Were the victims Muslims? An innocent question asked by an illiterate vegetable vendor regarding Saturday’s Hyderabad blast is precisely the question dogging the mind of Indian Intelligence and enforcement agencies since the Malegaon blast on September 9, 2006 and the Mecca Masjid blast on May 18, 2007. If it was an act of Islamic extremism, then how could they (perpetrators) target their own community? And if they are not jihadis, just who are they?
Since the first direct threat to India by the world’s worst known terror outfit al-Qaeda early this month, the country has been on its toes. In a video posted on LauraMansfield.com, an American website which monitors terrorist groups, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, a wanted American member of al-Qaeda, accused India of supporting the US in its mission of uprooting the terrorist outfits and said that India was “killing more than 1,00,000 Muslims in Kashmir with US blessing”.
He threatened that they shall “continue to target you (US and her allies) at home and abroad, just as you target us at home and abroad, and these spy dens and military command and control centres from which you plotted your aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and which still provide vital moral, military, material, and logistical support to the crusade, shall continue to be (our) legitimate targets,” he warned.
The first apparent realisation of this threat was perhaps the Hyderabad blast last weekend in which over 40 people were killed and many families destroyed. The question that the vegetable vendor asked was not without reason. If they are Islamic militants then how could they kill their own people?
“Acts of terrorism are of different kinds; it could be because of ideological, religious, political or for simply no reason at all. In 1995 when the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with nerve agent Sarin, they killed more than a dozen people and injured thousands. Their motive was to propagate their ideology, different from other religions. From then to now, terrorist activities worldwide have taken place because of different reasons. In the recent past, especially in the last two-three years, the main agenda behind terrorist attacks in India, seems to create general panic and sense of lawlessness in the state,” said a senior police officer of the Karnataka police.
“For them (terrorists), caste and community are immaterial; it’s the state which matters and which needs to be destablised. Earlier attacks on temples in India reflected that they were meant to create communal disharmony, but now that seems to be an old school of thought. The terrorists just want to destabilise the image of the country and make it economically bankrupt. The influx of counterfeit currency is a pointer towards that,” he added.
In his interrogation, the alleged al Badr terrorist Mohammed Fahad, who was arrested along with his accomplice Ali in Mysore last year, confessed that his briefing was to “attack India’s centres of economic growth”. He said that Pakistan is nervous about India’s progressive economic image in the world and he was asked to attack that. He was given to handle operation south India and his main targets were Mysore, Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi,” said another police officer.
Devyani Srivastava, a researcher on terrorism and conflict resolution, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi, agrees that terrorist attacks in the recent past, may be rooted in religious fundamentalism but the objective may be something else. “The idea behind the recent terrorist attacks is to confuse the state hence even in their attacks, their targets are different and the explosives used are also not similar. Their criteria for selection is not fixed. The four main terrorist groups operational in India — Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HuJI) and al Badr are part of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist outfit International Islamic Front (IIF), which was established in 1998 against the crusaders and Jewish people. From 2006, the time Laden gave an indirect threat to India, they have become more active. All these groups are undoubtedly based in Pakistan and funded by the ISI,” she said.
Finding themselves cornered are the intelligence agencies, who are often blamed for failure of intelligence after a terrorist attack. “When a terrorist attack takes place the refrain is that intelligence network has failed but very few know that but for intelligence many more such attacks would have happened,” said former intelligence chief Karnik.
The fact however, remains that till now no terrorist attack in India has been conclusively proven mainly because of “lack of political will and clinching evidence”. And where are the funds to gather evidence? asks Ajai Kumar Singh, Director General, Corps of Detectives, Karnataka. “The rules do not permit us to claim the full cost of investigation. In a scenario where the DA of a constable is Rs 40 per day, that of a police inspector Rs 60-75 and senior level officer is Rs 150-200 per day, which includes their board and lodging facilities, what can we expect of them? The police reforms have not even addressed the issue,” he said.