New Delhi:

Daesh and Al Qaida do not yet pose a threat to India, the national security adviser said on Tuesday, despite attempts by the ultra-radical groups to enlist support from among India’s huge Muslim population.

Flags of the Daesh group have appeared in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, setting off concern that the insurgent group is drawing support in a region where Indian forces are trying to end a 25-year revolt.

An announcement by Al Qaida in September that it had set up a South Asia branch further added to Indian fears that global jihadi groups were turning their attention to the country, as foreign forces in nearby Afghanistan leave.

A.K. Doval, a former head of India’s domestic intelligence arm and a specialist covert operations, said the government was watching the two groups closely.

“I don’t think there are threats of magnitude from either one of them which we are not in a position to cope with,” he told a security conference.

An Indian Mujahideen group has emerged in recent years with its home-grown fighters carrying out low-level bomb blasts in towns across India.

But India’s 160 million Muslim population has largely stayed away from waging holy wars in foreign battlefields which Indian security officials say underlines the strength of the country’s democracy where people don’t have to turn to guns to fight for their rights.

Doval said the government is “closely monitoring” the activities of the Al Qaida and Daesh and if it finds the relationship between the two evolving to harm India then the government would take a “very, very serious view” of it.

In answer to a query on the threat perception from the two groups during his address at the Munich Security Conference meet here, Doval said there is nothing like a big or small threat. “We consider terrorism as a threat, and it is not on the basis of geographies or groups, but on the basis of capabilities and targets.”

He said. “Any group that we have information on, that they have the intentions and capability to strike against us will be the biggest target. Right now we are closely seeing and monitoring them [the two groups], we have to watch to see if the relationship evolves and if they are targeting us, then we will have to take a very, very serious view”.

To a question on China, during the meet held in partnership with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Doval said India considers “China as a very important neighbour” and a country with which India has had good relations for many centuries, barring “some bad experience in 1962 and the water dispute”.

He said both sides will find a solution to their bilateral problems through talks and both have found a “lot of space in economic cooperation” despite many problems that are common.

In a warning, he added, “But while we want every opportunity to develop relations to the best extent, our territorial interests and sovereignty are totally inalienable.”

Doval said there would be “no compromise at the cost of national security”.

He added that they have found “positive signals from the Chinese interlocutors and we feel we should sit together and resolve our boundary dispute amicably and as early as possible”.

He said there should be a relationship of peace, stability and accommodation with China and that we have to engage them rather than follow a path of exclusive isolation from each other.

During his talk, Doval also called for a collective global convergence on terrorism and also said that India considers strong democracy as the best tool to foster security both within the country and in the region.

“There is need for global convergence, automated systems and institutionalised mechanism and meaningful partnership” to combat the threat of terrorism, he said.

He said that post the 9/11 attacks when the war on terror was launched, terrorism has become “much more intense and expanded, engulfed new areas, and the type of capability it has acquired has become mind boggling”.

He said in the past 13 years while individual countries have honed their independent anti-terror mechanisms and networks, at the international level countries have failed to jointly act against terror, except to hold conferences.