By bombing Balakot, India has struck ideological heart of Pak-based terror

Balakot is where a 19th century leader who waged jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom was killed in battle, and has come to be revered by Pakistan-based terrorists

When Indian Air Force (IAF) jets on Tuesday bombed a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) camp in Pakistan’s Balakot, in a pre-dawn strike, they might also have struck at the ideological root of Maulana Masood Azhar's terrorist organisation.

While Pakistan claims ‘payload’ was dropped in Balakote, a place with a similar name within Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, IAF’s Mirage 2000 aircraft are said to have crossed the Line of Control (LoC) and struck a JeM camp on the banks of the Kunhar river in Balakot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of the four administrative provinces of Pakistan.

Addressing the media on Tuesday, Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale said: "In an intelligence-led operation in the early hours of today, India struck the biggest training camp of JeM in Balakot... This facility at Balakot was headed by Maulana Yousuf Azhar (alias Ustad Ghouri), the brother-in-law of JeM chief Masood Azhar."

Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal’s 2011 book Pakistan: Terrorism Ground Zero, seems to confirm that JeM operated a "large training camp for between 800 and 1,000 recruits at Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa". According to the book, the camp was administered by "Yousuf, a Christian convert to Islam from Sindh who is married to Azhar's sister". The JeM facility at Balakot was called the ‘Syed Ahmad Shaeed’ training camp, Gunaratna and Iqbal wrote, adding that Indian sources said the camp was still functional in early 2003, even after the group was banned in January 2002.

If the name of the camp is anything to go by, JeM's “biggest training camp” that India struck, and the town that it is associated with, might have had an ideological and symbolic significance for many Pakistan-based terrorist organisations. That seems to be borne by the association of Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli, or Syed Ahmad Shaheed Barelvi as he is also known, with Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Sayyid Ahmad famously waged a war — a ‘jihad’, in fact — against Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom in the early years of the 19th century. In her book Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, historian Ayesha Jalal wrote: "The historical significance of the war (Sayyid Ahmad's jihad) lies in the indelible imprint it has left on the subcontinental Muslim psyche."

Sayyid Ahmad's "revival of the ideology of jihad became the prototype for subsequent Islamic militant movements in South and Central Asia," writes Husain Haqqani, the former ambassador of Pakistan to the US, in The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups. "It is also the main influence over the jihad network of Al Qaeda and its associated groups in the region," he adds. In fact, Haqqani credits Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli as the founder of the first jihadi group that emerged in India.

Sayyid Ahmad, along with Shah Ismail, the grandson of well-known 18th-century Islamic scholar Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, was killed in a battle against Sikh forces in Balakot on May 6, 1831.

To this day, Balakot, where Sayyid Ahmad lies buried, is a spot "that has been greatly revered" by "militants in contemporary Pakistan", wrote Jalal in her book. In fact, the JeM camp that was struck by India appears to have been named after the same Sayyid Ahmad.

Jalal further wrote that Balakot's "association with the idea and practice of jihad in South Asia was reinforced in the 1990s, when militant groups set up training camps in its environs to prepare for their campaign against Indian security forces stationed in predominantly Muslim Kashmir." To these militants, she writes, Sayyid Ahmad and Shah Ismail are "great heroes"; their "admirers" seek to emulate their jihad in a bid to "redress what they perceive as current injustices".  

Sayyid Ahmad also appears to have been an inspiration for Masood Azhar. According to Haqqani, Azhar, as a tribute to Sayyid Ahmad, wrote the preface of 'Ma'arka' (The Struggle), one of the books in which the JeM chief explains the ideology of the various Deobandi jihadi groups in Balakot, where Ahmad died.

During his lifetime, Sayyid Ahmad went on to declare himself Amir al-Mu'minin (commander of the faithful). Later, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban (dead now), would follow in Ahmad’s footsteps and assume the same title.

Jalal also wrote, Sayyid Ahmad referred to himself as Khalifa (Caliph) Sahib while dealing with the Sikhs. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, also adopted the same appellation over 180 years after Sayyid's death.