Al-Qaeda statement against India over minorities reflects synergy with Pak pitch
Al-Qaeda’s statement reveals an unusual synergy between the global jihadist group and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence in building a narrative against India
Global terrorist group Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has asked Indian muslims and scholars to join hands and wage jihad against India to defend against what it described as discrimination and genocide. Indian security agencies say the statement by Al-Qaeda’s Middle East wing reveals an unusual synergy between the global jihadist group and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence in building a narrative that accuses New Delhi of discrimination against minorities.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has asked Indian muslims and scholars to join hands and wage jihad against India
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The statement by the terror group spotlights the Citizenship Amendment Act that fast-tracks grant of Indian nationality for undocumented migrants from six minority religious communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The law was passed five months back, in December 2019.
A senior official in the security establishment said the reference to the citizenship law was only the entry point for the global terror group to lend support to the Pakistan deep state’s shrill social media campaign to adversely influence India’s relations with the muslim-majority Gulf countries and provoke Indian muslims.
“We have been tracking the social media campaign right from the start and have identified the 2,794 Twitter handles that have played the most active role to carry out this information warfare. We have been able to trace every hashtag that has been created to target India or the government over the rights of muslims and every one of them took us to an account in Pakistan,” the official said.
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Some well-meaning people in India also get taken in by this campaign, quite like some people in the Gulf without realising the big picture,” the official said.
An intelligence official said the involvement of the Al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula in the ISI effort could indicate an effort to build global jihad into the narrative that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan repeatedly tried to build all of last year before the Pak ISI took charge of this project.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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