ISLAMABAD: Coming to grips with reality after several of its citizens were arrested abroad for their links with Daesh, India says it has accepted the challenge it faces from its Muslim citizens in southern India. “Challenges are there. We have to accept that it is a reality. The threat is there,” Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju told Karan Thapar in an interview to the India Today TV programme, “To the Point”. Rijiju said Muslims from the southern states were “attracted” more to the Daesh ideology than their north Indian counterparts.“It is a reality (some South Indian Muslims getting attracted to ISIS). It is a fact. But we should not undermine our vigil in other parts of the country,” he said. As if more proof of a regional threat was needed, Friday saw Daesh claiming responsibility for an attack on a Shia Muslim mosque in Bangladesh on Thursday, killing one person and wounding three as they prayed, the second attack on the country’s tiny Shia Muslim community in a month. At a time when reports about Daesh sightings from the region have now becomecommon, whether it is India, Afghanistan or Pakistan, what is worrying that on this issue alone the three governments are not coordinating. While individually each country has its own specific mechanisms to fight terror, the Daesh threat would require more coordination on a regional level, specially for all three immediate neighbours. Speaking on the seventh anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Rijiju told the anchor that it was quite possible that Daesh may carry out attacks by even using a single terrorist in the garb of a ‘lone wolf’, but New Delhi is aware of this and hence preventive measures have been put in place. To a query, the minister admitted that the government was aware of Daesh flags appearing in Jammu and Kashmir but brushed asides these incidents as “isolated cases and not spread across the country”. The minister said that several servers of web portals which are spreading Daesh propaganda are located outside India and not within the state.
