Imagine a group of Muslims raiding shops that sell pork or liquor, shouting religious slogans, assaulting shop owners and customers, even lynching and shooting people. Or picture another group storming private gatherings, attacking guests for being Hindu, accusing them of “love traps,” or distributing swords to fight “kafirs.” What would we call such groups – mobs, or terror outfits?In an article published last month, Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit argued that “terrorism has a religion,” locating its source in Islam, while claiming she indicts only a violent ideological current, not the faith itself. This does not address the core problem: why similar ideological currents in other traditions escape the same analytical and moral scrutiny.Before debating ideology, we must ask a more basic question: who gets to define terrorism, and on what grounds?Inconsistency in defining and analysing terrorismThere was a time when Jewish leaders who fought for an Israeli state, including future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir of the Irgun and Lehi – later integrated into the Israeli Defence Forces – were officially labelled terrorists by British authorities. Today, those fighting for Israel are no longer viewed through the lens of terrorism; instead, their actions are often placed on a pedestal and justified in the name of “self-defence.”Under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, terrorism is defined broadly as acts intended to threaten the unity, integrity, security, or sovereignty of India, or to strike terror among people, “by any means whatsoever.” By this definition, organised mob violence aimed at terrorising specific communities should qualify as terrorism, yet in practice it rarely does.Recent Supreme Court observations while denying bail to Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid further widened terrorism to include even non-violent acts, based on intent and impact rather than weapons alone. Paradoxically, this expansive standard is applied selectively: speech and protest are branded terror, while coordinated killings often are not – revealing how legal categories are filtered through political priorities.Although governments define terrorism in domestic law, no universal definition exists. Scholars like Connor Huff of the University of California and Joshua D. Kertzer of Harvard University argue this ambiguity persists because of double standards in judging similar violence, similary, political theorist Eqbal Ahmad warned that precise definitions are avoided since consistency would implicate state practices themselves.The result is selective moral outrage: violence by disfavoured groups is condemned as terrorism, while violence backed by official power is excused, denied, or even celebrated. This shields the power elites from confronting root causes, since questioning why people turn to violence is branded “anti-national” when the perpetrators are already demonised, while state-linked religious violence is downplayed, and met with attempts to withdraw charges against the accused or the authorities may even participate in it.Absolutist ideology is not unique to IslamJNU V-C Pandit argues that radical Islam is uniquely rooted in absolutist theology, collectivist supremacy, and hostility to pluralism. But these traits are not exclusive to any one religion; they characterise many nationalist and theocratic projects.Hindutva’s canonical texts illustrate this clearly. In Essentials of Hindutva (1923), V. D. Savarkar endorsed violence and militarisation to forge Hindu political unity, portrayed Muslims as permanent internal enemies, and treated coercion as necessary for nation-building. Historian Ajaz Ashraf notes that Savarkar even rationalised rape against Muslim women as a political tactic – arguments that do not merely tolerate violence but morally legitimise it.Likewise, M. S. Golwalkar’s We, or Our Nationhood Defined and Bunch of Thoughts advance a hierarchical order in which non-Hindus may live in India only if they fully submit to Hindu culture and abandon claims to equality, envisioning a state guided by Hindu civilisational supremacy – an unmistakably theocratic ideal.These traditions show that ideologies capable of sanctifying violence extend well beyond Islam. Singling out one religion while normalising similar doctrines in another is not analytical rigour but selective blindness. And even where absolutist ideologies exist, they do not automatically produce suicide attacks or mass terror; explaining such tactics requires examining political conditions, not belief aloneWhy people turn to suicide terrorismAnother claim in the Sunday Guardian article is that contemporary suicide terrorism is primarily driven by Islamist ideology. Decades of research challenge this. Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, in their book Cutting the Fuse (2010), analysed every recorded suicide attack worldwide from 1980 to 2009 and found that the dominant driver is not religion but military occupation. Suicide attacks function as a coercive strategy against materially superior occupying forces; religion may feature in propaganda, but mainly as a recruitment tool. Their data show sharp spikes after foreign occupations, especially following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, with most attacks targeting occupying forces or their allies.This also explains why secular groups like the Tamil Tigers pioneered suicide bombing long before Islamist groups adopted it. Historical perspectives support this. In The Silent Coup, Josy Joseph cites historian Rajan Gurukkal’s observation that traditions of heroic self-sacrifice exist across cultures and are not unique to any religion. Early Dravidian societies, for example, celebrated a “heroic age” in which bodily sacrifice was seen as honourable service to collective survival. Such cultural scripts can be mobilised by political movements, but they do not originate in theology.Together, this evidence shows that suicide terrorism arises from political conditions and strategic calculation, drawing on older cultural ideas of honour and sacrifice. Theology alone cannot explain its timing or geography.Who produces and exports violent ideology?If absolutist ideology is not unique to Islam, the real question is political: who enables, funds, and globalises violent doctrines?Historically, key Western allies in West Asia – Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been major exporters of such ideology, even as India and Western states maintain close ties with them and cooperate on counter-terrorism. Civilisational explanations ignore this contradiction. In No Good Men Among the Living (2014), Anand Gopal documents how Saudi Arabia funded madrassas, distributed conservative Salafi texts, and shaped refugee religious education during the Afghan war, while Pakistan provided territory for training and Saudi clerical networks supplied religious legitimacy.This was not incidental. A 2009 WikiLeaks cable attributed to Hillary Clinton noted that donors in Saudi Arabia were “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” and later disclosures pointed to contacts between Saudi officials and leaders of the Haqqani network, linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Qatar, too, has been accused of backing Islamist groups in Syria, including Jabhat al-Nusra, and Saudi officials reportedly described Daesh as a counter to U.S.-backed Shia forces in Iraq.Yet Indian public discourse rarely confronts the fact that states treated as counter-terror partners have helped nurture the ideological ecosystems of militancy. Focusing only on Pakistan may be politically convenient, but it obscures the broader political economy of jihadist mobilisation. One cannot credibly oppose terrorism while remaining allied with regimes that systematically export extremist theology; this is not just hypocrisy, but strategic complicity.Why clash of civilisations is analytically bankruptThe JNU V-C also invokes Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis, a theory widely discredited by scholars. In his book, A World Without Islam, former U.S. intelligence official Graham Fuller argues that major geopolitical conflicts long pre-date Islam – from Byzantine-Persian wars to European intra-Christian rivalries – and followed the same logic of power, trade, and territory. Even without Islam, similar conflicts would have occurred in the same regions.Fuller adds that in colonial and post-colonial contexts, religion often substitutes for suppressed political identities: people do not fight because they are Muslim, but fight as Muslims when other channels of mobilisation are blocked. He stresses that dictatorships, artificial borders, and Cold War policies – when Islam was encouraged as a bulwark against the Soviet Union – shaped political violence far more than theology. Islam, he argues, is not the cause of conflict but the banner under which older struggles are fought.Edward Said likewise warned that civilisational categories erase internal diversity and obscure material power relations, turning political conflicts into cultural inevitabilities and absolving states of responsibility for repression and inequality. Huntington’s thesis gained traction after 9/11 because it served strategic ends, justifying wars and regime-change as cultural defence rather than geopolitical intervention; notably, Huntington himself urged exploiting internal divisions within Islamic societies, echoing later U.S. alliances with sectarian militias in Iraq and Iran.In this sense, “clash of civilisations” functions less as an explanation than as an ideological instrument.Why identity narratives persistCivilisational explanations of terrorism are appealing because they simplify causation, personalise blame, and turn political conflicts into moral crusades. They also serve a political purpose: shielding states from accountability for policies that generate violence while legitimising coercive governance at home.When we imagine religious mobs only in one direction, we expose our political conditioning more than the nature of violence. The thought experiment that opened this essay felt shocking because we are trained to associate terror with certain identities and to normalise it when it comes from others. Civilisational narratives thrive on this selective imagination, deciding whose violence deserves outrage and whose is explained away. Confronting terrorism honestly requires unlearning whom we are taught to fear.Framing terrorism as a cultural pathology also renders vigilante violence invisible, erases geopolitical complicity, and grants moral cover to security excesses. Symbolic toughness replaces serious engagement with structural causes, while policies that breed resentment and radicalisation remain intact.As Josy Joseph notes, the tactical art of looking away at crucial moments lies at the heart of India’s democratic crisis. Terrorism must therefore be analysed not through civilisational fear, but through power, exclusion, occupation, and political strategy – only then can rhetoric give way to genuine prevention.Omair Khan is a research associate documenting and analysing hate crimes and hate speeches at Karwan-e-Mohabbat.