A week after the Red Fort car blast, investigators are still piecing together an alleged white-collar terror module – one that has revived fears of “home-grown” radicalisation after years of security focus on Pakistan-based jihadi tanzeems. With several doctors among those arrested, some linked to Faridabad’s Al Falah University, the case points to a network that may have quietly spread into multiple states, operating under the influence of a pan-Islamist ideology that agencies are still reluctant to name.

The arrests of these doctors, one of whom was confirmed through DNA analysis as the driver of the car that exploded near the Red Fort on November 10, have brought back memories of the clandestine, locally embedded terror cells that haunted India through the 2000s. 

The “doctors’ module” has also triggered talk of a new kind of “white-collar terrorism”. But it is not the first time that highly educated professionals have allegedly been involved with terror groups. Al Qaeda and ISIS are known for their affluent, highly educated cadres. The shadowy “Indian Mujahideen” too had a host of qualified individuals in various professions. 

IM was held by security agencies to be a creation of Pakistan’s ISI – a tactic used to expand the “thousand cuts” strategy from Kashmir to the rest of India. Pakistan has denied any link to the IM. Along with SIMI, IM had attained notoriety for claiming several attacks across urban India, including in Mumbai, Varanasi and Delhi. The last terrorist attack in Delhi before last week’s Red Fort incident was in 2011, claimed by both the Bangladesh-based HUJI and the IM.

However, whether the latest module has a Pakistan link remains unclear.

Four doctors and a maulvi

The network began to unravel when Irfan Ahmad Wagay, a preacher at a mosque in Nowgam on Srinagar’s outskirts, was arrested after an alert J&K police official noticed posters, ostensibly signed by a “commander” of  the Jaish-e-Mohammed, pasted on walls in the suburb. The posters warned security forces of consequences and asked people not to help them.

This is currently the only element linking the case to Pakistan. Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has carried out and claimed several attacks in Kashmir, is a Pakistan-based group. Parts of its headquarters in Bahawalpur were targeted by India on the first day of Operation Sindoor.

Investigators believe the doctors had no direct connection with the JeM. 

The three arrested doctors are Muzammil Ganaie, Adeel Rather and Shaheen Sayeed. Ganaie met Wagay when he was working at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar around 2019. He met Sayeed, a Lucknow native, at Al Falah Medical Institute, where he moved in 2021. Like him, she too was a faculty member. Rather, who relocated from Anantnag last year, was working at a private hospital in Saharanpur. Dr Umair Nabi – the driver of the car that exploded at Red Fort and who died inside it – was also a faculty member at Al Falah.

The posters were made and pasted by three individuals in Nowgam on Wagay’s instructions. The doctors and these three men, all among the eight arrested by J&K Police, did not know each other and never met. Wagay was their only link, communicating with each group separately.

Two pistols – a Chinese Star and a Beretta – one AK-56 rifle with ammunition, another AK variant called Krinkov with ammunition, and 2,900 kg of materials used in making explosives (chemicals, reagents, inflammable substances, circuits, batteries, timers, metal sheets) were recovered from different locations after the arrests. One pistol was recovered from Zameer Ahmad Ahanger, a businessman in Kashmir and a contact of Wagay.

Wagay is being reported by the media as the “mastermind” but in their absorption of Islamist messaging, the doctors seem to have gone further than the maulvi may have imagined. Umair was perhaps the most radicalised, investigators said. Though his phone has not been found, investigators learned he had been in touch with many students on messaging apps, engaging them in conversations about jihad, martyrdom, and the oppression of Indian Muslims by the “Indian state”. Unlike Wagay, Umair’s preoccupation was not limited to Kashmir.

Investigators say that all of Al Falah – its students, faculty, and residents of Dhauj village, where it is located – are now under scrutiny for links to Umair and the other doctors. Over 100 of the university’s 800 students are from Kashmir, and many faculty members are Kashmiri as well.

The National Investigation Agency, which has taken over the case, has arrested an Al Falah student – a resident of Ludhiana – from his ancestral home in West Bengal, where he had gone for a wedding. Two other doctors from the institute have been detained by Delhi Police. The owner of the car that Umair drove has also been arrested.

Unusual silence on the usual suspect

On November 12, two days after the explosion in which 13 people were killed, the government finally called it a terror incident. By Indian standards, this was an unusually long time. Notably, the “P-word” was missing both in anonymous briefings and in media reportage. In earlier cases, government leaders have suggested Pakistani involvement within hours of an incident.

Call it the post–Operation Sindoor security doctrine effect. When India carried out military strikes on terrorist targets inside Pakistan in retaliation for the Pahalgam attack, it announced a new doctrine: every terrorist act henceforth would be treated as an act of war. Modi and the defence minister said Operation Sindoor had only been “paused”. But India knows the diplomatic price it paid for the four-day skirmish. Blaming Pakistan again would raise domestic expectations of retaliation when there is no international appetite for such action.

Investigators say their conclusion that the Red Fort blast was the work of “home-grown” terrorists is not guided by political or diplomatic considerations. If it aligns with the government’s stance, they say, it is coincidental. A “home-grown” group may have spared the government a difficult decision under its post-Sindoor doctrine. Yet it is also true that local groups have previously received ISI patronage, including Hizbul Mujahideen, and, as Indian authorities allege, the IM.

The symbolism of an explosion at Red Fort is hard to miss. The Mughal-era structure is a central political symbol of independent India. Every Prime Minister has addressed the nation from its ramparts on August 15. For that reason, Pakistan-based groups have vowed to seize it and fly their flag there. In 2000, Lashkar operatives attacked the Fort, killing two soldiers of the Rajputana Rifles. Security agencies frequently flag intelligence alerts about terror threats to the Red Fort.

If a Pakistan link to the doctors’ module emerges, it may indicate that – as with the IM – the ISI is again attempting to expand its reach beyond Kashmir. Such a link would be difficult to prove, but it would pose a serious security challenge and signal a return to the insecurity that dogged India’s big cities two decades ago.

But even without Pakistani involvement, the existence of a radicalised network presents a serious challenge to security agencies. It exposes the government’s claim of zero local recruits to militant groups. It also shows that the “normalcy” narrative after the constitutional changes in J&K in 2019 rested on a heavy clampdown, which hid the alienation from view, and may have contributed to it. Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status ostensibly to “integrate” Kashmiris with the rest of India. But from the routine intimidation of Kashmiri students and residents across India since Pulwama in 2019 the integration project appears to have failed. Al Falah’s success in attracting large numbers of Kashmiri students soon after opening in 2019 stems from its nature as a minority institute in a minority village in Faridabad district – which has the second-highest Muslim population in Haryana. Students and faculty from Kashmir likely felt safer there.

The module’s doctor recruits in Haryana and UP are warning signs that the present political and social marginalisation of Indian Muslims is affecting some individuals enough to push them toward extreme paths. The arrests by the Gujarat ATS of three allegedly ISIS-inspired men, including a Hyderabad-based doctor at about the same time as the Kashmir doctors’ network came to light, shows the radicalisation is not a one-off. 

It can be argued that the state contributes directly to the alienation with such actions as the razing of Umair’s family home, which, aside from violating a Supreme Court judgement, is extra-judicial punishment of a person who is a suspect. Contrary to the belief that only the poor become terrorists because they have nothing to lose, the Gujarat arrests and the doctors’ module show that individuals with stable careers and education may also turn to terrorism. It is worth recalling that the IM – which attracted many engineers – rose in the aftermath of the communal polarisation that followed L K Advani’s rath yatra across north India. In Sri Lanka, where the Muslim community was well integrated until Sinhala-Muslim riots and extremist violence, a group of successful and well-connected Muslim businessmen and professionals came together with an ISIS-inspired preacher to carry out the 2019 Easter bombings.

Lapse and accountability

The new terror network took shape in a security-saturated territory – not in a day or two, but over years. Despite uncovering it days before the blast, J&K Police were unable to prevent the Red Fort explosion, the first terror incident in the capital in 14 years. Should there have been a red alert in the capital and across north India after the seizures of such large quantities of explosive material and the ongoing search for others in the network?

As with the lapses that enabled the Pahalgam attack, questions about failures in this case remain unanswered – including those about a second, connected incident at Nowgam police station, where a blast late on November 14 destroyed all the bomb-making material seized by police and killed 13 more people.

The massive explosion at Nowgam police station destroyed crucial evidence in the Red Fort blast case. It was labelled an accident, and the public and media have been advised not to circulate any other theories. But an accident does not happen in a vacuum; it results from human negligence. Was it safe to transport these explosives from Faridabad to Kashmir? There is still no official explanation for what acts of negligence caused the blast, and it is unlikely one will be offered. This government is not known for acknowledging mistakes, let alone entertaining questions of accountability.

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