The infrastructure used for cyber terrorism and online radicalisation is distributed while some entities also train terrorists with weapons from remote locations as well as online resources. Communications,  travel, logistics - there are many links in the chain. Terrorists should not be allowed to misuse differences in legal principles, procedures and processes in different countries. This can be prevented through deeper coordination and understanding between governments.  

As author Sushant Sareen had said in the context of Jammu and Kashmir that on one hand thousands of people have died, families and properties destroyed, and an entire society traumatised, the one set of people who have prospered beyond their wildest imagination is the separatist mafia. The huge fortunes built by separatists and terrorists in Kashmir are one of the worst-kept secrets. Over the years, Kashmir has been transformed into a war economy, which needs to be dismantled.  

For decades, the focus of the Indian security establishment in hotspots around the country has been more on seizing weapons than on cracking down on the funding networks. While in the West, security agencies followed money to bust criminal syndicates and terror networks, in India the thinking was that the problem wasn’t the money but the munitions. Unfortunately, elements in the security establishment have also contributed to the separatist entrepreneurship in Kashmir by plying the separatists with huge amounts of money in the fond hope of weaning them away from Pakistan and eventually winning them over – the former Intelligence Bureau chief in Kashmir and later Research & Analysis Wing chief, AS Dulat, has admitted as much in his book on Kashmir. Essentially what this meant was that the separatists raked in the moolah from all sides – India, Pakistan, within Kashmir, foreign donors, and so forth. 

Little did the geniuses in the Indian intelligence community realise that this was a mug’s game because it only incentivised separatism by giving the separatist mafia an additional income stream without having to deliver anything in return. There might have been a time when the Indian approach to rupturing terror networks by bribing them would have been valid, but it has run its course.

To be continued...