Counter-terror meet: ISIS hasn’t influenced Indian Muslims

India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh has inaugurated the-three day counter terrorism conference in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. The conference focuses on the integrated approach to counter terrorism and provides a platform to a wide array of professionals involved in counterterrorism analysis and practice from world over to explore the nature of terror threats in current times and strategies to overcome them.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Singh expressed happiness at the negligible impact of ISIS on the country’s youth. He said that Indian Muslims were ‘patriots’ and that ISIS has failed to influence them since the community is complete integrated in the national mainstream. Of the handful of Indian youth who had joined the ISIS, some had even returned after being persuaded by their families.

Alluding to the terrorism threat posed by ISIS, he said that the world was witnessing an entirely new paradigm of the terrorism in form of Islamic State. That it has appealed to the young and educated people around the world despite its medieval ideology should be cause of grave concern for the global community. The ability to use technology for a massive outreach program to attract wider audience should be checked.

He mentioned that India has been a victim of cross border terrorism for the last several decades. He referred to Pakistan’s connivance in harboring organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad which were responsible for terrorist attacks in India and that ‘India’s neighbor’ should seriously recalibrate on the proxy war instrument in her own interest, given the spate of high profile terrorist incidents in Pakistan in the recent past. Alluding to the use of non state actor proxies for settling scores in international conflicts, he said that “there are instances of such proxies being used across the world”.

To show India’s commitment in tackling the new menace of cyber crime, he reported that an expert committee had recently been constituted to check the threat of cyber crime and understand its linkage with the terrorist world. The conference has been organized by India Foundation and Sardar Patel University of Police Security and Criminal Justice. Amongst the attendees were India’s Defence Minister Mr. Manohar Parrikar, National Security Advisor, Mr. Ajit Doval, former Home Secretary, Mr. G.K. Pillai, former Army Chief Gen (Retd.), Mr. V.P. Malik, and former chief of BSF, Mr. Prakash Singh.

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