NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India ordered
several provinces on Thursday to be on increased alert after al Qaeda
announced the formation of a wing of the militant group in India and its
neighborhood, 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". The government believes it is authentic and
has warned local governments, said an official who attended a
security briefing in which the video was discussed with the home
(interior) minister.
"This matter has been taken very seriously," the official told
Reuters. "An alert has been sounded."
Indian security forces are usually on a state of alert for attacks
by home-grown Islamic militants and by anti-India groups based in
Pakistan. It was not immediately clear what additional steps were
being taken.
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 also made two references to Gujarat, the home
state of India's new 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, told Reuters. 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 organizations, including al Qaeda, since the 2002 riots.
"It will be more so now because Narendra Modi is prime minister,"
the official said, requesting anonymity.
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 India's
arch-rival, Pakistan.
Assam is an 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 account for 15 percent of Indians but, numbering an
estimated 175 million, theirs is the third-largest Muslim population
in the world.
Tensions between Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent have grown
since Pakistan was carved from Muslim-majority areas of India in
1947, a violent partition in which hundreds of thousands were
killed.
Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan, has long
attracted foreign mujahideen fighters as well as home-grown
separatist militants. In June, al Qaeda released a video urging
young radicals in Kashmir to draw inspiration from militants in
Syria and Iraq and join the "global jihad".
Intelligence sources in Indian-held Kashmir told Reuters on Thursday
that they had so far detected no traces of al Qaeda in the Himalayan
region that borders Pakistan and China.
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.
India has suffered several large-scale attacks by Islamist
militants, most recently the 2008 Mumbai rampage by Pakistani
fighters that left 166 people dead.
Smaller domestic militant groups regularly detonate small bombs, but
have so far failed to launch a major attack. Earlier this year,
Indian intelligence agencies said a handful of Indian men had joined
the militancy in the Levant, among the first known cases of Indians
joining foreign jihad.
Hindu nationalist groups sympathetic to Modi have been stirring
sectarian tensions in recent weeks, claiming there is an Islamist
conspiracy to seduce Hindu women and convert them to Islam.
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."
(Additional reporting by Fayaz Bukhari in SRINAGAR and Biswajyoti
Das in GUWAHATI; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel and John Chalmers,
Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
