Opinion The IS next door

ISIS chief Abu Bakr Baghdadi.

Even as Indians have watched the rise of the Islamic State with alarm, few have understood just how imminent the danger is. In recent days, evidence of the growing danger in India’s near neighbourhood has piled up. Police in Bangladesh have caught an Islamic State-inspired terrorist module planning attacks on the country’s government. Entire families have left the Maldives to participate in the so-called caliphate’s millenarian dystopia; at least five of the country’s nationals have lost their lives in its cause. Taliban factions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have pledged loyalty to the organisation —  as have breakaway factions of the Indian Mujahideen network. Even inside India, the impact of the IS’s new, ultra-violent jihadism is certain to be felt. The Afghan jihad and the Taliban’s triumph in Kabul gave birth to a generation of jihadists who let loose a crimson tide across South Asia; the IS has given their inheritors new hope of victory.

How should the government of India respond to this challenge? For one, the Research and Analysis Wing, as well as India’s Intelligence Bureau, are desperately short of the kind of language and technology skills that are needed — just as they were in the mid-1980s, when the first phase of Islamist terrorism began unfolding. Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has taken some tentative steps forward to address these deficits, capacity-building in the intelligence services needs to be pushed much harder. Then, there has to be political cognisance that a communalised domestic politics is the toxic swamp in which Islamism breeds. Ensuring communal peace, by coming down hard on religious reactionaries who threaten it, is a national security imperative.

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Finally, New Delhi needs to think hard about just what its role in the international effort against terrorism might be. New Delhi has long called for efforts against terrorists to be truly global — but, equally, has not been willing to put its shoulder to the wheel. For good reasons and bad, India has stayed away from involvement in foreign wars against Islamist terror, whether under the United Nations flag, like in Mali, or multinational efforts, like those in Iraq. New dangers must be met with new ideas — and the time to start debating them with seriousness is now.