Deoband Soft Power, Doval and Muslim Hegemony in South Asia

The strategic meaning of Doval’s 2014 lecture

Doval delivered the tenth Nani Palkhivala Memorial Lecture at SASTRA University in February 2014, when he was a former Intelligence Bureau director and headed the Vivekananda International Foundation. The university's own newsletter records the title as 'India's strategic response to counter terrorism' and notes his criticism of New Delhi's response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

The best-documented portion of the speech is Doval's argument for 'defensive offence'. He said India should not remain confined to intercepting attacks after they had been planned. Instead, it should work on Pakistan's vulnerabilities, including internal security, international standing and influence in Afghanistan. His warning that another Mumbai-style attack could cost Pakistan Balochistan became the most widely reported line from the lecture.

The Deoband passage belongs to the same strategic frame. In the circulated video, Doval can be heard saying that the “Taliban listen to Deoband much more”. He essentially presented the Taliban as a movement that could be responsive to religious authority, political goodwill and material influence. Doval's point was not that the seminary exercised a formal chain of command over Afghan fighters. It was that India possessed assets Pakistan could not wholly monopolise: the historic centre of the Taliban's declared school of thought, a large economy, longstanding relationships in Afghanistan and Muslim organisations capable of carrying messages with greater credibility than an Indian security official could command alone.

The distinction between influence and control is essential. The Taliban's leadership emerged primarily from Afghan networks and Pakistan-based seminaries, especially institutions shaped by the Afghan jihad. Darul Uloom Deoband has no known organisational authority over the Taliban, and scholars in India have repeatedly distanced the seminary from militant violence. Doval's remark is best read as a statement of strategic aspiration, not proof of an accomplished command structure.

How religious authority strengthens a national message

Governments can state that Indian Muslims are loyal citizens, that Kashmir belongs to India or that terrorism has no religious legitimacy. Those messages acquire a different weight when delivered by Muslim scholars whose authority does not formally derive from the state.

The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind's 2019 resolution on Kashmir is a clear example. The organisation described Kashmir as an integral part of India, affirmed the unity of the country and rejected separatism, while also speaking of the welfare and dignity of Kashmiris. For Indian diplomacy and domestic politics, the statement had value beyond the Jamiat's membership. It contested Pakistan's claim that support for its Kashmir position followed naturally from Muslim religious identity. At a deeper ideological level, the position also undercuts the two-nation logic that can be invoked in support of Kashmiri 'azadi': the proposition that Muslim religious identity itself creates a political case for separation from India.

The same dynamic was visible in the Deobandi campaign against terrorism. In 2008, Darul Uloom Deoband and associated scholars publicly declared terrorism contrary to Islam. The initiative responded to genuine concerns among Indian Muslims, including collective suspicion, wrongful arrests and the reputational consequences of violence committed in Islam's name. Yet it also served a wider national narrative: India could present its most famous Islamic seminary as a source of religious resistance to militancy, contrasting it with armed groups and seminaries associated with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This contrast is politically effective because it turns a shared tradition into a hierarchy of legitimacy. The Indian branch is framed as original, scholarly, anti-colonial, constitutional and peaceful. Pakistani offshoots are more readily discussed through military rule, the Afghan jihad, sectarian organisations and the Taliban. The comparison contains elements of truth, but it is selective. India has its own histories of communal violence and state pressure on Muslims, while Pakistan contains Deobandi scholars and institutions that reject militancy. Narrative power lies precisely in making one strand appear representative of the whole.

From domestic legitimacy to Afghan diplomacy

The 2025 Muttaqi visit demonstrated how an old religious connection could be repurposed for contemporary diplomacy. India and the Taliban each had practical reasons to engage. Kabul wanted trade, medical access, consular services and greater international acceptance. New Delhi wanted to recover influence in Afghanistan, limit the space available to Pakistan and China, and protect its security and economic interests without formally endorsing the Taliban's domestic policies.

Deoband offered a setting in which this engagement could be presented as civilisational and religious rather than purely transactional. The seminary's location in India allowed New Delhi to host a symbolic return to the movement's intellectual source. The visit suggested that the route from Kabul to the wider Deobandi world need not run exclusively through Pakistani seminaries or Pakistan's security establishment.

That symbolism was reinforced by deteriorating relations between Pakistan and the Taliban authorities. Islamabad has accused Kabul of sheltering the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, while border clashes, deportations and mutual recriminations have weakened the assumption that the Afghan Taliban will remain a dependable Pakistani client. India's opening is therefore less a sudden conversion than a response to a strategic opportunity.

Doval's decade-old observation appears more significant in this context. It anticipated the possibility that religious genealogy, goodwill and economic engagement could be combined to loosen Pakistan's hold over Afghan politics. The 2025 visit did not prove India had achieved control. It showed that India had gained access.

The anti-Pakistan effect

The use of Indian Deobandi voices can weaken Pakistan's national story in several ways. First, it reminds audiences that the creation of Pakistan was opposed by major Muslim scholars, not only by Hindu leaders or secular nationalists. Pakistan therefore appears as one contested answer to Muslim political insecurity, rather than the inevitable expression of South Asian Islam.

Second, it separates Islamic legitimacy from Pakistani statehood. When Deobandi scholars defend Indian citizenship, condemn militancy or support India's territorial unity, they demonstrate that an orthodox Muslim identity can coexist with loyalty to India. That directly challenges the emotional logic of the two-nation theory.

Third, it gives India a way to portray Pakistan as having instrumentalised and militarised a religious tradition born in India. The argument is powerful: Deoband produced scholarship and anti-colonial politics; Pakistan's security system redirected parts of that inheritance towards proxy war. This framing is frequently applied to Kashmir and Afghanistan, where India describes itself as a victim of cross-border militancy and Pakistan as its sponsor.

Finally, it places Pakistan in an awkward genealogical position. Many Pakistani and Afghan institutions identify as Deobandi, but the foundational seminary remains in Uttar Pradesh. India can therefore claim cultural ownership of a source of authority whose political descendants sometimes oppose it. The claim is symbolic rather than juridical, but symbols are central to contests over history and identity.

Bangladesh: a more difficult arena

The argument becomes more complicated in Bangladesh, where Deobandi-influenced Qawmi madrasas are extensive but political attitudes towards India are far from uniformly favourable. India has long benefited from a Bangladeshi national narrative centred on the 1971 Liberation War, the Pakistan Army's atrocities and India's support for independence. That history naturally produces suspicion of Pakistani nationalism and of parties accused of collaboration in 1971.

Yet anti-Pakistan sentiment in Bangladesh cannot credibly be reduced to Indian manufacture. Bangladeshi governments of different political complexions have raised unresolved issues with Islamabad, including demands for an apology and disputes over assets. The memory of 1971 is embedded in Bangladesh's state formation, family histories and political conflicts. India amplifies that memory when it serves its interests, but the underlying grievance cannot be described as an Indian creation alone. It is nevertheless reasonable to acknowledge that India has played a role in shaping, reinforcing and politically mobilising that grievance.

Nor can Bangladesh's Deobandi networks be treated as reliable instruments of New Delhi. Hefazat-e-Islam, a movement rooted in the Qawmi madrasa sector, organised fierce protests against Narendra Modi's visit in 2021. The demonstrations led to deadly clashes with police and showed that religious conservatism in Bangladesh can be strongly anti-India even when it shares intellectual ancestry with Deoband.

Bangladesh also illustrates how quickly regional narratives can change. Following the removal of Sheikh Hasina in 2024, Dhaka and Islamabad resumed high-level talks and sought closer trade and security relations, even while the 1971 apology remained unresolved. A population may retain a critical view of Pakistan's past while rejecting Indian political influence in the present. These positions are not mutually exclusive.

Influence is not obedience

The strongest evidence supports a strategy of selective partnership and amplification, not a system of comprehensive control. Indian governments benefit when Deobandi scholars endorse national unity, reject Pakistan's claims or provide religious arguments against militancy. State institutions and sympathetic media can elevate those interventions, place them in diplomatic settings and present them as the authentic voice of South Asian Islam.

But Deobandi institutions retain their own interests and often oppose the Indian government. The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind has challenged policies affecting Muslim personal law, madrasas, religious freedoms and minority rights. Its patriotic language does not make it an arm of the Bharatiya Janata Party or the security establishment. Indeed, its usefulness to the state partly depends on being recognised as an independent Muslim authority.

The relationship is therefore transactional and sometimes mutually beneficial. Indian Deobandi leaders use declarations of national loyalty to protect Muslim citizenship, resist accusations of separatism and secure a legitimate place in public life. The state uses those declarations to rebut Pakistan, manage domestic dissent and present Indian pluralism to external audiences. Cooperation can exist without command, and shared interests can produce coordinated narratives without secret direction.

There is also no single Deobandi centre capable of disciplining the movement across borders. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan Deobandis have developed under different states, conflicts and institutional economies. Their political positions range from constitutional participation to militant insurgency, from Indian nationalism to Pakistani Islamism, and from Bangladeshi religious conservatism to opposition against both Delhi and Islamabad.

The battle is over legitimacy, not ownership

India's advantage lies in possessing the historic institution and a well-established anti-Partition tradition. Pakistan's advantage lies in decades of direct institutional, social and security relationships with Afghan and Pakistani Deobandi networks. Neither side owns the tradition, and neither can reliably control its political outcomes.

Doval's remarks are important because they make visible how a security strategist could view religious authority: as an asset capable of carrying influence across borders, contesting an adversary's ideological claims and reaching actors who might distrust the state itself. The later welcome given to Muttaqi at Deoband showed that this logic was not merely theoretical.

But the phrase 'control through Deoband' overstates what the public evidence demonstrates. India has cultivated access, amplified supportive scholars and used Deoband's history to undermine Pakistan's claim to represent South Asian Muslims. It has not established a command structure over the Taliban, the Qawmi madrasa system or the wider Deobandi world.

The more accurate conclusion is also the more revealing one. India has learned to turn religious plurality into statecraft. By elevating a Deobandi tradition that opposed Partition and affirms Indian nationhood, it can present pro-India positions through Muslim voices, cast Pakistan's religious nationalism as historically contested and open diplomatic channels into Afghanistan. The result is not total narrative control, but a sustained and sophisticated contest over who has the authority to define Muslim politics in South Asia.

Saiful Islam is a political analyst and author, based in Bangladesh.