The Professionals of Terror: India’s Educated Are the New Foot Soldiers of Jihad

The Delhi blast lays bare how India’s educated elite are falling for online indoctrination and Pakistan-backed networks.

Dr Umar Nabi Dr Shaheen Sayeed Dr Muzammil Ganai

The deadly car blast near Delhi’s Red Fort that killed thirteen and injured more than thirty has definitively forced India to confront the unsettling truth that terrorism is no longer confined to the disenfranchised or the desperate. Investigators tracing the plot’s contours were startled to find that the accused were not illiterate foot soldiers or street radicals, but highly educated professionals – doctors in this case - drawn into Pakistan-sponsored networks and terror outfits.

Hours before the blast, the Jammu and Kashmir Police had announced the arrest of seven individuals linked to Pakistan-based terror outfits Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind (AGH). Among them were two doctors – men trained to save lives, not destroy them.

One of them, Dr. Muzammil Ahmad Ganai, a lecturer at Al-Falah Medical College in Faridabad, was arrested after investigators seized 358 kg of explosives from his rented home. Another, Dr, Adeel Majeed Rather, a resident doctor at Government Medical College, Anantnag, was detained in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur. None of the seven accused had any prior record. They were young, educated and seemingly integrated into professional life - until they weren’t.

The prime suspect in the Delhi blast, Dr. Mohammad Umar, was also an assistant professor at the same Faridabad institution. His car carried the explosives that ripped through the Red Fort Metro Station area. Umar, Ganai and Rather are the first doctors from the Al-Falah University to be implicated in terror-related activities in the past two years. Investigators now believe that the university’s network may have been systematically exploited to recruit professionals into extremist cells.

The scale of recoveries has alarmed officials. From multiple raids across Delhi, Haryana, and Kashmir, police seized 2,900 kg of IED-making materials including chemicals, detonators, circuits, remote controls and rifles. The group reportedly used encrypted messaging apps to raise funds and exchange logistical information. Police say the funds were collected through “professional and academic networks,” often under the guise of social or charitable work.

Chilling pattern

This disturbing pattern is no longer an anomaly. India’s security agencies have in recent years seen a spurt in the radicalisation of educated professionals — doctors, engineers, IT experts — by Pakistan-backed and Islamic State-linked networks operating both physically and online.

Across several investigations from Kerala to Karnataka, and from Hyderabad to Delhi, India’s security agencies have detected an unsettling trend - the growing presence of technically skilled, well-placed young men from educated Muslim families in the machinery of jihad. The phenomenon, once dismissed as an outlier, now appears to be a systematic strategy by terrorist outfits such as the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), both of which actively recruit professionals capable of building bombs, encrypting communications, or spreading propaganda with linguistic polish and digital reach.

When ISIS first began recruiting in India around 2014, its propaganda drew mostly from disaffected youth in conflict-prone states or migrant labourers abroad. Today’s profile looks strikingly different. The cases of Dr. Ijas Kallukettiya Purayil, an MBBS graduate from Kerala’s Kasaragod district who joined ISIS in Afghanistan or Mohammed Sirajuddin, an Indian Oil Corporation executive from Rajasthan arrested for online recruitment, illustrate the shift. These were not men of deprivation but well-educated, English-speaking, familiar with social media and global currents.

In July 2023, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Dr Adnanali Sarkar, a 43-year-old anaesthetist from Pune, for his alleged links to ISIS. The NIA said Sarkar, who had published in medical journals and worked at leading hospitals, was part of the Maharashtra ISIS module accused of recruiting vulnerable youth and plotting attacks.

A year earlier, Dr. Abdur Rahman, an ophthalmologist from Bengaluru, was arrested for ties to the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). In 2024, Ishtiaq Ahmed, formerly with the radiology department of a hospital in Ranchi, was detained for alleged links to al-Qaeda.

Engineers too have not been immune. Last month, Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested Zubair Hangargekar, a software engineer from Pune’s Kondhwa area, for alleged links to al-Qaeda. Police recovered translated speeches of Osama bin Laden, bomb-making videos, and photos of Hangargekar wielding assault rifles. A well-paid IT professional, he had been under surveillance for weeks before his arrest.

Earlier, the Pune Police had detained four suspects from the Chennai Express on October 27, as part of an expanding investigation into online radicalisation networks. Officials now believe the India operations of ISIS are being directed from handlers in Syria, and that the group, though territorially defeated, has revived its propaganda and recruitment activities across digital platforms.

Digital Indoctrination

Doctors and engineers were once seen as natural antibodies against extremism, the products of education, science and reason. Their drift into terror exposes how inadequate such assumptions have become.

A case in point was a 16-year-old Pune schoolgirl intercepted by the ATS in 2015, who was preparing to join the Islamic State in Syria after being radicalised online. Promised medical training and a “purposeful life,” she had been corresponding with recruiters from Sri Lanka and the Middle East. Her story is echoed in dozens of NIA dossiers on students seduced by encrypted messaging platforms, online sermons and recruitment manuals disguised as religious study groups.

The Popular Front of India (PFI), banned in 2022, had used similar methods. The NIA last year had attached two floors of a Pune school where the PFI allegedly held indoctrination camps, training recruits in weapons and propaganda. The agency described the group’s goal as the establishment of an Islamic rule in India by 2047.

Intelligence officials warn that such recruits bring a dangerous mix of technical competence and ideological conviction.

Behind the transformation lies a deliberate calculus. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and affiliated outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) long relied on poor madrasa graduates and mercenaries. But the modern jihad demands literacy in code, chemistry, and encryption. The terrorists of the 2020s are digital natives, often blending religious fervour with misplaced notions of global injustice and belonging.

What drives a medical graduate or an IT professional to embrace violence? Investigators and psychologists point to a cocktail of alienation, online indoctrination and transnational propaganda. Radicalisation now unfolds less in mosques than in private chatrooms. Recruiters from ISIS and AQIS have learnt to cloak ideology in the language of moral outrage – be it on Gaza, Kashmir or the alleged ‘mistreatment’ of Muslims in India - before nudging recruits towards violent action.

Kerala, which sends tens of thousands of workers to the Gulf, has been particularly vulnerable. In 2016, at least twenty-one individuals from the state left for Afghanistan to join ISIS’s Khorasan branch. Among them were engineers, teachers and a dental student. Similar cases in Maharashtra and Telangana suggest that the middle-class cocoon is no longer a safeguard.

Security agencies admit that the internet’s decentralisation has made policing radicalisation nearly impossible. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has identified more than 200 pro-ISIS handles operating in India, many using encrypted platforms such as Telegram.

Despite this, sections of India’s political and intellectual class remain in denial. Each new arrest or blast is greeted by a reflexive chorus blaming unemployment, poverty or ‘Hindu majoritarianism.’ Opinion columns lecture about ‘Islamophobia’ rather than engaging with the ideological roots of jihadism. India’s liberal commentariat, eager to project balance, has often conflated legitimate concerns about communal prejudice with a reluctance to discuss intra-community radicalisation. In universities and think-tanks, the study of Islamist extremism is treated as unfashionable or ‘right-wing.’

Community institutions must recognise that the challenge is not only one of security but of moral leadership. India’s Muslims have historically produced reformers, scientists, and statesmen. The radical fringe threatens to overshadow this legacy. Terror today no longer comes dressed in fatigues; it wears the lab coat and the engineering badge. To acknowledge this is not to stigmatise an entire community, but to defend it from being hijacked by those who speak in its name.