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Boys gone astray, Minister?

Boys gone astray, Minister?

Author: Shishir Gupta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 13, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/8366.html

You don't have to wait for intelligence agencies to release their trademark identikit pictures to know the faces behind Mumbai's serial blast. Those fuzzy, looks-like-everyman sketches can't tell you anything what Abdul Razzaq can. Or what Mohammed Waliullah can. Razzaq and Waliullah are not foreign mercenaries. They are from here. They are the faces of India's very own homegrown jihadi network. They tell the story of how astonishingly unprepared our internal security establishment is, of how the UPA's politics is not allowing a committed policy against terror.

Razzaq was trained by Lashkar-e-Toiba in Muzaffarabad last year. His mission was to target his country - India. He had decided however to take a detour: fight the Americans in Iraq first before going back to his native city, Hyderabad. His contribution to Iraqi insurgency - he fought near the Iraq-Iran border - over, he came back home and was picked up.

Waliullah, a Phulpur cleric and a HUJI activist, is an accused in the March 7 Varanasi bomb blast case. When asked during interrogation why he bombed the Varanasi station apart from the Sankat Mochan temple, Waliullah replied the station architecture reminded him of a temple. But religious symbolism isn't what grabs these jihadis most. They want the country they are citizens of to suffer, lose its bearings. Hence reports of LeT reconnaissance on the Ajmer Sharif dargah. Hence the bombs targeting Mumbai's lifeline.

But the Intelligence establishment under the UPA is in denial. The comfortable theory about terrorism is that it is imported into this country. And that is still true. But the UPA, it seems, simply can't accept that jihad now has a domestic manufacturing facility. Shivraj Patil wants us to think of boys gone astray. But his men have done little about massive recruitment by banned SIMI splinter groups, which head-hunt for jihadis by using Gujarat riots as a motivational tool.

Of course, when you talk of Gujarat you have to blame the NDA. BJP politicians who issue anti-terror statements should remember that VCDs of the riots are campaign material for recruiting jihadis in India (outside, too; riot visuals have been used in Saudi Arabia to inspire putative terrorists).

But let the UPA not say it doesn't play politics with terror. And because it has allowed politics to infiltrate anti-terror policy, the total number of terrorist modules busted in 2005 was only a third of the figure in 2004 (the UPA came to power in May 2004). In operational terms, this means terrorists were allowed to entrench themselves and found it easy to carry the jihadi propaganda to young men in cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore. It is no one's case Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not firm on tackling terror. But anyone who knows how this government functions cannot but see that the internal security apparatus is virtually dysfunctional. And for that, Dr Singh has to take part of the blame. The PM has allowed his national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, the home minister, Shivraj Patil, to put the party first in engaging ULFA and the Naxalites. The Naxalite strategy badly backfired. But even after that the government halted the army's anti-ULFA operations in the Dibrugarh-Saikhowa forests earlier this year.

Management of internal security has suffered after the rule of two-year fixed tenures was instituted for home and defence secretaries, R&AW and IB chiefs. Here merit was not the criterion. Comfort levels with the Congress were the yardstick. While the R&AW fumbled from spy to spy (Rabinder Singh to Ujjawal Dasgupta), the IB lost key people in its Kashmir, anti-Naxalite and Operations wings due to office politics.

The brute fact is that despite having Narayanan's trusted lieutenants as RA&W and IB chiefs, the government had no inkling of the Mumbai blasts or the Srinagar attacks. Eight blasts in 11 minutes on the same route speaks of a well-planned conspiracy that would have included reconnaissance of the route and painstaking assessments of jihadi capabilities.

Though the Mumbai blast case is likely to be solved due to local involvement, that won't absolve the Centre's approach to internal security. The priorities of the coalition government were quite evident at the UPA-Left coordination meeting on June 15. The counter-insurgent Salwa Judum movement in Naxalite-infested areas of Chhattisgarh occupied as much time and attention as Kashmir violence. The Left criticised the BJP taking over a movement started by a Congress MLA. Communal violence in Gujarat rightly figured in the meeting but this was more in the context of the BJP-bashing rather as a starting point for discussing jihadi recruitment in India.

Perhaps, after 190 deaths in Mumbai, the government will notice the obvious. There is no more room for political IOUs in Assam, Maharashtra and Andhra. Intelligence agencies need to be proactive: don't allow jihadi modules to settle down. Special focus should be put on AP, Gujarat and Karnataka so that youth recruitment is stopped in these states in the name of Gujarat riots, Narendra Modi and Ayodhya demolition.

Rather than waiting for his home minister to take these steps, the PM should directly intervene. He should get his intelligence chiefs to brief him directly. They will tell him India is a wonderful target for terrorism. Jihadis have the ability to strike at will. Just as they did in Srinagar, where grenades were thrown into tourist vehicles in a city crawling with AK-47 toting security forces.

The answer to combating homegrown terror does not lie in increasing the number of babus in the home ministry or creating another cell in North Block. The PM gave short shrift to Patil's cabinet proposal for a Rs 12 lakh allocation to set up an anti-Naxalite cell in the home ministry. That would have been a waste of Rs 12 lakh of taxpayers' money. Dr Singh needs to listen to the grim evidence from the fields. Evidence that may not be politically comfortable for some of his colleagues. But evidence that may help save many of his fellow citizens.


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