Author: Uday Mahurkar and Sandeep Unnithan
Publication: India Today
Date: August 11, 2008
Introduction: Terror now sports and Indian
face with ISI training and Taliban indoctrination. It has made the task of
weeding out terrorist from locals all the more tough.
Plausible deniability-a political doctrine
that originated in the 1950s allowed the US president to deny the covert operations
and assassinations carried out by the CIA.
The word is as applicable to the shadowy terror
games being played out in the subcontinent as it was to the skulduggery of
the Cold War. It can, for instance, help explain the new gameplan of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to spread terror throughout the hinterland
yet denying any knowledge of it.
Ahmedabad was the newest and deadliest in
a series of attacks, over the past few years, having claimed about 53 lives
and the reappearance of a new group, the Indian Mujahideen.
"While continuing giving financial aid,
training and arms assistance to the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), ISI is encouraging
it to depend for its operations in Indian territory on Indian Muslims only,"
says terrorism expert B. Raman. Welcome desi jihad.
While usual suspects like LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammed
(JeM), which carried out attacks on Parliament and in Ayodhya, have been lying
low, the focus in the past few months has now shifted to the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al
Islam (HUJI), a shadowy Bangladesh-based jihadi organisation that first shot
into prominence with blasts on the Shramjeevi Express and in Varanasi.
The explosives used now comprise locally available
ammonium nitrate and gelatin sticks instead of RDX that is easily traceable
to Pakistan.
The Gujarat blasts are believed to have been
planned by HUJI and executed by the Indian Mujahideen, which, investigators
say, is a new name for the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
ISI is believed to have encouraged HUJI to
set up a separate India-specific organisation with recruits solely from the
Indian Muslim community.
Secretary of US Department of Homeland Security
Michael Chertoff believes the next attack on the US could be carried out by
"clean skin" terrorists-European nationals who could fly under the
radar. Are the Indian Mujahideen, a purely Indian organisation with no overt
Pakistani or Bangladeshi involvement, the "clean skins" the ISI
has coveted?
For starters, this is a group that believes
in assiduously claiming credit for its misdeeds, always through an email and
sometimes with proof and signed by a mysterious "Guru al Hindi".
Their voluble 14-page email sent after the Gujarat attack bizarrely requested
"LeT and other organisations not to claim the responsibility for these
attacks".
Almost 24 hours after the blasts in Jaipur
in May, two TV channels in Delhi had received an anonymous email on behalf
of the Indian Mujahideen.
Significantly, the message included an authentic
picture of one of the cycles alleged to have been used in Jaipur (the number
was readable), leading to the possibility that the Uttar Pradesh and Jaipur
blasts were carried out by the same group.
What is the composition of these groups? Following
the 2002 Gujarat riots, some of the more radical elements in the Deoband-Tablighi
Jamaat and Ahle Hadis tanzeems in Gujarat vowed vengeance.
As many as two dozen students, most of them,
of course, Kashmiris who were studying in Deobandi madrasas in south Gujarat,
fled the madrasas for arms and explosives training in Pakistan soon after
the riots.
Twelve of these were students of the Deobandi
madrasa at Kantharia near Bharuch called Darul Uloom Arabiyyah Islamiyyah.
(These madrasas have now stopped enrolling Kashmiri students following police
pressure). It is possible that the blasts were the work of these new recruits.
Significantly, one of the most notorious commanders
of HUJI and leader of its Auragabad module, Javed Kashmiri, who is eluding
Maharashtra Police, had his religious education in a similar madrasa near
Bharuch.
The 101-year-old Deobandi madrasa at Dabhel
near Surat, which is the oldest Deobandi madrasa in Gujarat, has also been
accused of spreading radicalism. At least two maulvis charged with terrorist
acts have studied in Dabhel.
In Gujarat, almost all those arrested in relation
to terror acts following the post-Godhra riots, including the infamous Akshardham
attack and the lesser known bus bomb blasts in 2002 in which 13 people were
injured, were Deobandis.
So, it came as no surprise last week when
the police arrested a radical Ahle Hadis maulvi, Abdul Halim, within hours
of the Ahmedabad blasts. Halim faces an old but unsubstantiated charge that
he had sent some boys to Pakistan for arms training following the Gujarat
riots.
The emails follow a recurring theme-that Indian
Muslims had decided to take the offensive way to waging a jihad. They refer
to the severe penalties awarded to the accused in the Mumbai blasts of March
1993, lack of action against Hindu police officers who allegedly committed
atrocities on Muslims, the Gujarat riots of 2002, the assault on arrested
JeM suspects by some lawyers and, that the criminal justice system treated
the Muslims severely but was lenient with the Hindus.
How to identify terrorists without hurting
the community-recruitment aspect for terrorists- is a challenge before law
enforcement officials. One officer who had mastered this technique after acquiring
sound knowledge of the working of the Wahhabi tanzeems was Gujarat Police
DIG D.G. Vanzara, who was in-charge of the state Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS).
He had reportedly made life miserable for
the ultra radical Wahhabis in Gujarat during his tenure. This process screeched
to a halt when he was arrested in the Sohrabuddin encounter case along with
two other IPS officers and 11 other policemen in June 2007.
Though controversial, Vanzara had, on the
basis of his knowledge and skill, raised his own intelligence network within
the Muslim community by roping in the moderate elements even in the Wahhabi
tanzeems. He used this information to monitor the tanzeems.
One of his unorthodox techniques was keeping the relatives of absconding terror
act accused under his personal custody till the accused presented himself
before the police.
Unorthodox measures they may have been, but
they succeeded in keeping radical Islamic elements on a tight leash. Vanzara's
acts, though, were often interpreted as harassment of the Muslim community,
while in effect these were necessary measures to prevent terror attacks, say
police officials.
Many see last week's attack as a result of
a big intelligence lapse on the part of the state police, since a very large
number of locals are believed to be involved.
The absence of Vanzara was clearly visible
even in the Ahmedabad blast investigation last week. Despite suspecting the
involvement of a large number of locals in the terror act, the police picked
up only Halim.
As a police official puts: "Following
such incidents, the net has to be cast wide. The unwanted fish can be released
back into the lake while retaining the wanted ones." Clearly, for law
enforcement agencies, caution is the new watch word.
