As Iranian protestors demanded an end to the Islamic Republic and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s dictatorship, India’s Shi’i community took to the streets to support Khamenei and his regime. The Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, together home to 1.5 million Shi’a, witnessed Shi’a protests and processions between January 13 and 15, 2026, with crowds shouting slogans in Persian and Urdu against Israeli and U.S. intervention.
Shi’a clerics ... dismissed the reports of mass killings of protestors by Iranian forces, and alleged that Israel and the United States created unrest.
Local protests erupted. In Ladakh’s Kargil district, with its 80 percent Shi’i population, Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust’s chairman Sheikh Sadiq Rajai organized a large protest, accusing Washington and Jerusalem of destabilizing Iran. There were also rallies in Budgam and Pulwama, both Shi’i pockets in the Kashmir Valley and hotbeds of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism for the past three decades. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, prominent Shi’i clerics such as Maulana Kalbe Jawad, reportedly close to the Modi government, Maulana Yasoob Abbas, Maulana Khalid Rashid Firangimahli, and the Shahi Imam of Lucknow, dismissed the reports of mass killings of protestors by Iranian forces, and alleged that Israel and the United States created unrest by crippling Iran with sanctions. They urged India to support Tehran’s sovereignty.
The virulence of the protests may have surprised Indians and outside observers, but it should not have. Though India remains a peripheral actor in the Middle East, with the third largest Muslim population, it cannot remain aloof. In 1919-20, Indian Muslims led by Mahatma Gandhi organized the Khilafat movement to oppose partition of Anatolia. Near a century later, the Arab Spring exposed Kashmir’s local jihadist movement to global Islamism, unleashed Middle Eastern Islamist trends, tactics, and organizations in Jammu and Kashmir. On the Sunni side, countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey influence Indian Muslims, whereas the Shi’a, constituting 15 percent of India’s Muslims, lionize Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and hold the Iranian religious hierarchy in esteem.
As Iran’s Islamic Republic has expanded its influence among Kashmiri Shi’a over the past two decades, Kashmir’s Shi’a community has radicalized and increased its separatist tendency. Huge billboards of Iranian ayatollahs dot Budgam, Srinagar, and Kargil. Former Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah’s posters are also common in religious processions and social gatherings. Iranian and Kashmiri Shi’i scholars and leaders have increased exchanges.
Kashmiri Shi’i clerics now copy Iran’s martyr culture, praising terrorists like Burhan Wani as martyrs. Saudi Shi’a cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr’s 2016 execution led to protests in Srinagar and other Shi’i strongholds. Tehran sought to recruit Kashmiris into its proxy militias, and several Kashmiris travelled to Iraq to fight the Islamic State alongside the hashd al-shaabi. Local Kashmiri militants often brag of connections to Iranian-backed Middle Eastern terrorist groups to enhance their local prestige.
In the Indian hinterland, Iranian outreach and Shi’a radicalization remain largely ideological, strengthening religious and cultural ties with Iran.
The Iranian-Lebanese “resistance” literature is popular among the Shia’s in Kashmir. The Urdu translations of the biography of Mustafa Chamran, who helped establish Lebanon’s Shi’i Amal militia, as well as biographies of Amal’s founder Musa al-Sadr and Ayatollah Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, are widespread. Kashmiri Shi’a align with Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei’s worldview, dividing the world into oppressors like Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and the oppressed, including the Palestinians, Syria, Kashmir, Iraq, and Lebanon. This resonates with Kashmir’s grassroots conditions, where human rights excesses, the army’s presence, internet shutdowns, curfews, and repression of protests are rampant.
Traditionally, Kashmiri Shi’a have kept their distance from the Sunni-led separatist movement. That is now changing. This is evident in the increase of anti-India sloganeering during Muharram processions.
In the Indian hinterland, Iranian outreach and Shi’a radicalization remain largely ideological, strengthening religious and cultural ties with Iran. However, the presence of Iran’s covert operational networks in India appear serious as Tehran has managed to orchestrate attacks outside the Israeli embassy in Delhi twice with the help of its Indian networks. Indian security agencies so far either ignore these growing ties between Indian Shi’a and Iran or downplay them as simply cultural. Such wishful thinking will come at a high price as Shi’i radicalization, coupled with existing Sunni extremism, could become the biggest threat to India’s internal security and communal harmony in coming decades.
