The killing of Cesare Tavella, a 50-year-old Italian aid worker who was out on an evening jog in a relatively secure Dhaka locality, should be a wake-up call for governments in South Asia, especially India. The possibility of international terrorism taking a deadlier trajectory stares them in the face. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the murder this week. If that is confirmed, it would be the first attack by the particular terrorist group in a South Asian country, barring war-torn Afghanistan. India’s long and bloody face-off with terrorism has been mostly in the form of bomb blasts and suicide attacks, all of them the handiwork of one large group or the other. The activities of such groups inherently have the weakness of information leaking out, and consequently Indian agencies have been able to thwart several terror attacks. Though the IS, which controls swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, doesn’t seem to have established any organisational network in India and its immediate neighbourhood until now, the Dhaka incident is an announcement that lone-wolf attacks could happen in India as well. To be sure, the IS has negligible support among the Muslim community in India. Besides, Islam in India has a broad syncretic reach and has generally been spared the overweening influence of West Asian Wahhabism, or the Saudi version of Salafism, from where IS seeks to draw ideological legitimacy. Still, there are fundamentalist proclivities among certain pockets and there is a possibility of IS targeting or influencing disaffected youth among the community. This poses a serious challenge.
The security establishment must ensure that it has the capabilities to prevent any attack by IS and other fringe groups. For long, Indian intelligence agencies have been heavily dependent on technical intelligence to monitor terrorist activity. Indian agencies need to reinvigorate their field operatives, strengthen their numbers, and recruit more cadres from among minorities. But the potential IS threat cannot be tackled just by means of a security-oriented response. The government has to ensure that the grounds of disaffection among the largest minority community in the country are addressed in a just way. Growing intolerance, invasion of private spaces, and abuse of individual freedom and of rational thought are all signs of fringe elements revealing their fangs. Such tendencies hold the potential to rupture social harmony, creating opportunities for extremists to gain traction. For a multi-religious, multicultural society, this would be disastrous. India needs to have a comprehensive approach to check extremism that addresses both the issue, irrespective of religion or sect, and its causes. It should build its anti-terror strategy on a social foundation.
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