January 11, 2026:
Last year, on November 10, a car bomb exploded near the seventeenth-century Mughal-era Red Fort in New Delhi, India. The car bomber was a Moslem medical doctor Umar Un Nabi, and an assistant professor at Al Falah University in Faridabad, Haryana. Dr Nabi and twelve nearby civilians died while 32 others were wounded. Such attacks are rare for India. The last one also took place in New Delhi in 2011, when a briefcase exploded outside New Delhi’s High Court. Four other medical personnel at a local hospital were arrested for helping Dr Nabi plan and carry out the attack. All five men were radicalized by a paramedic at the hospital they all worked in. Attacks like this by Indian Moslems are rare.
Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed planned the attack to avenge the death of 10 family members of its leader, Masood Azhar. This attack took place just a few months after Operation Sindoor, an Indian military operation that sought to discourage Islamic terror groups based in Pakistan . The Red Fort attack was revenge for recent Indian counter-terrorism operations. Indian Operation Sindoor was launched in response to the Pahalgam attack of April 22, 2025, that killed 25 Indian and 1 Nepalese in Baisaran Valley in India’s Jammu and Kashmir. Operation Sindoor led to four days of intense tit-for-tat conflict between India and Pakistan.
So far this year there have been 198 terrorism incidents in India, a country of over a billion people and one of the most peaceful in the world. In 2025 there were 642 deaths in India from all forms of terrorism, compared to 630 in 2024, 480 in 2023, 434 in 2022, 585 in 2021, 621 in 2019 and 940 in 2018. In 2020 54 percent of the dead were in Kashmir, which was higher than usual. In most years non-Islamic terrorist violence accounts for most of the violence, but in 2020 leftist Maoist rebels in eastern India only accounted for 41 percent of the deaths with another five percent caused by tribal separatists in the northeast. The decline in Maoist activity began in 2009 when India assigned 75,000 additional police to deal with the Maoists. Initially this did not increase Maoist losses but did result in more dead policemen. The Maoists eventually lost many of their rural camps and, in general, were forced to devote more time to security and less to attacking the government or extorting money from businesses. As always, the government failed to effectively address the social and economic problems in the countryside, where feudalism and corruption are rampant. India has more Moslems than Pakistan and Pakistan has a difficult time radicalizing Indians.
Eight years ago, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh celebrated the 70th anniversary of British India and centuries of British rule being replaced with independent India and Pakistan, which, after 25 years, split into Bangladesh and what is now Pakistan. By 2017 these three nations had a population equal to China but have fared differently when it comes to economic growth. After 70 years India has seen its GDP per capita increase 5.5 times, Pakistan 3.9 times and Bangladesh 2.4 times, Neighbor China saw an increase of 17.9 times. Back in 1947 the GDP per capita in India was 38 percent higher than China while in what is now Pakistan it was 50 percent higher and in Bangladesh 21 percent higher. In 1947 China had just ended four decades of rebellion, civil war, invasion and one more civil war that put the communists in power. During that time British India was much more peaceful and undergoing the industrial revolution and the attendant changes. The Chinese economy didn’t grow much more quickly than that of India until the 1980s when the Chinese government decided to give economic, but not political, freedom a chance. India always had political freedom, but the economy was crippled by corruption and state control. In the 1990s India introduced more economic freedom but still, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, suffered more from corruption than neighboring China. There were also cultural differences between the four nations, but it is interesting to see how the four did after 70 years of independence.