Indian Mujahideen
This chapter traces the emergence, growth and consolidation of the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The chapter begins with a brief historical account of India’s Islamist landscape and IM’s emergence as an Islamic terrorist group. The chapter includes a brief thre
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Indian Mujahideen
Abstract This chapter traces the emergence, growth and consolidation of the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The chapter begins with a brief historical account of India’s Islamist landscape and IM’s emergence as an Islamic terrorist group. The chapter includes a brief threat assessment of IM examining past attacks, targets, and tactics, while detailing IM’s leadership, organizational structure, and alliances with other terrorist groups operating in the region. Since independence, India has faced many forms of extremist violence, ranging from ethno-separatist terrorism to ideological and religious extremism. However, over the past 20 years, and accelerating in the last decade, India has witnessed a new extremist threat from the combination of disaffected Indian Muslims and Pakistan-based state-sponsored Islamist terrorist groups that have infiltrated India from neighboring countries with the sole objective of fueling Islamic jihad. These threats have coalesced and are embodied in the terrorist group known as Indian Mujahideen (IM). This chapter provides an overview of IM, beginning with the group’s history as well as a discussion of the IM organization and its links to other state and non-state organizations. The chapter begins with a background summarizing IM’s organizational predecessors including Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Asif Reza Commando Force (ARCF). It discusses how elements of SIMI turned to violence and how IM was established via a combination of elements from SIMI and ARCF. This will be followed by a description of IM’s major operations, its evolution as an organization, and the effects of Indian counter-measures. The description of IM as an organization will include information on the group’s ideology, structure, leadership, and tactical and logistical operations. Finally, this chapter will conclude with a report on IM’s links with other organizations including other terrorist groups such as Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Al-Qaeda, as well as IM’s connections to organized crime and its state sponsorship by Pakistani intelligence. Before proceeding, a word of caution is in order. Unlike LeT (Subrahmanian et al. 2012), which is a cohesive entity whose principal goal is to establish an
V. S. Subrahmanian et al., Indian Mujahideen, Terrorism, Security, and Computation, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-02818-7_2, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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Indian Mujahideen
Islamic Caliphate in the Indian subcontinent and beyond, IM is a much more disparate entity with different cells that operate more loosely. As a consequence, the study of IM poses challenges that were not present in our previous study of LeT (Subrahmanian et al. 2012).
2.1 Emergence and History of Indian Mujahideen 2.1.1 Jamaat-e-Islami, the Parent Organization As Fig. 2.1 indicates, the organizational antecedent of SIMI and IM is Jamaate-Islami (JeI). A leading resource on JeI is the work of Nasr (1994). Nasr discusses how JeI, founded as an
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