Veiled Threats

The Delhi blast and the arrests that followed have forced India to confront an unsettling evolution in its terror landscape. Among those now in custody is Dr. Shaheen Shahid, a Lucknow-based physician who, investigators say was not merely a sympathiser but an organiser tasked by the Pakistan-backed Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) to build its women’s wing in India, the Jamaatul Mominat. Her alleged mission was to recruit, indoctrinate and mobilise women, particularly educated students, for coordinated terror attacks across the country. It was designed to serve both as a recruitment hub and a moral shield.

Dr. Shaheen’s interrogation has exposed what security officials describe as a professionalised network of radicalised doctors including main suspects Dr. Umar Un Nabi, Dr. Muzammil Ahmad Ganaie and Dr. Adeel Majeed, who had been stockpiling ammonium-nitrate explosives for two years to be used for coordinated attacks across India. This mark a chilling new chapter in India’s jihadist story wherein the frontline of extremism has shifted from jungle camps to research labs, and from madrassas to medical colleges.

Shaheen’s arrest reveals how women are becoming the new face of jihad in India. For years, women were portrayed as victims or passive enablers of extremism. Dr. Shaheen’s case upends that assumption. During questioning, Dr. Shaheen acknowledged that she had maintained direct contact with Sadia Azhar, sister of JeM chief Masood Azhar, and had worked alongside her brother Parvez Ansari to expand the group’s reach within India. Her assignment, she reportedly told investigators, was to identify, indoctrinate and mobilise women - particularly students abroad - to support the organisation’s objectives.

That a doctor, trained to preserve life, should conspire to destroy it marks a grim inversion of professional ethics. Yet Dr. Shaheen’s case is not an anomaly. It represents a shift in jihadist strategy which is from recruiting alienated youths in conflict zones to cultivating educated professionals capable of operating in plain sight. The Jaish leadership, facing tighter border surveillance and international scrutiny, appears to have realised that the future of its network lies not in the mountains of Pakistan but in the classrooms and clinics of India.

Women’s involvement, by design, provides cover and social respectability, along with plausible deniability and access to spaces from which male operatives are barred. This was in evidence during the Delhi riots as well. Dr. Shaheen and her circle were not mere couriers or sympathisers but educated actors capable of producing explosives, encrypting communications and sustaining clandestine cells for years.

The ideological grooming of such professionals has not happened in isolation. It has thrived in a permissive environment where any discussion of radicalisation risks being dismissed as bigotry. India’s self-styled progressives, quick to romanticise Muslim intellectuals and reformers, have often chosen to look away when confronted with evidence of extremist influence within educated circles. The transformation of a doctor, especially a lady, into a lethal terror operative thus represents not only a security failure but a moral one.