09-21-2008, 03:45 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India must fight the jihad within </b>
Pioneer.com
Ashok Malik
After the Mumbai train bombings of July 2006, a group calling itself Lashkar-e-Qahar sent out an e-mail claiming responsibility. When the dead had been accounted for, one body remained unidentified. An e-mail from Lashkar-e-Qahar displayed the photograph of a young man, claimed the dead body was his, and that he was the suicide bomber who had helped trigger a lethal terror attack that had killed 200 people.
The e-mail was actually a trap. Using a fairly everyday computing tool called stagnography, it invited you to click on the image of the young man and then led you to an innocuous-looking site that listed 'missing persons'. However, as cyber-sleuths were to discover, the act of clicking and moving to this second site actually exposed one's computer to a Pakistan-based monitor.
Now, a control room had access to the Internet Protocol of the person who had, only a few seconds earlier, opened his e-mail account and read the Lashkar-e-Qahar message. In the days to come, this person's computer and e-mail account were hacked into and made accessible to the terrorist organisation.
Given that State police forces, national security agencies and media institutions happily clicked away on the so-called suicide bomber's image, the level of penetration was substantial. In later weeks, computers had to be changed, e-mail accounts re-set, protective measures taken. India, for all its Information Technology prowess, had been fooled by a smart but essentially low-level trick.
A few days after the Mumbai bombings, Bhopal Police arrested a 17-year-old boy called Shariq. Subsequently removed to Mumbai, Shariq was described as an "IT wizard". He was, however, no ordinary teenage geek. Some months earlier, he had visited Pakistan, ostensibly to meet an aunt but actually to receive training on the theology and tactics of jihad.
Back in India, it was he who had designed the e-mail, using his skills in stagnography to allow his principals to read the mail and scan the computers of those who were sent the 'suicide bomber' mail in July 2006.
Grant Shariq this: He is clever, determined and tough. In two years, he has revealed little. He has not been 'broken' by the Mumbai Police, which, however, knows he is extremely dangerous.
Shariq is still behind bars. In the absence of an appropriate anti-terror law, he is being detained under the provisions of the Information Technology Act. The IT Act has some stringent, even draconian provisions. When it was legislated in 2000, there were concerns that it would be used to harass cyber-café clients. However, India has innovated -- it must be the only country in the world fighting terrorism with an IT Act.
Shariq's story is instructive. It tells us that, far from the stereotypes we may have formed, the terrorist India is fighting is often educated, intelligent and not propelled by economic and political grievances but by a perverse interpretation of his faith. It also points out how, in numerous unseen forms, the lack of an effective anti-terror law has crippled the police.
<b>Shariq's level of indoctrination is frightening though not unique. Increasingly, Indian Mujahideen modules being uncovered are found manned by middle-class youth, some of them engineers and techies.</b> Terrorism psychologists have long argued that such people can make the most ruthless terrorists, if they are convinced of the rightness of their cause. They are trained to think methodically and mechanically, and see open acts of violence -- rather than subtle subversion, for instance -- as the best method of 'vengeance'.
This makes the Indian Mujahideen less 'political' and less amenable to settlement on the basis of meeting identifiable goals. This is not the Mizo National Front, which will stop fighting if offered an honourable peace in a Mizo-majority State. It is not even the Khalistan Commando Force, the agenda of which was limited to Punjab's 'independence'.
For the Indian Mujahideen, on the other hand, violence is an end in itself. In its 13-page letter announcing the Delhi blasts of September 13, 2008, it makes only one specific demand: "Here we announce our ultimatum: Vacate the land of Babri as soon as you can." However, it also promises to "carry on the struggle and fight against the Kufr (disbelief) till our last breath"; and chillingly announces that "the dust will never settle down".
Like Al Qaeda, which wants the Islamic re-conquest of Spain, the stated aims of the Indian Mujahideen are messianic.<b> The interrogation of Safdar Nagori provides a clue. Arrested in February 2008, the general secretary of the Students Islamic Movement of India said he was working for the revival of the Caliphate. He joked with police officers that they would one day have to send leave applications to Istanbul.
More substantively, Nagori believed state power in India had been snatched from Muslims by the British and surreptitiously handed over to Hindus in 1947. Indian Mujahideen/SIMI wanted to redress this. The strategy was to shake public and institutional confidence through repeated acts of violence. "By 2020, Nagori felt," recalls a police officer, "terrorism would have caused so much destruction that there would be anarchy in India, and the Indian state would be vulnerable."</b>
<b>It is easy to laugh at Nagori's final aspiration, but it is important to take his interim plans seriously. It would not do, certainly, to see in him a rallying point for all Muslims. In lionising SIMI, politicians like Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mr Ram Vilas Paswan are appealing to an extreme fringe but seriously misreading the larger mood.</b>
Take Nagori's father. An outstanding police officer -- "One of the best in Madhya Pradesh," says a former colleague of his, "awarded the President's Police Medal" -- he sent his son to an English-medium school in Ujjain and proudly saw him enrol for an undergraduate course in mass communications. It was while doing his MA that Safdar began to change; his dissertation was on "the fire in Kashmir", a subject that had not exercised him earlier.
<b>Today, the senior Nagori is bitterly disappointed in his son. Safdar knows that. When he was arrested, he asked to speak to his mother but pleaded not to be put on the phone to his father -- he was too scared</b>.
It is impossible not to sense the pain of retired police officer Nagori. No doubt he expects the Indian state, which he served diligently, to take on the challenge posed by his son and his jihad-crazed associates. He has understood the need to combat them. When will the Government of India?
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Pioneer.com
Ashok Malik
After the Mumbai train bombings of July 2006, a group calling itself Lashkar-e-Qahar sent out an e-mail claiming responsibility. When the dead had been accounted for, one body remained unidentified. An e-mail from Lashkar-e-Qahar displayed the photograph of a young man, claimed the dead body was his, and that he was the suicide bomber who had helped trigger a lethal terror attack that had killed 200 people.
The e-mail was actually a trap. Using a fairly everyday computing tool called stagnography, it invited you to click on the image of the young man and then led you to an innocuous-looking site that listed 'missing persons'. However, as cyber-sleuths were to discover, the act of clicking and moving to this second site actually exposed one's computer to a Pakistan-based monitor.
Now, a control room had access to the Internet Protocol of the person who had, only a few seconds earlier, opened his e-mail account and read the Lashkar-e-Qahar message. In the days to come, this person's computer and e-mail account were hacked into and made accessible to the terrorist organisation.
Given that State police forces, national security agencies and media institutions happily clicked away on the so-called suicide bomber's image, the level of penetration was substantial. In later weeks, computers had to be changed, e-mail accounts re-set, protective measures taken. India, for all its Information Technology prowess, had been fooled by a smart but essentially low-level trick.
A few days after the Mumbai bombings, Bhopal Police arrested a 17-year-old boy called Shariq. Subsequently removed to Mumbai, Shariq was described as an "IT wizard". He was, however, no ordinary teenage geek. Some months earlier, he had visited Pakistan, ostensibly to meet an aunt but actually to receive training on the theology and tactics of jihad.
Back in India, it was he who had designed the e-mail, using his skills in stagnography to allow his principals to read the mail and scan the computers of those who were sent the 'suicide bomber' mail in July 2006.
Grant Shariq this: He is clever, determined and tough. In two years, he has revealed little. He has not been 'broken' by the Mumbai Police, which, however, knows he is extremely dangerous.
Shariq is still behind bars. In the absence of an appropriate anti-terror law, he is being detained under the provisions of the Information Technology Act. The IT Act has some stringent, even draconian provisions. When it was legislated in 2000, there were concerns that it would be used to harass cyber-café clients. However, India has innovated -- it must be the only country in the world fighting terrorism with an IT Act.
Shariq's story is instructive. It tells us that, far from the stereotypes we may have formed, the terrorist India is fighting is often educated, intelligent and not propelled by economic and political grievances but by a perverse interpretation of his faith. It also points out how, in numerous unseen forms, the lack of an effective anti-terror law has crippled the police.
<b>Shariq's level of indoctrination is frightening though not unique. Increasingly, Indian Mujahideen modules being uncovered are found manned by middle-class youth, some of them engineers and techies.</b> Terrorism psychologists have long argued that such people can make the most ruthless terrorists, if they are convinced of the rightness of their cause. They are trained to think methodically and mechanically, and see open acts of violence -- rather than subtle subversion, for instance -- as the best method of 'vengeance'.
This makes the Indian Mujahideen less 'political' and less amenable to settlement on the basis of meeting identifiable goals. This is not the Mizo National Front, which will stop fighting if offered an honourable peace in a Mizo-majority State. It is not even the Khalistan Commando Force, the agenda of which was limited to Punjab's 'independence'.
For the Indian Mujahideen, on the other hand, violence is an end in itself. In its 13-page letter announcing the Delhi blasts of September 13, 2008, it makes only one specific demand: "Here we announce our ultimatum: Vacate the land of Babri as soon as you can." However, it also promises to "carry on the struggle and fight against the Kufr (disbelief) till our last breath"; and chillingly announces that "the dust will never settle down".
Like Al Qaeda, which wants the Islamic re-conquest of Spain, the stated aims of the Indian Mujahideen are messianic.<b> The interrogation of Safdar Nagori provides a clue. Arrested in February 2008, the general secretary of the Students Islamic Movement of India said he was working for the revival of the Caliphate. He joked with police officers that they would one day have to send leave applications to Istanbul.
More substantively, Nagori believed state power in India had been snatched from Muslims by the British and surreptitiously handed over to Hindus in 1947. Indian Mujahideen/SIMI wanted to redress this. The strategy was to shake public and institutional confidence through repeated acts of violence. "By 2020, Nagori felt," recalls a police officer, "terrorism would have caused so much destruction that there would be anarchy in India, and the Indian state would be vulnerable."</b>
<b>It is easy to laugh at Nagori's final aspiration, but it is important to take his interim plans seriously. It would not do, certainly, to see in him a rallying point for all Muslims. In lionising SIMI, politicians like Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mr Ram Vilas Paswan are appealing to an extreme fringe but seriously misreading the larger mood.</b>
Take Nagori's father. An outstanding police officer -- "One of the best in Madhya Pradesh," says a former colleague of his, "awarded the President's Police Medal" -- he sent his son to an English-medium school in Ujjain and proudly saw him enrol for an undergraduate course in mass communications. It was while doing his MA that Safdar began to change; his dissertation was on "the fire in Kashmir", a subject that had not exercised him earlier.
<b>Today, the senior Nagori is bitterly disappointed in his son. Safdar knows that. When he was arrested, he asked to speak to his mother but pleaded not to be put on the phone to his father -- he was too scared</b>.
It is impossible not to sense the pain of retired police officer Nagori. No doubt he expects the Indian state, which he served diligently, to take on the challenge posed by his son and his jihad-crazed associates. He has understood the need to combat them. When will the Government of India?
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