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A pattern marks London terror attacks

The man who carried out the stab attack at London Bridge on November 29 reinforces the pattern of extremist violence that the United Kingdom (UK) has witnessed in the last 15 years.

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Luv Puri
Journalist and Author

The man who carried out the stab attack at London Bridge on November 29 reinforces the pattern of extremist violence that the United Kingdom (UK) has witnessed in the last 15 years. 

Twentyeight-year-old Usman Khan, the London attacker, was born to parents who hailed from Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PAJK), which is called PoK by India and ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ by Pakistan. He, along with another Nazam Hussain, also born to immigrant parents from PAJK, had plans to establish and recruit for a militant training facility under the cover of a madrasa (religious school) on land owned by his family in PAJK. Interestingly, his profile bears an uncanny resemblance with other extremists who have carried out attacks in the UK in the recent past. 

In the 2005 string of suicide attacks on London’s public transport system, 56 lives were lost. Mohammad Sidique Khan, a 30-year-old married man and father to a daughter, was the head of the plot. Khan was born to parents who had migrated to the UK from the Pothwari-speaking area of Rawalpindi which adjoins PAJK. He had travelled to a camp in PAJK of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Kashmir-centric militant group. A year after the London bombings, a terrorist plot to blow up the 10 United States-bound flights from Heathrow with the help of liquid explosives was revealed on August 10, 2006. The foiled attack was the brainchild of 1981-born Rashid Rauf. His father Abdul Rauf had immigrated to the Britain from Mirpur town of PAJK, also known as Little England. Rashid grew up in Birmingham city, UK. After claims and counter-claims, the family of Rauf admitted that he was killed in a US drone attack in November 2008.

In this connection, a lesser discussed fact about the Britain’s ‘Pakistani descent’ population is the fact that over 70 per cent has a direct or indirect connection with the Pothwari-speaking PAJK, particularly Mirpur, or the adjoining linguistically akin areas like Rawalpindi, Jhelum or Gujarat areas of Pakistani Punjab. Migration from the region started in the early twentieth century when locals travelled to Mumbai to work, primarily as sea men. The second wave of migration took place during the construction of the Mangla dam, a mega hydel power project in the 1960s on the Jhelum river. The dam was designed and supervised by a British company, and constructed by a consortium of eight US firms.

The construction of the dam led to mass migration from the belt as all agricultural activity came to a halt. The British government had initially granted 400 work permits to the displaced population of Mirpur. The migration continued in the coming decades, not just from Mirpur, but also from nearby areas. The grievance over the loss of their land to the dam became a source of political mobilisation for the Mirpuri diaspora, in favour of independence of the undivided state, including from Pakistan, that coincided with the start of militancy in the Kashmir valley in 1989. In fact, the diaspora was the backbone of the financial support to the pro-independence militant outfits in the early 1990s. 

In the 1990s, the diaspora settled in different parts of the UK, particularly Birmingham, Bedford and Lutton, tried to internationalise the Kashmir issue. They found favour with a few British politicians, particularly from the Labour Party, mainly because the diaspora had a sizeable presence in a number of parliamentary constituencies in the Britain. They influence 20 to 30 British constituencies, besides electing hundreds of councilors every year. The then Foreign minister from Labour party David Miliband wrote an article in the Guardian in 2009: “Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms.” In the recently released manifesto for the December 12 UK elections, the Labour Party has a reference to Kashmir. It says: “The Conservatives have failed to play a constructive role in resolving the world's most pressing humanitarian crises, including in Kashmir, Yemen and Myanmar, and the escalation of tensions with Iran.”

The political association with the ‘Kashmir cause’ may have given the first generation an opportunity to re-establish linkages with their places of birth. But for some members of the second and third generation young men facing identity crisis and manifold contestations or schisms such as familial traditions and western culture results have proved to be different. This is further exacerbated by Islamophobia that has unleashed a vicious circle of hate in some pockets of the British society. French political scientist Oliver Roy, who has written extensively on the radicalisation within diaspora communities of the West, states that the overrepresentation of Pakistanis, read descent, in the British Jihadist movements is primarily because Pakistan defines itself outside the model of the territorialised nation-state and also the impact of faith-based schools which act as an obstacle for integration. This has resulted in the radicalisation of Islam which, according to Roy, is more due to globalisation and de-culturalisation than its diasporic nature. 

In the early 1990s, the community settled in the UK, mostly the first generation settlers, supported pro-independence forces active in Jammu and Kashmir. A decade later, some members of the second and third generation living in the UK started looking at broader and universal Islamic causes to define their identity. For the radicalised youth, the situation in Jammu and Kashmir became part of the Islamic solidarity as they internalised the simplistic or binary interpretations from diaspora societies or online sources without contextual nuance. Tackling the radicalisation of this section of the British society would require a multi-dimensional response that also includes supporting efforts to wean them away from simplistic versions that they had internalised about the place of birth of their parents or grandparents.

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