New Delhi: After Narendra Modi's landslide victory militants have started inciting anti-India attacks.
A Militant group suspected of having links to al-Qaida has released a video calling for militant organisations across the Middle East and south Asia to attack India and Indian interests overseas.
The video was uploaded within 24 hours of India's recent election results, which saw a landslide victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Before the poll, counter-terrorist officials and experts predicted an increased threat from Islamic militants if the BJP won.
Allegations that the BJP's leader Narendra Modi allowed encouraged violence in which 1,000 people, largely Muslims, died in Gujarat in 2002 have made the prime minister elect a target for Islamic extremists.
Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat at the time, has denied wrongdoing and the country's supreme court found insufficient evidence to support charges against him.
There is no direct mention of Modi but the video – issued by a little known group calling itself the Ansar-ut-Tawheed fi Bilaad Hind (Brotherhood for Monotheism in the land of Hind) – refers repeatedly to the events in Gujarat in 2002.
The group is thought by officials to be based in the restive semi-autonomous border zone of western Pakistan and possibly to have connections to al-Qaida's senior leadership and local Pakistani militants.
"In 2002, Muslims were massacred under a planned conspiracy in Gujarat," the video says, before describing alleged atrocities and accusing the Indian state of persecuting Muslims.
The appeal is addressed to the leaders of independent extremist groups and al-Qaida affiliates around the Islamic world, including the Taliban, al-Qaida in the Yemen, al-Qaida in the Maghreb, the Islamic State of Iraq and others.
India has suffered from domestic and international terrorist attacks. The most spectacular was in 2008 when militants from Lashkar-e-Toiba, a Pakistan-based organisation with links to the country's security establishment, made a bloody assault on Mumbai, India's commercial capital.
BJP officials said that they will take a tougher stance on internal security than the outgoing Congress party administration, which had been in power since 2004.
In recent months a series of bombings have been blamed on local Islamic militant cells. One, in the northern city of Patna, appeared to target Modi directly. Another blast occurred on a train in the southern city of Chennai during the election.
Ansar-ut-Tawheed, the group that released the most recent video, announced its formation late last year. Its first video, released in October, was called Usood-ul-Hind (Lions of India).
The group's media appears to be inspired by the al-Qaida media operation, known as As Sahab. It frequently disseminates extremist propaganda, including translated videos of al-Zawahiri's statements, in Hindi.
