While India has the second largest Muslim community in the world – numbering about 180 million – it has astonished observers that Indian Muslims have refused to join the cohorts of trans-national extremism that have attracted thousands of youth from different Muslim countries and communities across the world, including the Gulf, over the last few years.

This phenomenon is particularly impressive given that, while extremist violence in Kashmir has been ongoing for three decades, Indian Muslims in the rest of the country have consistently refused to join the insurgency there.

This chapter examines several possible reasons – doctrinal, cultural and political – to explain this aloofness from faith-based violence. It discusses the belief-systems and practices of ‘popular Islam’ in India, particularly the influence of Sufism, the veneration of saints, and the insistence that matters of faith remain part of personal conviction rather than agitated in the public domain.

The chapter then examines the shaping of India's contemporary political culture whose syncretic values and accommodativeness are enshrined in the constitution and are protected by strong watchdog institutions such as the independent judiciary, free media and a vibrant civil society. These have imbued the nation with a culture of pluralism, that, despite robust challenges, remains resilient and refuses to accept nontolerant and extremist assertions across the communal landscape.

Finally, the chapter provides some ‘lessons’ from the Indian experience that could be useful for other countries in the Gulf and the wider region that are shaping approaches to de-radicalisation and counter-radicalisation.

Unique Traditions

When the call went out for Muslims to join the ‘global jihad’ in Afghanistan in the 1980s, about 100,000 responded from around the world. None, however, was from India. Indian Muslims also kept aloof from the transnational jihad led by Al Qaeda in the 1990s and later, after 9/11, through local affiliates in West and South Asia. After the advent of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), about 200 Indians responded to its call. It was reported that 22 people went to Syria to fight, while another group of 25 (from the state of Kerala) migrated to ‘Khorasan’, the ISIS enclave in Afghanistan. The rest were engaged in online activity, either accessing ISIS material or disseminating it to facilitate further recruitment.

This aloofness of Indian Muslims from ISIS contrasts sharply with the latter's ability to attract about 30,000 militants from outside Iraq and Syria, with recruits joining its ranks from West Asia and North Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and from Europe. Indian Muslims have rejected trans-national jihad despite concerns that communal polarisation has increased in the country from the 1980s, along with sporadic violence directed at them from sections of the majority community and a perceived sense of marginalisation from the mainstream of the nation's political and economic life.