Arise Bharat

By: Col. Ajay Kumar ( retd )

The echoes of the blast near the Red Fort on November 11, 2025, were not just the sound of shattered glass and twisted metal. They were the sound of our strategic delusion collapsing. The suicide car-bomb attack—targeting the very emblem of our republic’s continuity and pride, killing nine and injuring more than twenty—was not an aberration. It was the grim consequence of a nation’s prolonged refusal to speak the truth about the roots of radical violence.

That refusal has cost us lives, and with the latest arrests, it has cost us our excuses. The capture of three Kashmiri doctors—Adeel Ahmad Rather, Muzammil Shakeel, and Umar Mohammed—has ripped away the last comforting illusion that terrorism is the refuge of the poor and uneducated. Two of them were picked up from Saharanpur and Faridabad. The raids led to a shocking discovery: nearly three tonnes of suspected ammonium nitrate, the same chemical used in the Red Fort blast. This is a mirror to our denial.

For decades, we have hidden behind the lazy phrase, “terror has no religion.” It was meant to comfort. Instead, it numbed our national conscience. This self-imposed blindness has not protected Bharat; it has shielded those unwilling to confront the ideological virus infecting our society. The time for that hypocrisy has expired. Our children will not forgive us if we continue to prioritize political correctness over survival.

The Strategic Fantasy of Denial

To keep insisting that terrorism is born of poverty or political grievance is suicidal. This narrative has been a convenient alibi for politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals unwilling to face the uncomfortable truth. It has been used to preserve vote-banks, to diffuse responsibility, and to cloak cowardice in the language of secularism.

Terrorism in today’s Bharat is not random or reactionary. It is sustained by what has been  aptly called the “white-collar terror ecosystem.” It operates not in the shadows of slums but in the corridors of academia, professional institutions, and digital forums. This ecosystem recruits minds, not just men. It targets educated professionals who possess influence, networks, and legitimacy.

The involvement of three doctors—trained to heal, sworn to save—shatters the old clichés. These were not jobless drifters. They were educated, employed, and socially secure. Yet they chose to surrender to an ideology that glorifies destruction. That choice was not economic—it was ideological. What drives them is the faith twisted into fanaticism. The disease is not material deprivation; it is moral and theological perversion.

The Allure of the Afterlife

The radical recruiter’s most lethal weapon is not the bomb or the bullet—it is the promise of Paradise. The ideology convinces men that their professional success and worldly comfort are meaningless compared to the divine reward awaiting the martyr. It turns faith into a contract for murder.

One of the most insidious ideas used in this psychological warfare is the myth of Hoor al-Ayn—the “72 Hoors” awaiting the martyr. This is not abstract theology; it is a powerful incentive system designed to override all human instincts for self-preservation. To a radicalized mind, this promise of eternal pleasure and divine honor is worth more than a career, a family, or a life.

For a doctor like Adeel Rather, the idea of becoming a “soldier of God” must have offered a strange grandeur. In one stroke, his act of violence would erase the banality of his worldly existence and immortalize him in his imagined heaven. That is the cruel genius of radical ideology—it transforms personal frustration into cosmic purpose. It offers the lonely, the alienated, and even the accomplished an instant sense of transcendence.

The brilliance of this psychological weapon lies in its universality. It seduces both the madrasa dropout and the medical graduate. The socioeconomic divide dissolves in the face of a singular promise: kill in God’s name, and live forever in glory.

The Mind is the Battlefield

Our national security response has too often been forensic. We catch the bombers, trace the explosives, and fortify our borders. But the Red Fort attack and the arrests that followed reveal a deeper truth: the real battleground is the human mind. The real weapon is not ammonium nitrate—it is the radical text, the warped sermon, the manipulated scripture that sanctifies slaughter.

Unless Bharat confronts this ideological core, our counter-terror efforts will remain reactive. We will keep chasing explosions instead of dismantling the theology that detonates them. Clarity is not intolerance; it is the first step toward survival. To name the ideology driving these acts is not bigotry—it is strategic honesty.

What Bharat Must Do

If Bharat is to defend itself effectively, it must shed the political compulsion to blur moral and ideological lines. Four actions are urgent.

First, build a national counter-narrative that openly dismantles the theological distortions used to justify violence. This must not be bureaucratic jargon but a persuasive, philosophical offensive rooted in our civilizational values of truth, debate, and coexistence.

Second, enact legal precision. Our laws must recognize ideological subversion—the deliberate propagation of violent extremism—as a distinct and punishable crime, even before it manifests in physical violence. The financiers, professors, digital propagandists, and religious preachers who nourish the “white-collar ecosystem” must face equal scrutiny.

Third, reform education comprehensively. Radicalization seeps through intellectual gaps—and our education system today is full of them. Modern degrees have not produced moral clarity; they have produced technical competence without conviction. Universities and professional institutes must be protected from ideological infiltration and reoriented to teach historical truth, ethical reasoning, and civilizational literacy. And beyond these elite spaces, Bharat must initiate strict reform and monitoring of madrasa education—many of which have become ideological breeding grounds under the guise of religious instruction. No institution, however sacred, can be exempt from scrutiny when national security is at stake. A nation that forgets its own philosophical roots and refuses to cleanse its educational arteries will remain vulnerable to imported fanaticism.

Fourth, enable community partnerships. Moderate voices within the faith must be empowered to speak against radicals, not sidelined by political tokenism. They are the frontline of ideological defence, and their courage must be amplified.

Choosing Truth Over Cowardice

The Red Fort bombing is not just another act of terror—it is a moment of reckoning. It demands that Bharat choose truth over timidity. The old comfort lines—“terror has no religion,” “it’s all about politics,” “don’t generalize”—have outlived their utility. Terror does not operate in a vacuum; it operates under a flag of faith, however distorted.

We owe it to those who died on 11/11 to stop pretending otherwise. Terror wears an ideological uniform, speaks a theological language, and feeds on our reluctance to call it by name. Until we expose the ideology, challenge its text, and dismantle its psychological rewards, we will keep treating the symptom while the disease spreads.

Bharat’s survival depends not on louder condemnations or tighter security but on intellectual courage. The time for euphemisms is over. The nation that named its enemies on the battlefield must now name them in the realm of ideas. Only then will the blasts that shake our cities finally give way to the silence of understanding—and the peace born of truth.