6-9-2014 3.30pm IST Medhaj News:Al Qaeda launched a new branch to "wage jihad" in South Asia as it sought Thursday to invigorate its waning Islamist extremist creed after the rise of the rival Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

But experts said it would struggle to gain traction with India's Muslims.

Skepticism regarding Al Qaeda’s appeal among Indian Muslims stems from the history of the Indian sub-continent. Here moderates have held sway. Even during the Indo-Pak partition era, a large number of Indian Muslims opposed Muslim League and refused to go to Pakistan. In fact, Maulana Hussein Ahmed Madani, a leading cleric of the Deoband school, wrote a book in which he termed the concept of asking for a political state on the basis of a universal religion like Islam as `heretical’, and inimical to Islam.

Maulana Mehmood Madani, Hussein Madani’s grandson, and leader of the Deobandi Jamiat Ulema-Hind, also stood up against Musharraf, telling him brusquely that Indian Muslims are capable of taking care of themselves, and do not need the intervention of an outside power, when the ex-Pakistani general visited India as President in early 2000s.

Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority State has a long history of violence between separatists and security forces. Going by conventional logic if anywhere, it is here that Al-Qaeda can be expected to strike roots.

But Kashmir practices a tradition of Sufi Islam. Despite the growth of militancy and the infiltration of Pakistan based pseudo-Jihadi groups like LeT and Lashkar-e-Toiba, Kashmiris have managed to keep alive purely indigenous groups that raise the demand of Kashmir’s separation from India.

That is why, in response to the recent Al-Qaeda call, Kashmiri separatists said Al Qaeda had no role to play in their struggle against Indian rule of the disputed territory.

"They (Al-Qaeda) have no scope here. Kashmir is a local political dispute and Al-Qaeda has nothing to do with it," Ayaz Akbar, spokesman for separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani told AFP.

Speaking off the record, three other Kashmiri separatists told Medhaj News that “we want an Independent Kashmir. We are Sunni Muslims but we don’t want the kind of Sharia laws ISIS or Al-Qaeda enforce; we want Muslim sisters to feel safe, not afraid, before us”.

Condemning the brutality of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, one of them was of the view that “Saudi affiliated Sunni extremists cannot enter Kashmir. There are Shia brothers who fight with us for the Independence of Kashmir. How can we allow them to be massacred by a few misguided Salafi Sunnis who do not know anything about `Kashmiriyat’ or the history of Islam in Kashmir?"