Ghori Resurfaces: A Phantom Returns to the Stage

As 2025 unfolds, Farhatullah Ghori—Pakistan’s elusive terror architect—continues to weave digital webs of radicalisation invoking Ghazwa-e-Hind to incite violence across India’s southern states. With the Popular Front of India (PFI) banned, a vacuum emerged in Islamist networks. Ghori, alias Abu Sufiyan, stepped in to revive Al Ummah, a dormant terror outfit from the 1990s. Intelligence reports link him to recruitment drives in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka urging lone-wolf strikes on infrastructure (IANS, July 2025). His propaganda ties local grievances to the prophetic conquest of Hind.

Ghori’s “Sawt al Haq” channels on Telegram and Instagram sponsor hate speeches calling Indian Muslims to arms against Hindus and the state. Videos threaten the Ram Temple’s destruction and glorify the 2024 Rameswaram Cafe blast which he allegedly masterminded (India Today, January 2025). By mid-2025, exposés revealed sponsored posts on Instagram amplifying calls for fidayeen attacks (Spicy Sonal on X, June 2025).

This escalation builds on Ghori’s earlier resurfacing in June 2022 when he released a video calling for jihad in Assam and Kashmir under the banner of Ghazwa-e-Hind. Associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and HUJI, Ghori is wanted for orchestrating the 2002 Akshardham temple massacre and the 2005 suicide strike on the STF camp in Hyderabad (Geopolitical Monitor, Weekly Blitz). For nearly two decades he evaded a Red Corner Notice reportedly sheltered by Pakistan’s ISI. His sermons linked the Nupur Sharma controversy, NRC–CAA protests and the Ahmedabad blast verdicts to a divine war for India’s conquest.

The Ideological Recasting of Ghazwa-e-Hind

References to Ghazwa-e-Hind appear in a handful of classical texts such as Musnad Ahmad and Sunan al-Nasa’i. These narrations are classified as ahad—single-chain reports with limited transmission—rather than mutawatir which carry the highest standard of authenticity. Scholars across centuries have debated their meaning, context and relevance. Some suggest the phrase may have referred to early Arab incursions into Sindh while others view it as a later political construct.

What is clear is that the term has undergone significant reinterpretation. In its original usage, a ghazwa denoted a specific kind of expedition. Modern invocations stretch that definition turning a historical term into a flexible ideological slogan. This ambiguity allows militant groups and propagandists to reframe it as a timeless call to arms regardless of its textual standing.

The most influential modern reinterpretation came not from theologians but from military ideologues. Brigadier S K Malik’s The Qur’anic Concept of War (1979), endorsed by General Zia-ul-Haq, reframed jihad as a psychological weapon declaring that “instilling terror” was its strategic essence (Institute for Security Policy and Law). This doctrinal shift allowed militant groups to repackage ambiguous Hadiths into recruitment slogans transforming historical fragments into ideological fuel.

Madrasas, Militancy and B Raman’s Warning

Veteran security analyst B Raman repeatedly warned that Pakistan’s Deobandi seminaries had become incubators not only of Kashmir-centric militancy but also of sectarian violence against Shias and Ahmadis (South Asia Analysis Group). He documented how madrasa networks indoctrinated generations turning localised grievances into a larger civilisational war. In his words, these were “state-sponsored factories of extremism” that could not be easily shut down because they were woven into Pakistan’s military–mullah compact.

These seminaries did not just teach theology—they manufactured ideology. The curriculum often fused religious instruction with militant doctrine creating a pipeline from classroom to battlefield. For many recruits, Ghazwa-e-Hind was not a metaphor—it was a mission.

The TTP Turns Its Guns on Pakistan

Ironically, the very ideology Pakistan fostered boomeranged. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an offshoot of the Afghan jihad, declared its war as Ghazwa-e-Hind but interpreted “Hind” broadly to include Pakistan itself. Its factions turned their guns on the Pakistani state, bombing Shia processions, police stations and army convoys. In 2014, the Army Public School massacre in Peshawar—where over 130 children were killed—exposed the self-consuming nature of jihadist fire. Pakistan wanted jihad without blowback yet its own protégés revealed the fiction of a united Islamist front.

From Kashmir to Jamia: India as the Chosen Theatre

Ghori’s sermons echo Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed linking events like the Nupur Sharma row and NRC protests to divine war (Geopolitical Monitor, July 2022—updated context). He invoked the CAA and Jamia Millia Islamia clashes and even the farmers’ highway blockades as evidence that Muslims in India faced systemic oppression. Each incident became a building block in his narrative of Ghazwa-e-Hind. Religious conquest was layered onto civil protest turning dissent into justification for violence.

Posters, Protests and the Lone-Wolf Spark

The danger of such narratives lies in their decentralised impact. In Bareilly, an “I Love Muhammad” poster fell in the wind—or perhaps by mischief—sparking violent mob attacks (Times of India). In Udaipur, two men filmed themselves beheading a tailor who had expressed support for Nupur Sharma. These are not centrally commanded plots. They are sparks in dry tinder where each adherent of the ideology becomes a potential soldier.

This is what I call the decentralisation of terror—a shift from large camps and coordinated strikes to lone-wolf violence. The battlefield is no longer confined to borders. It has seeped into marketplaces, classrooms and homes.

Deoband’s Fatwa and Its Ideological Legacy

The problem is compounded when institutions with deep ideological influence lend inadvertent legitimacy. In 2024, Darul Uloom Deoband—widely regarded not as a mainstream seminary but as the ideological nucleus of uncompromising Islamist thought—issued a fatwa that appeared to validate the Ghazwa-e-Hind Hadith and glorified those who die in it as martyrs (Hindustan Times, India Today). Police later claimed it was an old reference yet the damage was done. When Deoband speaks, millions listen. Every validation becomes oxygen for extremists.

Deoband’s doctrinal framework has inspired a transnational network of seminaries across Pakistan and Afghanistan. These institutions form the ideological bedrock of groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). While not directly affiliated, many of their leaders were trained in Deobandi madrasas and cite its jurisprudence to justify armed jihad.

Riyadh’s Reforms, Iran’s Disillusionment

While Pakistan clings to medieval prophecies, Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is moving in the opposite direction. His Hadith Documentation Project aims to retain only the Qur’an and mutawatir Hadith as binding, sidelining weak narrations like Ghazwa-e-Hind. In the high-tech world of NEOM, MBS is steering Islam toward a future-facing framework.

The Arab Barometer’s 2023 survey found that 72 percent of Saudis and 67 percent of Jordanians support reducing the role of religious authorities in politics. In Iran, the GAMAAN survey conducted in 2022 revealed that only 32 percent of Iranians identify as Shia Muslims and over 70 percent oppose the Islamic Republic’s clerical system. These figures reflect a growing disillusionment with rigid orthodoxy across the region.

The irony is stark. The custodians of Islam’s holiest sites are discarding what Islamabad still clings to as a strategic weapon.

Yogi’s Bulwark: Countering the Madrasa Ecosystem

India cannot afford complacency. My film Crimson Crescent – The Last Quarter documents how Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh ATS has built a bulwark in western UP disrupting madrasa-financed networks and monitoring Rohingya infiltration that many security experts describe as a form of demographic jihad. This model has inspired southern crackdowns especially in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka where Ghori-linked cells are now active (Vicky Nanjappa, July 2025).

The film traces how radicalisation often begins not with weapons but with whispers—in sermons, WhatsApp forwards and community networks. The ATS model focuses on early detection, community engagement and intelligence-led disruption.

The Crescent’s Arch: India’s Fight Against Ideological Drift

What India faces today is not an invasion by armies but the decentralisation of terror. Marc Sageman called it “leaderless jihad” (Leaderless Jihad, University of Pennsylvania Press). A knife-wielding youth in Udaipur, a lone gunman in Europe, a truck driver mowing down pedestrians in Nice or self-radicalised Americans pledging allegiance to ISIS—all are part of the same logic. Each adherent of the ideology becomes a self-activating weapon untethered from command structures yet bound by a shared promise of divine reward.

Ghazwa-e-Hind is not merely a myth. It is a form of ideological indoctrination designed to incite violence and mayhem. It turns human beings dangerously intolerant of other ideas and willing to kill those who differ from their worldview. It is not a spiritual aspiration but a hegemonistic construct—monolithic, exclusivist and absolutist in nature. It functions as a missile of destruction even when the faith of the other is compassionate, pluralistic and non-aggressive.

What makes it more insidious is its targeting of inclusive traditions—those that embrace multiplicity and reject conquest. Ghazwa-e-Hind is not a call to defend. It is a call to dominate. It seeks not dialogue but submission, not coexistence but erasure. And in doing so, it weaponises belief against the very cultures that have historically offered refuge, tolerance and synthesis.

To confront this, India must look beyond security grids and surveillance. It must dismantle the ideological and emotional architecture that turns anger into sanctification and grievance into glory. The battle is not just for territory—it is for the soul of pluralism itself, as Ram Swarup, the great mystic scholar of Voice of India, used to say.