I argue that to understand securitisation of Muslims in India (and beyond) by limiting it within the frame of the attacks on the USA on September 9, 2001 (9/11) and the ‘Global War on Terror’ is to succumb to journalistic presentism, which is also largely securitised. A historically grounded understanding ought to instead situate securitisation of Muslims as simultaneous with colonial modernisation and the development of nationalism and nation-states. To proceed then with my argument  that securitisation, modernisation and nation-statisation together form a coeval trinity,  let’s begin with the phrase ‘securitisation of Islam.’ 

Political scientist Jocelyne Cesari claims to have coined this phrase and marks its onset with post-9/11 policy by European states: ‘a paradoxical policy of European governments both fearing and fostering radicalisation in a process I call the ‘securitisation’ of Islam.’ What this quote reveals, inter alia, is that while Cesari takes securitisation as contested to place it in scare quotes, she does not take a similar stance with the words radicalisation or radical/radicalism, which she also often uses. This suggests that unlike securitisation, radicalisation and its kins are supposedly neutral.

In my own work, I name the process Muslims were put to as follows: ‘In the post–9/11 world, as Islam has become an object of ‘security,’ these terms have also become ‘securitised.’’ Those terms were ‘moderation’ and ‘radicalisation, both in scare quotes.

My point is not so much whose phrase it is but which horizon of thought it springs from as well as ushers in. As it has been noted, far from being neutral, radicalisation is a politicised term such that it has been made nearly coterminous with Islam and Muslims. Radical, in fact, signifies the enemy in the international political order instituted after World War II, especially during ‘the New World Order.’  When used along with ‘fanatic,’ as is often the case, it becomes deadlier. From the early nineteenth century on, Jews and Muslims occupied the space of fanatics, as an enemy in Western/Christian thought. Contemporaneously, Muslims, with or without the prefix radical, mostly occupy that space. Thus viewed, it becomes clear how an attempt to coin the phrase, securitisation of Islam, is itself indebted to the vocabulary instituted by Western states and embraced by compliant non-Western powers such as India.

For example, in 2006, the British state launched a gigantic academic ‘research’ project: ‘Combating Terrorism  by  Countering  Radicalisation.’ Disregarding their autonomy, it asked academics to study pre-designed topics such as ‘membership of extremist Islamist groups,’ ‘theological  legitimisation  for  violence,’ ‘name the  key  figures  (moderate and  extreme)’ and  ‘radicalisation drivers.’  Since the project (that covered virtually the whole world divided into six zones) named no other group but only Muslim, the government had no ambiguity about who the target was. Put differently, to coin securitisation of Islam by placing it in scare quotes but not similarly treat  ‘radicalisation’—a post-9/11 ‘buzzword in intelligence circles’—is akin to participating in the discourse of radicalisation bequeathed by Western powers.

A recent study explains securitisation of Muslims more theoretically as Western states’ turn to ‘militant democracy.’ After Hitler’s violent rise to power through democracy, the key concern of Karl Loewenstein, an émigré German political thinker to the US, was to halt Nazism based on ‘intimidation and terrorization scientifically applied.’ And, should democracy with values of ‘fundamental rights, for fair play for all opinions, for free speech, assembly, press,’ therefore, allow space to fascism? By militant democracy, Loewenstein meant banning fascist organisations from democratic space. Based on interviews with 23 Muslims in Australia, the authors of this study see securitisation as resulting from Australia’s turn to  Loewenstein’s militant democracy. To this political science term, they apply anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s concept of ‘misinterpellation,’ an obverse borrowing from the philosopher Louis Althusser’s ‘interpellation.’ Misinterpellation as subjectivity of Muslims interviewed in this study thus works as a conceptual subsidiary to their securitisation presided over by Australia’s turn to militant democracy.

While the move to theoretically unpack securitisation is worthy, the theory itself seems less so. Is it correct to equate, as the authors’ unsullied application of militant democracy to the post-9/11 condition assumes, fascism with what they take as ‘Islamic extremism?’ Notably, they don’t  spell out the rationale of this equation. Though, unlike Cesari, they use radicalisation only once, its meaning is similar to Islamic extremism. Thus, they discuss Muslims in relation to their religious identity, hijāb, the Qur’ān and religious texts. In fact, they treat Islamic extremism as ‘ideological.’ Along with the inapt equivalence between fascism and Islamic extremism, my second critique is that they also appear to misread Loewenstein’s take on fascism. To Loewenstein, ‘fascism is not an ideology but a political technique.’ The equivalence between fascism and ‘Islamic extremism’ thus does not hold, as it equalises what to Loewenstein is a technique with what the authors take as an ideology. That they write ‘Muslim terrorists’ as an innocent label and, like Cesari’s use of radicalisation, without scare quotes is no less strange. What about Hage’s ‘misinterpellation?’ As noted earlier, it is a subsidiary to militant democracy as a core concept. When the core loses its coherence and comparative merit, as the discussion so far demonstrates, misinterpellation too logically falls apart.  Here, it is vital to note that, in 2020, Hage explicitly stated the unproven equation the study I discuss here assumes throughout. He termed the ghastly attack in Nice, France as an ‘Islamo-fascist terrorist attack.’ Like the term radicalisation common to both Cesari and the British counterterrorism research agenda, ‘Islamo-fascism’ is shared alike by Hage and George Bush Jr. who used it long before the former did.

Security: The very word and its meanings

The first step toward developing an alternative framework is to examine the premise of 9/11 as a benchmark for securitisation of Islam—a premise, which, like Cesari and others, I too once subscribed to, albeit differently.  To this end, my emphasis on temporality is not simply calendrical but conceptual. That is, to understand securitisation of Islam is to get to the very concept of security.

In academic and writer Raymond Williams’ sense of keywords, security has traditionally been at the heart of Political Science and International Relations (IR) rather than anthropology or sociology, which only relatively recently began to engage with it. According to John Baylis, an IR expert, security is a ‘contested’ but foundational term in IR where it primarily means security of the state. As an academic discipline begun after WWI, IR’s key theory then was Idealism, which briefly enjoyed support due to optimism of the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations). However, soon Idealism gave way to Realism, the most dominant IR ‘theory,’ Hans Morgenthau being its founder. Drawing on Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and others, Realism believes in no morality except that of raison d’État (reason of state). Consequently, survival and security of the state require its relentless strengthening vis-à-vis its enemies. Political theorist Carl Schmitt, who took politics as differentiating friend from foe, deeply influenced Morgenthau. Realism ruled the field of  IR after 1945 and during the Cold War, at the end of which Idealism briefly resurfaced. After 9/11, it was ‘back to realism’ again.  

In the 1980s and later, an important development in IR theory was also the onset of the constructivist approach, which challenged positivist premises of Realism and Neo-Realism. Here the contribution of feminist scholarship is pivotal.  For constructivists, security is not natural or given; hence, their emphasis on the constructed nature of securitisation. Scholars critical of the hegemonic Realist notion of security are deemed to belong to the Copenhagen or Welsh school. A parallel development occurred in the form of ideas about human security and development to which, among others, economists Mahbubul Haq and Amartya Sen contributed significantly.

The discussion so far thus enables us to identify three meanings and usages of security:

• security of a (national) state or its allies under threat by one or more states,
• securitisation as a process that fashions rather than simply reflects a threat ‘out there’ and;
• in its wider usage, security is not limited to the state but it also pertains to economy, health, environment and more.

Below, I demonstrate how Islam and Muslims in India have been a key object of securitisation in all these three meanings, well before 9/11. To fulfil this task, some notes are in order.

The three usages of security are distinct only heuristically; in practice they overlap. Thus, the first meaning—expressed mainly as ‘national security’ in military terms—continues to shape the tenor of the second as well as the third one. While my argument is sympathetic to the constructivist approach, its specific rendition in the Copenhagen school and elsewhere is deeply problematic. It is not simply the case that the premises of securitisation theory are Eurocentric; they equally rest on ‘methodological whiteness and anti-black racism.’

Notably, securitisation theory, like IR, too remained oblivious to religion. After 9/11, when it addressed religion, Carsten Laustsen and Ole Wæver, for example, considered it mostly from a Eurocentric-Christian lens. They disregarded the probing critique of dominant studies of religion by scholars like Talal Asad, or even by Elizabeth Hurd, an IR scholar. Their analysis assumes a ‘good’ secular West and a ‘bad’ religious East, especially the Islamic one. Furthermore, the received wisdom that surgically separates national from international or ‘home’ from abroad is unhelpful. This separation, for example, cannot account for international simultaneity of the post-9/11 discourse of ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims’ in as different and distant nation-states as Australia, India, Norway and the US.   

Securitising Muslims/Islam in India: A long view

No doubt, 9/11 intensified the securitisation of India’s Muslims—a new anti-terrorism law being its chief tool. That the anti-terror law, The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA 2002), disproportionally and non-evidentially targeted Muslims is apparent from the fact that from its enactment until September 2006, over 3,500 people (including some minors) in 18 states were held under POTA. The state of Gujarat had the largest number of detainees, 287, of whom all, except one, were Muslim.