NEW DELHI: The intelligence agencies in their report to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) have alerted that with the West Asian crisis escalating as Israel engages in war on multiple fronts, there has been an increasing trend of online radicalisation of gullible youth in India, sources said on Tuesday.
In its report to the Multi-Agency Centre under the MHA, the report highlighted that there has been a massive increase in traffic on the internet relating to “attack videos and literature”, which portray the strikes on Muslims by Israel as “genocide”, the sources said.
With Israel attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon and killing individuals in Iran, these have posed a “new challenge” for the security forces in India with elements from across the United States and Europe spreading provocative online contents through newly launched websites, which need to be looked into and blocked, the intelligence agencies suggested.
At present this is posing a major challenge for the Indian security establishment, as multi-faceted radicalisation has been on the rise and is leading to “anti-America” and “anti-Israel” sentiments among the gullible youth, they noted.
“There is a possibility of online radicalisation getting morphed into extremism and, eventually, attacks. Radicalisation in India is high, mainly among Shia Muslims that remained untouched so far,” the intelligence report said.
It is also learnt from the sources that developments in West Asia are impacting Shia pockets across the country, as Lucknow, Leh, Ladakh, Hyderabad and Delhi have witnessed unusual online traffic depicting attacks and abuse against America and Israel.
Noting that the current trend was never seen in India, the sources said, the intelligence report also indicated collection of funds in the Shia-inhabited pockets for giving aid and support to people in Lebanon and Gaza. Even a few of the NGOs are also found providing similar financial support, they said.
The Intelligence agencies have said that those who are propagating a particular type of narratives are working on particular algorithms, as children and women are being used to display the brutalities by America and Israel. They also said that such trends were noted during the Syrian civil war.
The report comes a year after the October 7 attacks led by Hamas terrorists that plunged West Asia into a crisis.
After the October 7 attacks, Israel launched retaliatory attacks to rescue abducted civilians and decimate the Hamas leadership responsible for engineering the raids.