Islamic terrorism’s tipping point in India

Victims of a recent bombing

It’s become increasingly apparent that India is not free from the terror of Islamic extremism. Even in the United States and Britain, an appalling proportion of college-age Muslims support, in some cases, violence for Islam’s sake (about 26 percent in the United States and 32 percent in Britain). In India, where an ugly history between Muslims and Hindus pervades and the country’s 1.1 million citizens includes 150 million Muslims, it wouldn’t, or maybe didn’t, take much of a spark to start a devastating fire.

Faithworld breaks down the numbers:

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me. 

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people. 

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.