When police in Faridabad arrested Dr Muzammil Ahmad Ganai, they found something that would have been unthinkable in the early 1990s: an educated, white-collared professional who had been seduced into the mechanics of mass murder. In his rented apartment, investigators discovered 358 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, an assault rifle, remote detonators, and the calculated precision of someone trained to kill. Dr Ganai was not an isolated extremist acting on impulse.

It’s being claimed that he was part of a network, one that traced its ideological inheritance back to an organisation that claimed to represent Kashmir’s Muslim majority but functioned, in practice, as the architect of separatist terrorism: Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

The November 10 explosion that devastated Delhi’s Red Fort, killing 13 people, has forced Indian security establishments to confront an uncomfortable truth. After decades of counterterrorism operations, successive bans, asset seizures, and intelligence successes against terrorist groups, the underlying ecosystem that sustains militancy remains substantially intact. At its foundation, it’s claimed there lies not a clandestine terror cell, but an organisation that operated in plain sight for 70 years. It was running schools, collecting charitable donations, maintaining property holdings across Kashmir, and cultivating what analysts describe as a “terror ecosystem" that could seamlessly transition ideological commitment into operational capability.

The Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir story is one of a methodical, generational projects. It begins with philosophical conviction, proceeds through institutional development, and culminates in the provision of cover, funding, recruitment networks, and ideological justification for men and women willing to build bombs and kill civilians.

JEI J&K’s Ideological Inheritance and the Break with the Mainstream

To understand Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir, one must first grapple with its parent body: Jamaat-e-Islami, the transnational Islamic movement founded in 1941 by Syed Abul A’la Maududi. Maududi’s vision was revolutionary in its scope and radical in its implications. He rejected the idea that Muslims could live as minorities in secular democracies, argued that democracy was fundamentally incompatible with Islamic governance, and posited that the state should enforce Islamic law in its totality.

But history is rarely monolithic, and the Jamaat-e-Islami that emerged after India’s partition showed a surprising capacity for ideological flexibility. The Indian branch, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, gradually reconciled itself to living in a secular, pluralistic democracy.

The transformation was real enough that by 2023, JeI Hind distanced itself publicly from its separatist cousin in Kashmir, asserting in petitions to India’s courts that it had “nothing in common" with Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir beyond a shared historical origin.​

The Kashmir chapter underwent precisely the opposite evolution. When Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir formally separated from the Indian parent body in 1953, the split ostensibly concerned a single issue: whether Kashmir should accede to India. But that disagreement concealed a deeper ideological departure.

While Jamaat-e-Islami Hind was learning to work within democratic structures, Jamaat-e-Islami J&K was becoming wedded to a maximalist vision in which only two outcomes were acceptable: a plebiscite that might grant Kashmir independence, or merger with Pakistan.........

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