The first visit of Gordon Brown to India as the new British Prime Minister has essentially underscored a serious urge from the British side to strengthen closer ties with India, especially in the arena of counter-terrorism. London's growing uneasiness over the increasing threat of terror at home and permeation of extremist trends amongst British youth have been continuously articulated in the British media as well as by senior cabinet ministers. A post-facto analysis of the British premier's visit may bring out the British concerns distinctly.

If the India-UK Joint Statement adopted at the Fourth summit is scrutinised, observers may agree that larger strategic issues like climate change, civilian nuclear cooperation, WTO, Millennium Development Goal, reform of the UN Security Council etc., are to be better addressed and consensus achieved at the multilateral level. Both countries have expressed satisfaction on the recently concluded Eighth EU-India Summit in New Delhi. But needless to say, a growing EU-India strategic partnership cannot be compared with Indo-UK relationship. India's traditional relations with the UK and its expectations are certainly not dependent on its relations with Brussels. Other bilateral issues like economic cooperation and education are also indicative of a steady growth. However, the concluding section of the Joint Statement, which deals with counter-terrorism, seems to be crux of this summit. A similar emphasis could be placed on Brown's foreign policy priorities for a post-Blair Britain. Brown's speech in Delhi is in fact accentuated by the imminent danger of terrorism, its global reach, its conducive germination in failed states, all of which, he reiterated, has to be tackled with 'a coherent global effort'.

As the latest events show, both India and the UK have been under a constant threat of terror. The ghastly attack on the CRPF personnel in Rampur has highlighted the fact that terrorists are attempting to target not just specific targets in Indian 'maximum cities' like Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, but also wants to spread their tentacles to smaller towns like Varanasi, Malegaon, Rampur. Parallels drawn, the UK has been facing an identical threat. It is true that Britain has so far not experienced a recurrence of 7/7. But, in the intervening period it foiled many terror attack plans, smashed terror modules, denied safe haven to a radical Islamist demagogues on its own soil and in particular prosecuted some international Al Qaeda strategists like Dhiren Barot successfully.

But as the Glasgow incident of last summer has shown, there are groups existing in the UK who are hell-bent to perpetrate terror attacks against the populace across Britain. Observed constantly in the official British discourse today is the predominant emphasis on the threat from terrorism. Be it the assessment of Jonathan Evans, the MI5 Director General, in November 2007 that the number of individuals with terror potential in the UK has increased up to 2000 in the last one year or the recent speech of Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary that terrorist recruitment is going on in the Internet, the nervousness of the British state is quite discernible. Especially when the British government has already started and expedited some specific measures in the aftermath of 7/7 for greater social cohesion and to arrest the trend radicalisation and dissemination of extremist ideas. The criticality of the issue became more than evident when this week the British government appealed to its academic community to tackle the challenge of campus extremism and its eventual fallout of recruitment of students by terrorist groups.

Even on the eve of Brown's visit to India, British media reports suggested that a newly-launched website www.alekhlaas.net (with another version http://ekhlaas.org/) is making attempts to open a British chapter of Al Qaeda. A cursory look at this Arabic website shows that it maintains links with other websites like www.ansar-jihad.net and provides jihadi encryption software like Mujahideen Secrets 2. The present British security situation, therefore, is heightened by the existence of terrorist groups, the unfettered trend of the radicalisation of youth and a continuous spiritual and religious impetus provided by the radical Islamist websites through their perverted interpretation of religion and misrepresentation of current affairs.

Both India and the UK have decided to address the threat bilaterally and globally. It is envisaged that the Indo-UK Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism would be strengthened and a dialogue on terror financing would also be established. Quite understandably the cooperation and dialogue would take place with extreme confidentiality and beyond the public purview. However given the utmost importance of the present threat it may be expected that the working group, instead of annual meetings as a practice, would meet frequently to take the stock of the situation and discuss imminent measures.

The unhindered radical Islamist propaganda on the web indicates that though various Jihadi and radical Islamist websites have been shut after 9/11, it has become almost impossible to stop these virtual webfarers. It is also observed that though many of the Radical Islamist websites in pre-9/11 period was hosted in the UK or in Europe, at present websites of this ilk has been hosted in different continents. The phenomenon underscores the need of continuous monitoring of the old and new websites by security agencies worldwide as well as to exchange information, inform the web-hosting firms and take appropriate measures. As most of the radical Islamist propaganda is in Arabic, both India and the UK may also attempt to build common area expertise, common data base of extremist groups, common list of monitored websites and above all joint training and Counter-Terrorism operations. As the present threat is generational is nature, both the countries have a long way to traverse in this camaraderie.

The writer is Associate Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi
alok.mukhopadhyay@gmail.com