03-11-2006, 04:35 AM
Understanding the harvest of hate
Praveen Swami
Varanasi was just an exclamation mark in Islamist terror groups' war against India. Learning from it needs an understanding not of each outrage, but the whole.
ALL THAT will remain, once the dead are cremated and the television cameras disappear, will be the detritus of the terror bombing in Varanasi: the fragments of metal and chemical residue laid out on forensic analysts' tables in New Delhi; the video images of the bomber who targeted the Sankat Mochan, temple which were captured by a wedding photographer in the last moments of his life.
In weeks or months to come, when those who executed the outrage are arrested or killed, the grief of the families of those who died at Varanasi will be revisited â and then forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until the next hideous bombing or shootout claims an adequate volume of lives elsewhere in India. The tragic truth is this: what happened in Varanasi was neither exceptional nor unexpected, just an exclamation mark in their long jihad against India.
The jihad in Uttar Pradesh
A curious innocence pervades the questions that are being asked after the Varanasi bombings. Is Uttar Pradesh, as some breathless media commentary has claimed, emerging as a major terrorist hub? Does it have something to do with global or domestic politics? Is more still to come?
That such questions are being asked at all illustrates the spectacularly amnesiac nature of Indian public discourse on terrorism. Journalists shocked by Varanasi seem to have obliterated from their memory the April 27, 1996, bombing of a bus in Roorkee by the Harkat-ul-Ansar, which claimed 16 lives.
Only passing mention was made of the explosion on a Patna-Delhi train near Jaunpur in July last year, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operation in which 12 persons were killed and 52 injured.
Questions like `why now' and `why Varanasi' are fundamentally misplaced. Data obtained by this correspondent make clear that Uttar Pradesh has not suddenly become a target for Islamist terror: like most Indian States, it has seen sustained levels of jihadi violence for the past several years. Since 2001, Uttar Pradesh has seen the interdiction of at least 22 cells linked to Pakistan-based jihadi groups in operations that led to the elimination of 10 terrorists, mainly Pakistani nationals, and 34 arrests.
Levels of terrorist activity in Uttar Pradesh, the data show, have risen steadily since 2001. In April that year, the Uttar Pradesh Police killed three Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists in Lucknow, after the Intelligence Bureau detected the first of what would be a series of terrorist attempts to target the makeshift temple that now stands on the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Operatives of the Lashkar, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and the Harkat were arrested later that year, while three terrorists were killed in a shootout at Bijnore.
In 2002, the prospect of an India-Pakistan conflict led the covert services of both countries to focus their energies on military espionage, rather than covert warfare. Of 14 cells interdicted that year in Uttar Pradesh, seven carried out espionage, not terrorism. However, the Uttar Pradesh Police also arrested several jihadi cadre, including a group of five Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operatives who had built a cache of weapons and explosives in the town of Bijnore.
Arrests of jihadi cadre became more frequent the following year. In 2003, intelligence-led operations led to the uncovering of four cells of the Jaish alone. Arrests were made from Lucknow, Allahabad, Muzaffarnagar, Sikandarabad, and NOIDA, a sign that Islamist terror groups were widening their networks across the State. Uttar Pradesh was also used as a base for operations in Delhi. For example, Jaish operatives Ijaz Husain Jan and Meraj Hasan were found in possession of maps of the Parliament building area.
Last summer, new evidence emerged on Uttar Pradesh's place in the plans of terror groups. In May 2005, police arrested Lashkar operatives Sadat Rashid and Masood Alam who were attempting to recruit seminary students in Bihar and Jharkhand. Again, in July, Lashkar recruiters Mohammad Hanif and Yamin Ahmad were arrested on the basis of information provided by the Assam Police. So too was Abu Razzak Masood, a Dubai-based Lashkar recruiter and fundraiser who had arrived in India to monitor these cells.
Despite these arrests, terrorist strikes continued apace. On July 5, six members of a Jaish fidayeen unit were shot dead as they attempted to storm the makeshift temple in Ayodhya, an act calculated to spark communal violence. Investigators soon discovered that the attack had been facilitated by cells run by new recruits from Deoband, Saharanpur, and Delhi. Just two weeks later came the bombing of the Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express near Jaunpur, making clear that other terror cells with lethal capabilities remained operational.
On February 1, less than six weeks before the Varanasi bombings, Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee told journalists that his force had arrested a Lashkar operative who had planned to execute strikes across urban centres in north and east India. Kolkata resident Tariq Akhtar, Mr. Mukherjee said, had stored 16 electronic detonators and a laptop containing bomb-making manuals at safe house in Jamshedpur. A third cell member had travelled north to study targets.
Looking back, Mr. Mukherjee's press conference has a special resonance: the third cell member, Zubeid Ahmad, was arrested from Varanasi.
The war ahead
Nalgonda, Almatti, Bangalore, Chintamani, Mumbai, New Delhi: from these towns and cities, 14 members of nine Islamist terror cells were arrested between January 3 and February 27 this year. Chemicals used for making improvised explosive devices of the kind used in Varanasi, electronic detonators, and at least nine kg of the lethal military-grade explosive RDX were found in the raids that led to these arrests.
Records obtained by this writer make clear that the threat from jihadi groups across India is growing, even as levels of violence in their core theatre of operations, Jammu and Kashmir, have fallen. In all of 2005, for example, fewer Pakistan-linked cells â excluding spies â were detected than in just the first eight weeks of this year. Not counting the Jammu and Kashmir-based squad, which executed the serial bombings in Delhi, just eight jihadi cells were discovered. In 2004, the level was even lower â just six.
If nothing else, the figures demolish claims by the Bharatiya Janata Party that the United Progressive Alliance has been soft on terrorism. In reality, the origins and course of the long jihad has not a little to do with the BJP's own practice of politics. In 1985, incensed by successive communal pogroms, Andhra Pradesh resident Azam Ghauri and Uttar Pradesh's Abdul Karim `Tunda' set up a vigilante organisation that provided the Lashkar an operational apparatus outside of Jammu and Kashmir.
Led by Ghauri and Karim, a Mumbai-based doctor named Jalees Ansari helped set off a series of 43 explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and 7 separate explosions on trains on December 6, 1993, the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid's demolition â the first Lashkar strike. In Hyderabad, meanwhile, the Lashkar succeeded in tapping the resources of mafia organisations communalised by the pogroms unleashed by Hindu fanatics in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
By the mid-1990s, these early cells had started developing a formidable all-India reach. One of Abdul Karim's most effective recruits, for example, was New Delhi resident Amir Hashim. Code-named `Kamran,' Hashim left India as a teenager to live with his sister in Pakistan, believing he had no future in this country. During his time in that country, he was recruited by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and went on to execute a series of bomb explosions in New Delhi, Rohtak, and Jalandhar.
With local networks in place, top jihadi commanders were able to operate outside Jammu and Kashmir with ease. In 1998, for example, Lashkar operative Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faislabad district, was able to use his contacts to set up a terror base in the town of Khurja. In August 1999, police discovered an 11-member Lashkar module led by Pakistan national Amir Khan, which operated out of Bhiwandi in Maharashtra. Khan, they discovered was planning to marry a local woman to strengthen his cover.
Similarly, top Lashkar activist Mohammad Salim Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan's Jhelum district, developed deep links in the local community using local recruits. Junaid had begun his career with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1991, as a foot soldier for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, rising rapidly through the organisation's hierarchy as a protégé of Azam Cheema, in charge of the trans-border movements of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Junaid had married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare parts export enterprise.
What happened in Varanasi, then, has little to do with the politics of the United Progressive Alliance or recent global Islamist mobilisations. It was driven by the irreducible hatred Pakistani Islamists have for India; a hatred born in the fires that led to the Partition of India, and fed by the fires that have raged after Independence. Most Indian jihad recruits have not personally experienced communal violence, but the fact is that pogroms have vested Islamist terrorism with the aura of just vengeance.
The former Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani's assertion that the Varanasi bombings were the consequence of "competitive minority appeasement" illustrates just why the war is nowhere near being won by India: for politicians like him, and to his doppelgangers on the Islamist side of the ideological fence, the jihad is in fact an opportunity to reap a harvest of hate.
Praveen Swami
Varanasi was just an exclamation mark in Islamist terror groups' war against India. Learning from it needs an understanding not of each outrage, but the whole.
ALL THAT will remain, once the dead are cremated and the television cameras disappear, will be the detritus of the terror bombing in Varanasi: the fragments of metal and chemical residue laid out on forensic analysts' tables in New Delhi; the video images of the bomber who targeted the Sankat Mochan, temple which were captured by a wedding photographer in the last moments of his life.
In weeks or months to come, when those who executed the outrage are arrested or killed, the grief of the families of those who died at Varanasi will be revisited â and then forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until the next hideous bombing or shootout claims an adequate volume of lives elsewhere in India. The tragic truth is this: what happened in Varanasi was neither exceptional nor unexpected, just an exclamation mark in their long jihad against India.
The jihad in Uttar Pradesh
A curious innocence pervades the questions that are being asked after the Varanasi bombings. Is Uttar Pradesh, as some breathless media commentary has claimed, emerging as a major terrorist hub? Does it have something to do with global or domestic politics? Is more still to come?
That such questions are being asked at all illustrates the spectacularly amnesiac nature of Indian public discourse on terrorism. Journalists shocked by Varanasi seem to have obliterated from their memory the April 27, 1996, bombing of a bus in Roorkee by the Harkat-ul-Ansar, which claimed 16 lives.
Only passing mention was made of the explosion on a Patna-Delhi train near Jaunpur in July last year, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operation in which 12 persons were killed and 52 injured.
Questions like `why now' and `why Varanasi' are fundamentally misplaced. Data obtained by this correspondent make clear that Uttar Pradesh has not suddenly become a target for Islamist terror: like most Indian States, it has seen sustained levels of jihadi violence for the past several years. Since 2001, Uttar Pradesh has seen the interdiction of at least 22 cells linked to Pakistan-based jihadi groups in operations that led to the elimination of 10 terrorists, mainly Pakistani nationals, and 34 arrests.
Levels of terrorist activity in Uttar Pradesh, the data show, have risen steadily since 2001. In April that year, the Uttar Pradesh Police killed three Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists in Lucknow, after the Intelligence Bureau detected the first of what would be a series of terrorist attempts to target the makeshift temple that now stands on the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Operatives of the Lashkar, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and the Harkat were arrested later that year, while three terrorists were killed in a shootout at Bijnore.
In 2002, the prospect of an India-Pakistan conflict led the covert services of both countries to focus their energies on military espionage, rather than covert warfare. Of 14 cells interdicted that year in Uttar Pradesh, seven carried out espionage, not terrorism. However, the Uttar Pradesh Police also arrested several jihadi cadre, including a group of five Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operatives who had built a cache of weapons and explosives in the town of Bijnore.
Arrests of jihadi cadre became more frequent the following year. In 2003, intelligence-led operations led to the uncovering of four cells of the Jaish alone. Arrests were made from Lucknow, Allahabad, Muzaffarnagar, Sikandarabad, and NOIDA, a sign that Islamist terror groups were widening their networks across the State. Uttar Pradesh was also used as a base for operations in Delhi. For example, Jaish operatives Ijaz Husain Jan and Meraj Hasan were found in possession of maps of the Parliament building area.
Last summer, new evidence emerged on Uttar Pradesh's place in the plans of terror groups. In May 2005, police arrested Lashkar operatives Sadat Rashid and Masood Alam who were attempting to recruit seminary students in Bihar and Jharkhand. Again, in July, Lashkar recruiters Mohammad Hanif and Yamin Ahmad were arrested on the basis of information provided by the Assam Police. So too was Abu Razzak Masood, a Dubai-based Lashkar recruiter and fundraiser who had arrived in India to monitor these cells.
Despite these arrests, terrorist strikes continued apace. On July 5, six members of a Jaish fidayeen unit were shot dead as they attempted to storm the makeshift temple in Ayodhya, an act calculated to spark communal violence. Investigators soon discovered that the attack had been facilitated by cells run by new recruits from Deoband, Saharanpur, and Delhi. Just two weeks later came the bombing of the Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express near Jaunpur, making clear that other terror cells with lethal capabilities remained operational.
On February 1, less than six weeks before the Varanasi bombings, Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee told journalists that his force had arrested a Lashkar operative who had planned to execute strikes across urban centres in north and east India. Kolkata resident Tariq Akhtar, Mr. Mukherjee said, had stored 16 electronic detonators and a laptop containing bomb-making manuals at safe house in Jamshedpur. A third cell member had travelled north to study targets.
Looking back, Mr. Mukherjee's press conference has a special resonance: the third cell member, Zubeid Ahmad, was arrested from Varanasi.
The war ahead
Nalgonda, Almatti, Bangalore, Chintamani, Mumbai, New Delhi: from these towns and cities, 14 members of nine Islamist terror cells were arrested between January 3 and February 27 this year. Chemicals used for making improvised explosive devices of the kind used in Varanasi, electronic detonators, and at least nine kg of the lethal military-grade explosive RDX were found in the raids that led to these arrests.
Records obtained by this writer make clear that the threat from jihadi groups across India is growing, even as levels of violence in their core theatre of operations, Jammu and Kashmir, have fallen. In all of 2005, for example, fewer Pakistan-linked cells â excluding spies â were detected than in just the first eight weeks of this year. Not counting the Jammu and Kashmir-based squad, which executed the serial bombings in Delhi, just eight jihadi cells were discovered. In 2004, the level was even lower â just six.
If nothing else, the figures demolish claims by the Bharatiya Janata Party that the United Progressive Alliance has been soft on terrorism. In reality, the origins and course of the long jihad has not a little to do with the BJP's own practice of politics. In 1985, incensed by successive communal pogroms, Andhra Pradesh resident Azam Ghauri and Uttar Pradesh's Abdul Karim `Tunda' set up a vigilante organisation that provided the Lashkar an operational apparatus outside of Jammu and Kashmir.
Led by Ghauri and Karim, a Mumbai-based doctor named Jalees Ansari helped set off a series of 43 explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and 7 separate explosions on trains on December 6, 1993, the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid's demolition â the first Lashkar strike. In Hyderabad, meanwhile, the Lashkar succeeded in tapping the resources of mafia organisations communalised by the pogroms unleashed by Hindu fanatics in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
By the mid-1990s, these early cells had started developing a formidable all-India reach. One of Abdul Karim's most effective recruits, for example, was New Delhi resident Amir Hashim. Code-named `Kamran,' Hashim left India as a teenager to live with his sister in Pakistan, believing he had no future in this country. During his time in that country, he was recruited by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and went on to execute a series of bomb explosions in New Delhi, Rohtak, and Jalandhar.
With local networks in place, top jihadi commanders were able to operate outside Jammu and Kashmir with ease. In 1998, for example, Lashkar operative Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faislabad district, was able to use his contacts to set up a terror base in the town of Khurja. In August 1999, police discovered an 11-member Lashkar module led by Pakistan national Amir Khan, which operated out of Bhiwandi in Maharashtra. Khan, they discovered was planning to marry a local woman to strengthen his cover.
Similarly, top Lashkar activist Mohammad Salim Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan's Jhelum district, developed deep links in the local community using local recruits. Junaid had begun his career with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1991, as a foot soldier for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, rising rapidly through the organisation's hierarchy as a protégé of Azam Cheema, in charge of the trans-border movements of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Junaid had married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare parts export enterprise.
What happened in Varanasi, then, has little to do with the politics of the United Progressive Alliance or recent global Islamist mobilisations. It was driven by the irreducible hatred Pakistani Islamists have for India; a hatred born in the fires that led to the Partition of India, and fed by the fires that have raged after Independence. Most Indian jihad recruits have not personally experienced communal violence, but the fact is that pogroms have vested Islamist terrorism with the aura of just vengeance.
The former Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani's assertion that the Varanasi bombings were the consequence of "competitive minority appeasement" illustrates just why the war is nowhere near being won by India: for politicians like him, and to his doppelgangers on the Islamist side of the ideological fence, the jihad is in fact an opportunity to reap a harvest of hate.