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| India's "Home-Grown" Terrorists Recruited, Supported by Pakistan | | | Col . Retd. Anil Bhat | 9/22/2011 11:13:16 PM |
| Misleading governments and public by by naming some new group or an old one, is standard tactics of terrorist outfits after carrying out attacks, particularly, when the most active and obvious groups want to maintain their momentum but do not want investigations pointing towards them. The extent to which Pakistan army, its intelligence agency and their favourite India-specific terrorist groups got exposed so badly after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, they desperately needed to re-label their products. With no major headway in Mumbai's July 13 terrorist bomb- blasts and only some email leads following the September 7 blast at Delhi High Court (the second one this year), an explosion at Agra's Jai Hospital reception waiting room area on September 18 injured at least 15 people.
Indicating that the blast in the Delhi high court could have been the handiwork of home-grown terror outfits, home minister P. Chidambaram stated in an interview: "We can no longer point to cross-border terrorism as a source of terror attacks in India.That threat remains - but we must also look at Indian modules or India-based modules which are capable of carrying out terror attacks…There have been three major attacks in India recently - in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. In respect of the Mumbai and Pune attacks, we are fairly certain they were carried out by Indian modules or India-based modules…The government can build capacity and extend the intelligence network, but policing is a very complex task and there will be cases where the terrorist is able to slip through the cracks,"
Addressing all present at the All India Directors General and Inspectors General Conference in the capital on September 16, Mr Chidambaram said the country's proximity to Pakistan and Afghanistan was a cause for worry and India was concerned about how to prevent the "radicalisation" of its youth. "Some modules are loosely knit under an organisation called Indian Mujaheedin (IM). Many old cadres of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) are morphed into IM cadres," he said. However, referring to Af-Pak as terror's epicenter, Mr. Chidambaram also reportedly stated: "Four out of five major terrorist groups are based in Pakistan and three of them continue to target India. There is no letup in efforts to infiltrate from across the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir," and added that there have been infiltration attempts via Nepal and Bangladesh as well as attempts to find a safe transit route via Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu.
At the same conference Prime Minister Manmohan Singh warned that terror camps across the border are being reactivated with attempts to induct fresh batches of militants into the country and marked out the prevailing security environment as 'uncertain'. Highlighting the need for the security apparatus to be "one step ahead of the terrorists", he said the recent blasts in Mumbai and Delhi were "grim reminders" of the challenges posed by terrorism to national security. The two groups who are supposed to have claimed to launch Delhi High Court attack are HuJI and IM. On HuJI, Mr. Chidam-baram said that though it had claimed responsibility for the blast, the group had not been active in India for a while. He further admitted that the Delhi and Mumbai blasts were a blot on the security and that India's intelligence agencies needed a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. "Two terrorist attacks in the space of two months are indeed a blot on our records. The central government and security forces have been severely criticized. While we accept the responsibility for the incidents and legitimate criticism, it is our duty to set out the context in which such terrorist attacks take place," he said.Both these attacks widely evoked public anger and cynicism. Reports about the "spirit of the people" are indeed ironic as it is the compulsion to earn their bread brings them back on the streets.The home minister also added that since the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, 50 terror modules have been neutralised in the country and that foiling of a Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) plot to assassinate the three judges who had delivered the Ayodhya verdict in Madhya Pradesh was also a significant breakthrough.
The unfortunate fact remains that this breakthrough mentioned or instances of pre-emption or prevention are quite rare in India, its being the target of Pakistan army/Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) sponsored, indoctrinated, trained and exported terrorists for over three decades, since it began with the perpetrators' 'Khalistan' misadventure. Compared to ten years of homeland security since 9/11 in the US, India's record of the same in barely three years since 26/11 in Mumbai is dismal. And all the more so as on 13 July this year, Mumbai got targeted for at least the 14th time in eighteen years since the 1993 multiple blasts there.
Some basics on terrorists linkages, which this newspaper has often dwelt upon in past years, need to be reiterated. The HuJI is closely linked to the ISI, Taliban and al Qaeda and with several Islamist groups operating in India, including Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Moham-med (JeM). HuJI's Indian recruits were trained at ISI-backed training camps in Pakistan. Till Bangladesh Nationalist Party was in power for almost two decades, its Bangladeshi wing known as HuJI-B was actively directed by ISI officers and operatives posted in good strength in Dhaka. The HuJI-B coordinated its attacks along with SIMI, LeT and JeM. SIMI cadres provided crucial shelter and logistical help to HuJI-B cadres prior to attacks and a number of SIMI cadres also joined the HuJI-B. The October 12, 2005 suicide attack on the Special Task Force (STF) office of the Hyderabad Police brought HuJI under the scanner of intelligence agencies. Since then, HuJI seemed to be featuring either directly or indirectly in most of the terrorist attacks in India's urban centres. On April 5, 2006, the Uttar Pradesh STF arrested six persons, including Waliullah, the 32-year old Pesh Imam of a mosque in Phulpur near Allahabad. Waliullah, a former SIMI cadre, became HuJI-B's area commander for eastern UP. LeT and JeM cadres were part of the actual orchestration of the attack. HuJI-B mounted the March 7, 2006 attacks on Sankatmochan Temple and the railway station at Varanasi with active assistance of JeM and SIMI. The December 28, 2005 attack at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, in which a Delhi University mathematics professor was killed, was by a HuJI-JeM combo. HuJI is believed to have played an important role in the February 2007 bomb blasts in the Samjhauta Express that left 68 persons dead. The May 25, 2007 twin blasts at the Lumbini open air auditorium and a popular restaurant Gokul Chat Bhandar in Hyderabad is also suspected to be the handiwork of HuJI and sleeper cells of the JeM and LeT. The HuJI has also been linked to the serial bomb blasts in Jaipur on May 13, 2008. Then came the highly planned and well-coordinated 26/11 multi-mode and multiple terror attacks in Mumbai. A name that did not feature in investigations of this attack till recently mentioned in late Syed Saleem Shahzad's book, Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11 (Pluto Press, distributed in India by Pentagon Press), got published, was of Ilyas Kashmiri. Kashmiri, according to Shahzad, was a key figure in planning and execution of 26/11and German Bakery, Pune in 2010. Kashmiri, a former HuJI commander left it to climb up to the position of commanding the 313 brigade of Al Qaeda, reportedly behind two of the most spectacular attacks on Pakistani military installations - the 24-hour siege of Pakistan army's headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009 and the15-hour siege of PNS Mehran, Pakistan navy's prime base in Karachi in May this year. Kashmiri and his group's anti-Indian ambitions were elabotated upon by Saleem Shahzad, the only journalist to have interviewed the shadowy leader. Shahzad was tortured and killed in late May, just two days after writing an article about Kashmiri's involvement in the attack on the Karachi naval base. Recent reports suggest that his killing was at the behest of Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and at the hands of the ISI.
According to Shahzad, Kashmiri sent him a message in February 2010 suggesting the 313 Brigade was involved in the bombing of a German bakery in Pune. Shahzad also alleged in his book that Kashmiri confided to him that "Mumbai was nothing compared with what has already been planned for India in the future." Kashmiri's plan, Shahzad wrote, was to provoke hostilities between Pakistan and India, thereby easing pressure on terrorits to realize their ambitions in Afghanistan. If on one hand the home minister recommended focus on "home grown" terror groups instead of cross-border terrorism, on the other hand he has also said that the latter continues. While five people, including two persons who are suspected to have sent an email to media in the name of the HuJI owning responsibility for the Delhi blast, were arrested from Kishtwar, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), this claim needs to be investigated/analysed. Because,as mentioned above, HuJI has never had any major presence/activity in J&K. The groups active there since long are mainly LeT, JeM and Hizbul Mujahideen. As such the possibility of HuJI and IM being behind the Delhi blast being a ruse or red herring cannot be ruled out.
It must also be borne in mind that since 26/11, the large number of embarrassing exposures about Pakistan army and ISI steadily and substantially LeT and not to forget, AL Qaeda in planning and implementation of attacks against India, Pakistan's military has changed tack to ensure that while the momentum of attacks must continue, they must not point towards Pakistan. Indian political leaders making statements amounting to "looking inwards" at "home-grown' groups is not going to help India in earning brownie points to improve the quality of the peace-talks with Pakistan, but will certainly further encourage Paskistani/Pakistan- supported terrorists to continue or step up their attacks with the assurance that even if captured they will not be hanged. Many counter-terrorist operations conducted by Army/police/ security forces in Kashmir Valley this summer mainly against LeT, in which some top terrorist commanders have been killed and stepped up infiltration attempts since August to try to induct many hundreds before the snow sets in only reinforces the fact that Pakistan army's priorities about India have not changed. That is one organization which is very allergic to improved relations India. India's politico-bureaucratic establishment must be very clear about the "capacity-building" which the home minister mentioned to, vastly acquire / improve homeland surveillance, forensics, penetrative intelligence and importantly, its covert external strike capability.-Word Sword Features |
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