India, Britain look to firm up strategies against terrorism

India and the United Kingdom are planning to enhance their counter-terrorism cooperation in various areas such effective monitoring of Internet and sharing innovative community-led initiatives for re-radicalisation.

The British minister of state for Commonwealth and United Nations Tariq Mohamed met with Prime Minister Narendra's Modi's special envoy on counter-terrorism Asif Ibrahim on Thursday to firm up the plans. Mohamed was minister in-charge of countering extremism when British Prime Minister Teresa May was the home minister.

“We discussed various ways to firm up the counter-terrorism strategy and agreed to share the best practices,” the minister told HT Hindustan Times in an exclusive interview.

After a slew of terror strikes in the country in recent past, UK has been looking at ways to strengthen the counter-terrorism strategy. Under the stewardship of Ibrahim, a former chief of Intelligence Bureau, India has been engaging with other countries to sharpen its efforts to prevent radicalisation of the youth, preventing terrorist financing, and working for multi-lateral legal frameworks to counter the threats of extremism and terrorism.

 “We need a hard-edged strategy to counter terrorism. There are various components to this, a prevent strategy, a contest strategy and a pursue strategy”, he said.

He said a great deal of efforts is needed to counter the propaganda of “sophisticated” terrorist organisations such as the Islamic state and governments need to work with private firms in this regard. “The internet and social media companies have to step up to the mark in countering these threats. They cannot sit hit and the governments will hold them responsible,” he said.

He said there should be ways to take off terrorist propaganda as soon they as appear on the internet. He spoke at length about governments joining the Global Internet Forum — an initiative of Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube to counter terrorism with an aim to “make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.”

Mohamed who met minister of state for external affairs MJ Akbar said India and UK could share community-led initiatives among the Muslim youths in two countries that help address the threat of extremism. He said the UK government is focusing on young Imams — who can speak of scriptures and football in same breath to reach out to the young Muslims.