Kin, neighbours spur youth to join militancy
Reports point to crucial role of friends and social media rather than IS or religious ideology
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)