For the first time, the United States government has issued a travel advisory warning its citizens of a possible Islamic State-inspired terror attack in a populated area in India. The Islamic State (IS) or Daesh, is the shorter form of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Its followers are prone to brandish black banners, as do Kashmiri anti-government protestors, and the gesture has significance because such banners were used when the Prophet took arms against infidels.

The American warning gives rise to some hard questions; whether the IS has suddenly made a significant appearance in India; and whether the supposition is correct that our 170 million-strong Muslim community is sufficiently inoculated by democracy against infiltration and indoctrination by terrorist groups sponsored from abroad. The IS is of origin outside the Indian subcontinent, though it is making inroads in our Muslim neighbours to the East and West.

It has scored significant successes in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya and has persecuted Christians, Shia Muslims, Turkmen and Yazidis, while using Sunni Muslims as its principal basis of support. Conventional wisdom has it that the IS should not be able to spread as fast or extensively in India as in the Arab countries, because a majority of Indian Muslims will hesitate to disown the benefits of the secular-democratic culture of India, despite its manifold shortcomings and exclusions. But there is obviously little scope for complacency.

There is already the presence of Al Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which was originally the progenitor of the IS. Currently, they follow different tracks not because of ideological differences, but for reasons of power politics and the blatant ruthlessness of the IS. But the IS has moved far beyond Al Qaida in terms of cadre strength, financial resources and territorial control, and there is no reason to imagine that AQIS adherents would not join the IS, as some of its cadres have already done in Afghanistan. Terrorist agencies will bury their differences when opportunities for gainful cooperation arise.

The IS made its presence felt in the Indian subcontinent on 1 July 2016 with its claim of a jihadi attack on a restaurant in an upscale area of Dhaka. The denial by Bangladesh about the IS presence is understandable but not convincing. Dhaka referred to links between the seven educated men of prosperous families who attacked the cafe and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahiddin Bangladesh (JMB), but as early as November 2015, an IS magazine had complimented the JMB, which suggested growing ties between them and underlined the scope for the IS to regard the JMB as a source of recruitment of jihadis.

As far as India is concerned, the distinctions between JMB, AQIS and IS are necessarily blurred because the terrorists use changing labels in accordance with practical convenience. Even the IS itself goes by multiple names. It is skilled in the use of technology, whether in the field of weapons or information, and can manifest itself anywhere before melting away after a terrorist strike. As for governments, they variously deny, underestimate or exaggerate the presence of these terror agencies to conceal their own deficiencies.

Many patriotic Indians can and do trust that India’s secular-democratic tradition has struck root among Indian Muslims, unlike the Muslims of Pakistan or Bangladesh. But it would be best to remain cautious because of information about a number of Indians, though still small, going to the Middle East to fight for the IS. Counter-terrorism operations by Indian government agencies have thus far kept this number small, but common sense suggests that India is a huge prize for IS because its ability to expand its presence here will earn publicity and enhance its stature when it is under pressure in Iraq and Syria.

The IS is spreading its wings in India by using its connections in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The IS, AQIS, and Pakistan’s ISI, are agencies hostile to India with overlapping jurisdictions and activities. Clearly, the ISI of Pakistan is a patron of AQIS as also JMB and one of its primary targets would be the Muslim community of India. According to American intelligence sources, the IS’s propaganda machinery ridicules Indian Muslims who prefer peaceful coexistence with Hindus.

There are reports that the IS wants to revive the use of Bangladesh as a base for actions in India, and that a new terrorist agency, the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), has emerged as its vehicle. Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiyaba (LET) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) are known proteges of the ISI, and will find it expedient to conceal their identities and use the IS as a cover for terrorist activities in India.

West Bengal, one of the most secular-minded States in India, has emerged as a jihadi hub. India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) has detected the existence of some five dozen terror outfits in West Bengal, who recruit cadres from some of the 500 recognised and 4,000 unrecognised madrasas in the state. They also supply cadres to the IS, AQIS, LET and others who work in close collaboration and competitive terrorism.

On 17 August 2005, over a brief period, 500 bomb explosions occurred at 300 places in various parts of Bangladesh. The JMB, which enjoyed the support of Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, showing an overlap between terrorist organisations across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, was held responsible. Some JMB leaders were arrested and convicted and in late March 2007, six of them were hanged. But a number of them fled to India, especially to West Bengal, and set up a base at Khagragarh for operations in West Bengal as also in Bangladesh. Many Jamaat leaders also took shelter in West Bengal. JMB was active in the Khagragarh base for years, and only an accidental explosion in 2014 brought these activities in the open. These militants even trained their spouses, who destroyed jihadi literature, attempted to prevent the entry of policemen, and pleaded unconvincingly that gas cylinders caused the explosion. As for the principal accused in Khagragarh, he was arrested only as late as September 2016.

In October 2016, a Bangladesh Government report pointed to terrorists with IS links moving from Bangladesh to West Bengal. In the same month, the chief culprit of the July café attack, who called himself a neo-JMB, was killed near Dhaka by a police raid. JMB’s role needs to be investigated in about a dozen communal disturbances during the Durga Puja in West Bengal last October, and the NIA told a court in Kolkata in late October, that interrogation of JMB militants revealed plans to attack several big cities in India.

It is imperative that Indian security agencies, especially the NIA, takes all possible counter-measures to deal with Muslim militants, even though their presence may still be misleadingly low in some parts of this vast country, yet disturbingly high in other parts, while they continue to utilise all manner of labels like. AQIS, JMB, and neo-JMB in order to create confusion. It is reasonable to assume that no amount of terror-related incidents can undermine the Indian democratic and social fabric, but the distraction from the economic development of the country will be highly undesirable. The fall of IS-controlled Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq, and their impending dispersal from Iraq’s second biggest city, Mosul, can only encourage the IS temptation to expand its activities to the much softer state of India, where a unique brand of vote-bank politics creates for the IS various opportunities which are not available to it in most other parts of the world. We have to remind ourselves that that price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

–Jayanta Kumar Ray and Krishnan Srinivasan

(The writers are respectively a National Professor and India’s former Foreign Secretary)