After a Rohingya and a B’deshi, now a ‘student’ from K’taka detained in Deoband for terror links!

A madrasa student from Karnataka, staying in the ‘world-renowned’ Darul-Uloom Deoband Islamic seminary of Saharanpur, was detained for questioning yesterday by NIA for terror links.

The student, Farukh, is adept at many languages and was reportedly in touch with a module of the Pakistan’s ISI via a social media app. Darul-Uloom Deoband’s chief Abdul Kasim Nomani said that in the evening, the student was handed over to the authorities of Darul-Uloom Deoband.

On June 23, a Bangladeshi/Rohingya student, Mujibullah, was arrested from Deoband. In April, UP ATS had arrested a Bangladeshi national Talha Talukdar bin Farooq from the Darul-Uloom Deoband seminary. He had been residing on fake documents for the last seven years after illegally acquiring an Aadhar and PAN card from Meghalaya. He even had Darul-Uloom’s life membership card! Talha was studying in class VIII of Arabic Alim and living in Darul-Uloom Deoband’s Room No 61, Dar-e-Jadid.

Hindustan Times reports that Farukh was let off after 8 hours of questioning. It is not clear if he has been cleared altogether or just ‘counseled’ for now.

NIA has done a stellar job in protecting Bharat from terror attacks, and busted innumerable terror modules. However, Indian security agencies and judiciary don’t have a great track record of deterrent punishment & deradicalization of Islamists. Many a times it has been seen that youth who are arrested before they can execute a terror attack are looked upon as ‘misled’ victims and treated softly as per the “every sinner has a future” maxim.

In one such case from 2020 which best exemplifies the muddled approach of our system, two de-radicalization attempts in three years failed to stop Pune’s Yerwada resident Sadiya Anwar Shaikh from going back to embracing jihadi ideology time and again. The NIA chargesheet against her pointed out that the 20-year-old had been de-radicalized by the Bharatiya Intelligence Agencies once in 2015 when she was a minor and again in 2018, yet she aspired to be a suicide bomber and kept going back to the terrorist outfit IS (Islamic State).

The threat of Islamic terror is growing exponentially as more and more Muslim youth, including many highly-educated ones, are getting indoctrinated both offline and online and Muslim outfits are planting the dream of Ghazwa-e-Hind, i.e. the reconquest of Bharat before end times which they believe was foretold by Muhammad as per the hadith.

The Indian State, even under the current government ironically labelled ‘Hindutva fascist’ by its Western critics, is yet to come to terms with the enormity of the challenge it faces and the role that mainstream Muslim organizations like Deoband seminary, Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamaat-e-Ulema Hind, Barelvi movement, Tablighi Jamaat, Nadwatul seminary in Lucknow, Ahl-e-Hadith, Ajmer dargah, AIMPLB etc have to play in this radicalization of the Muslim mind.

The core teachings of Deobandis and Salafis/Wahhabis (blamed for much of global Islamic terror) are the same. Muslim scholars themselves admit that the differences between these schools lie not in the fundamentals of faith, but in finer judgments and jurisprudence. The Afghan Taliban and Pakistan’s TTP terrorist groups are products of Deobandi madrasas. Similar madrasas proliferate across Bharat and have been proven to be breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism, misogyny and medieval attiudes. Yet, our state continues pumping funds into them in the name of ‘madrasa modernization’ and naive ‘One hand computer, one hand Quran’ rhetoric.

Unless we loosen the hold that mainstream Islamic religious and socio-political outfits have on ordinary Indian Muslims, the conveyor belt of terror recruits will not stop. We can put any Vishwaguru dreams in cold storage, as this perennial internal war will consume a large chunk of our nation’s energy.