Opinion | The Anatomy Of A Modern Extremist: Why 2025’s Radicals Don’t Fit Any Old Template

Radicalisation in India has never been a single fire to extinguish; today, it is an entire electrical grid sparking at once. Kashmir, the North-East, university campuses, social media echo chambers, Pakistan’s

propaganda ecosystem, and China’s strategic ambitions are no longer parallel problems — they are interlinked circuits in a larger architecture of destabilisation. Recent events — the Pahalgam massacre, the Red Fort bomber, Sharjeel Imam’s Siliguri thesis, banned secessionist literature, TRF’s resurgence, and Pakistan’s open admission of cross-border strikes — paint a picture far more complex than insurgency or alienation. What we are facing is a hybrid radicalisation system, where the terrorist with a rifle, the scholar with a footnote, the Opposition leader with a microphone, and the foreign intelligence officer with a map contribute to the same ideological continuum.

To understand how this system works, we must begin with the Pahalgam attack, where victims were separated by religion, forced to recite the kalima, and some inspected for circumcision. This was not militancy born of grievance; this was religious purification violence, consistent with Lashkar-e-Taiba’s early doctrinal manuals recovered by Indian agencies in the 1990s and 2000s. TRF — Lashkar’s “clean-skin” rebrand created after FATF scrutiny — now uses digital cells for recruitment, AI-edited training videos, and encrypted transit maps. The 2025 attack fits the global pattern identified by the UN Monitoring Team: terror groups increasingly outsource field operations to hybrid outfits while preserving ideological continuity.

India’s response, Operation Sindoor, signalled a doctrinal transformation. No denials. No ambiguity. A named, calibrated, precision retaliatory strike — the kind military strategists call “limited compellence operations”.
This is India borrowing from Israel’s and France’s playbook: when the adversary uses non-state proxies, the response hits the infrastructure, not the foot soldier. But militancy is no longer the strategic centre of gravity; ideas are.

Enter the white-collar jihadist — the Red Fort bomber, a doctor and academic, radicalised not in a madrassa but in encrypted theological forums. This mirrors the Western jihadist wave (2014–2017), where ISIS recruits were more educated than average, as per a World Bank study. India is now confronting the same sociology: the radical is not poor, not fringe, and not uninformed. He is confident, literate, and ideologically “purified”. His job isn’t to fight, but to make extremism appear intellectually defensible.

This ideological laundering is aided by the intellectual-apologist class, India’s third radicalisation engine. Their vocabulary is polished; their sentences are footnoted; their politics is aestheticised. But their function is brutally simple:

• erase Pakistan’s culpability,
• securitise (Copenhagen School theory) the Indian state,
• convert extremists into victims,
• disguise secession as scholarship.

The recent ban on 25 books — many of them treating Kashmir primarily through narratives of separatism and grievance, without substantial reference to the Pandit exodus or terrorist recruitment and financing networks — exposed this narrative-laundering machinery. Predictably, the outrage was largely performative: minimal substantive engagement with the texts, and immediate claims of “censorship” rather than debate.

But ideological laundering alone cannot destabilise a nation. It requires a political amplifier. This is where the INDIA bloc enters the picture. Instead of countering radicalisation, large sections of the Opposition have made it a political currency. The Sharjeel Imam case illustrates this perfectly. Imam’s call to “cut off the Siliguri Corridor” is not dissent; it is a geopolitical strike plan. The corridor — a 22-km-wide bottleneck — is India’s only physical link to its North-East. Since the 1970s, Pakistan’s ISI has discussed this vulnerability in intercepted communications; China studies it through its “Five Fingers of Tibet” doctrine; and Bangladesh-based radicals have referenced it in training manuals. Imam’s articulation mirrors these inputs almost word for word.

And yet, the Opposition converted a national security case into a communal morality play: “Muslims do not get bail.” This is not analysis; it is narrative weaponisation. When the political class refuses to differentiate between dissent and doctrinal destabilisation, they are not defending civil liberties — they are endorsing strategic fragmentation. Which brings us to the uncomfortable question: does the Opposition still see India as a single nation or a negotiable federation of convenience? Because every time they defend secessionist ideology as free thought, or minimise Islamist extremism as “alienation,” they signal to adversarial states that national unity itself is an open debate.

To fully grasp the scale of India’s challenge, one must zoom out to the North-East, where radicalisation is increasingly tied to transnational agendas. AQIS modules have been discovered in Assam; madrassa networks linked to Bangladesh’s radical outfits have been quietly expanding digital influence; socio-economic vulnerabilities are exploited through identity politics; and demographic shifts in border districts feed new anxieties. The Siliguri Corridor is not merely a highway; it is the hinge of India’s territorial integrity. Any discourse — academic, activist, or political — that imagines its blockade as dissent is not freedom of expression; it is geo-strategic sabotage.

This is why India’s understanding of radicalisation must shift from “counter-insurgency” to “ecosystem disruption”. In counter-terror literature, this is called disaggregating the architecture:

• the operative node (the terrorist),
• the ideological node (the educated radical),
• the narrative node (the apologist),
• the political node (the amplifier),
• the geopolitical node (the foreign beneficiary).

India’s current policies target only the first node. The other four operate freely — sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly — and increasingly under political protection.

As a Muslim, I must address the moral dimension. The greatest disservice to Indian Muslims is not done by the government but by those who pretend radicalisation does not exist. They infantilise Muslims, treat ideology as emotion, selectively quote scripture, misuse historical grievances, and weaponise identity for political mileage. This is not solidarity; it is manipulation. Radicalisation rejects the Constitution. The apologist ecosystem rejects accountability. But both claim to represent us. We must reject both.

So where does India go from here? Certainly not towards censorship alone, because censorship without clarity creates martyrs. Nor towards unrestrained policing, because enforcement without narrative wins battles but loses generations.

What India needs is a national hybrid anti-radicalisation doctrine:

• mapping ideological ecosystems with the same seriousness as terrorist cells;
• distinguishing dissent from secessionism with constitutional precision;
• regulating foreign-funded intellectual networks with transparency;
• integrating Kashmir and North-East intelligence grids;
• building Muslim-led theological counter-narratives;
• calling out political actors who treat national unity as a bargaining chip.

Because ultimately, India’s greatest vulnerability is not the terrorist who crosses the border. It is the leader who crosses the line between opposition and opportunism.

Radicalisation today is not an event but an architecture. And India’s survival depends on recognising that the threat is no longer the gun alone — it is the idea, the influencer, the institution, and the politician who allows the idea to breathe.

The question, then, is not whether India can defeat terrorism. It is whether India can defeat those who manufacture the conditions for it.

The author is a practising advocate. She writes articles on women’s rights, politics and law. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views