so, a large turnout of Muslim voters is often decisive. (The Lok Sabha, or
directly elected lower house of parliament, has a strength of 543.)
The consequences can be seen in a number of incidents. In 2006, for example, a minister
in the government of Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Yaqoob Qureshi, offered a reward of
510 million rupees for beheading the Danish cartoonists responsible for “disrespectful”
drawings of the prophet Muhammad. In Hyderabad last year, three legislators of a local
Islamic party roughed up Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author who has been critical of
Islam’s treatment of women and minority Hindus. A leading Muslim politician in Kerala,
Abdul Nasser Madani, is a self-declared Islamist who spent nine years in prison for his
role in a 1998 terrorist attack that killed 46 people.
The Pakistan Problem
All this would be challenging enough without the additional matter of Pakistan. The
country has long been a magnet for pan-Islamic radicals from around the world, among
them Abdullah Azzam (1941-89), the ideological father of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad,
al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their comrade in arms, Mullah
Omar of the Taliban. A plethora of local groups, among them Lashkar-e-Taiba (suspected
to be behind the Mumbai attacks) and Jaish-e-Mohammed, though organizationally
distinct from al Qaeda, share the same toxic ideology. The L-e-T was among the jihadist
groups that banded together in 1998 under the umbrella of bin Laden’s Islamic Front for
Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. Though formally banned in Pakistan since 2002, it
operates openly and over the years has expanded its ambit from Indian Kashmir to the
rest of the country. As recently as October, its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, publicly
called for terrorist attacks against India by declaring at a conference that it “only
understands the language of force.”
Along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the world’s pre-eminent exporter of violent Sunni
fervor—from Bradford to Borneo. The country’s Inter-Services Intelligence, a part of the
army, in a sense pioneered the yoking together of modern weapons training with pan-
Islamic religious brainwashing, albeit initially with help from the Central Intelligence
Agency. Many Pakistanis are moderate; nonetheless sympathy for radical Islam runs
deep. A 2007 poll showed bin Laden with an approval rating of 46%, higher than many
of the country’s politicians. The radical Islamic outlook—obsessed with the glories of
Islamic civilization, hostile toward non-Muslims and nonconformist women, and
convinced that Jews and Americans are perpetually plotting against their faith—is shared
by many who may disapprove of al Qaeda’s tactics.
Under its new civilian dispensation, Islamabad now claims to be in a shared fight with
India against terrorism. But it has yet to make even a minimal gesture of good faith by
handing over to Indian authorities Pakistan residents with civilian blood on their hands.
Heading the list: the L-e-T leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and the Indian mafia don
Dawood Ibrahim, a Karachi resident who orchestrated the 1993 Mumbai bombings that
killed more than 250 people. Ibrahim is also suspected of using his underworld network
to aid the most recent attacks. Terrorist camps on Pakistan’s territory, including those in
the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir, have never been permanently closed in a
way that is verifiable by the international community. Madrassas that have long stoked
radicalism—including Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Darul Uloom Haqqania outside
Peshawar—continue to thrive.
Until the most recent incidents in Mumbai, the consensus view was that radical Islam, the
most potent totalitarian ideology on the planet, posed little threat to India. India’s
democracy, its innate pluralism, and the open society it has nurtured for more than 60
years, were supposed to insulate it from changes that have worked their way through
Muslim societies from Morocco to Mindanao. Democracy and economic growth were
seen as the surest antidotes to extremism.
In reality, India, beset by poor governance, guided by an interpretation of secularism that
encourages Muslim separateness rather than integration, and pressed by neighbors that
are unwilling or unable to act against terrorist groups that operate from their soil, is the
major democracy most vulnerable to radical Islam. How the struggle plays out in the
years ahead will help determine, in large measure, whether India achieves the kind of
peace and prosperity taken for granted in much of East Asia, or whether it remains
bogged down in the mire of one of the world’s roughest neighborhoods.