BHARATA BHARATI

Radicalisation is not borne from illiteracy; it grows from an identity vacuum, ideological confusion, and the absence of a counter-narrative. Our community must reclaim its own moral vocabulary. Not the vocabulary of victimhood or “hurt sentiments”, but of responsibility. We need people who speak clearly about extremist interpretations instead of dodging them behind abstract words like “context” or “bias.” – Zeba Zoariah

Dear fellow citizens,

I write this with both grief and a sense of responsibility—a responsibility that comes from my identity, not in spite of it. We can no longer pretend that terrorism “just happens”, or that it is merely an intelligence failure or a systemic lapse detached from its ideological source. When the perpetrators of this attack come from my own community, it is not “Islamophobia” to name them—it is truth, and truth is the first step toward reform.

And truth demands that we acknowledge what many among us still refuse to say: radicalisation exists within sections of our own community. There are networks, sympathisers, and ideological pipelines that have been active for decades. Many of these pipelines trace back across the border, to Pakistan’s terror factories and their proxies within India.

The investigation into the recent Delhi terror attack already shows links with known terror outfits. When the patterns match the same old fingerprints of cross-border handlers and the motives echo familiar jihadi propaganda, how long can we keep pretending that the root is anything but what it is?

What jolts me awake is not simply that the blast occurred in Delhi, but that it was masterminded by professionals who looked like us. Names now emerging from the investigation include Dr Muzammil Ganaie (Pulwama), accused of surveying the Red Fort and storing explosives in Faridabad; Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather (Kulgam) and Dr Umar Un Nabi (Pulwama), linked to the transport of bombs; Dr Shaheen Saeed (Lucknow) and Dr Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyed (Hyderabad), one of whom allegedly exchanged messages with an ISKP-linked channel; and cleric Irfan Ahmad (Shopian), accused of indoctrinating young minds. These are people who had credentials, status, ambition — yet they chose radicalisation.

This should alarm us: we can no longer think of extremism as “illiterate, desperate, jobless”. The truth is far more insidious. Education, employment, and respectability are not shields; they can become facades. Radicalisation today is ideological and structural. It breeds in professional cloaks, institutional security, and unsuspecting settings.

What makes this case even more alarming is that India is now dealing with something almost unheard of globally—a full terror cell composed of multiple practising doctors working together. Around the world, we’ve seen occasional educated radicals like Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor involved in the 2007 Glasgow airport attack; Ayman al-Zawahiri, who rose to become al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, trained as a surgeon; George Habash, the founder of the PFLP, was a physician; and Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, is also a doctor.

The world has seen individual doctors embrace extremism, but India’s case is different: multiple doctors forming a single, operational terror unit. For a profession built on healing to be twisted into a shield for violence is shocking.

How will we solve the problem of radicalisation? Anger alone is not enough. If educated men with degrees and salaries can be radicalised, then the solution cannot be cosmetic, it must be structural. Radicalisation is not borne from illiteracy; it grows from an identity vacuum, ideological confusion, and the absence of a counter-narrative. Our community must reclaim its own moral vocabulary. Not the vocabulary of victimhood or “hurt sentiments”, but of responsibility. We need people who speak clearly about extremist interpretations instead of dodging them behind abstract words like “context” or “bias.”

At some point, a nation must stop speaking in euphemisms and call its wounds by their real name. For India, that name has been constant for decades: Pakistan—the world’s most consistent, state-sponsored hub of terrorism. From the 1993 Mumbai blasts to Kargil, from Parliament in 2001 to Mumbai in 2008, from Pathankot to Pulwama, the pattern documented across countless dossiers is identical: handlers in Rawalpindi, launchpads in PoK, training camps run by LeT, JeM, Hizbul, ISI-funded modules, infiltrators pushed across the LoC with clear intent.

Even recently, intelligence reports point to over 120 militants waiting across six new launch-pads in PoK, ready to infiltrate, a reminder that terror is not an accident, but an industry Pakistan has perfected. So when a blast rocks Delhi and the trail reveals professionals radicalised, encrypted instructions, and logistical support, let’s not pretend we “don’t know where this comes from”.

Latest intelligence shows how quickly Pakistan-backed terror networks are shifting their tactics. Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed is now using Bangladesh as a fresh base to plan attacks on India by recruiting locals, moving money, and building sleeper cells along the Indo-Bangla border.

This means the threat is no longer limited to Kashmir or PoK; the network is expanding sideways, looking for new entry points and educated recruits who can blend in. Radicalisation isn’t happening in isolation; it is being fed by a coordinated, cross-border machinery that keeps reinventing itself.

Force alone can’t end militancy, and communities must feel involved, not cornered. People want safety, justice, and sensitivity at the same time. This is why our national conversation must be honest, not extreme: we have to name the terror networks clearly, support security forces, and still make sure that ordinary citizens, especially Muslims, are not pushed into the margins where radicals thrive. That is how we defend both our nation and our faith: by being intellectually honest, morally firm, and absolutely unafraid.

A major part of our problem is the ecosystem of “professional explainers” and “professional saviours” within our own community, people who show up with academic accents and lyrical threads every time a terror attack happens, not to confront the rot but to manufacture excuses around it. The moment a terror-filled act happens, not to condemn it, but to immediately shift the conversation to victimhood, bias, and “larger systemic failures”. These are the same people who will write essays dissecting colonialism, majoritarianism, caste, capitalism, and everything under the sun, but go conveniently silent.

The evidence, meanwhile, is out there in plain sight: Chechen militants in Russia triggered two decades of insurgency; Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a Southeast Asian Islamist militant group with links to al-Qaeda, was responsible for the deadly 2002 Bali bombings; the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ); Boko Haram splinter groups target even fellow Muslims in West Africa; and the Maldives, a tiny island nation with no poverty to blame, has one of the highest per-capita numbers of ISIS recruits in the world.

This isn’t a Western narrative, an Indian narrative, or a Hindu narrative — it is a global Muslim crisis with documented patterns from Tripoli to Dhaka, from Lyon to Colombo. And the tragedy is that the loudest voices online will ignore all this and instead perform their ritual outrage about “hurt sentiments”, leaving the real struggle for truth to ordinary Muslims who simply want to live in safety and dignity.

It is precisely this silence from the powerful and this confusion among the privileged that allows extremists to flourish. And in the end, it is not the armchair intellectuals sitting in comfortable settings who pay the price, it is the everyday believer whose name, faith, and future get dragged into a battle they never chose.

So, my fellow Indian citizens,

I’ve realised something over the years: when religion stops inviting questions, it stops guiding people, it starts trapping them. That’s how radicalisation seeps in. Not because someone is uneducated, but because their world becomes so narrow that they cannot imagine being anything other than a foot soldier for someone else’s ideology.

I say this as a young Indian Muslim woman who has lived her whole life with freedoms many in the so-called “Islamic world” can only dream of. India has given me the space to study, learn, travel, work, argue, dissent, believe or not believe without fear. That is why it hurts to see educated young men turn against the very country that allowed them to rise. It feels like watching someone set fire to their own home.

So here is the only path forward: give young Muslims a story larger than “we are unsafe here”. A story of belonging and contribution. A story where India is not an adversary, but a place where our identity and ambition can coexist.

Terror grows in silence. But it collapses when ordinary people speak—clearly, honestly, fearlessly. And for me, the truth is simple: I love this country, and I will stand for it, with my voice, my work, and my conscience. – New18, 18 Novenmber 2025

› Zeba Zoariah is a practising advocate. She writes articles on women’s rights, politics and law.

Filed under: india, world | Tagged: global islamism, indian muslims, islam, muslim terrorism, radicalisation | Comments Off on White Coats, Dark Ideology: A letter the Muslim community cannot ignore – Zeba Zoariah