Target India
By Siddharth Srivastava
A report in The Times of India said India has faced
the brunt of terror attacks globally and ranks only below war-ravaged Iraq
in the numbers killed. Since 2004 India has lost more lives to terrorist
violence than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe
and Eurasia combined. All of these areas lost a total of 3,280 people in
terrorist attacks between January 2004 and March [2007] while India alone
has lost 3,674 lives…
Many experts say a much bigger game plan is being played
out and have advanced several theories. They have linked the attacks to
attempts to sabotage the India-Pakistan peace process, reining in India’s
economic progress and inspiring terror cells around the world desperate to
make their presence felt and cause alarm.
While western nations have become strict with their
security measures, India, which is seen as increasingly aligned to western
powers, especially the United States, has become a soft target.
Hemmed in by two nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with a
dubious record of taking on terrorism, orchestrating attacks in a vast
country with a huge impoverished population is much easier then providing
watertight security. Observers say that such attacks also keep the terror
cells well oiled by the underground funds that flow in from secret
sympathisers.
By ensuring huge casualties with minimum investment in
terms of finance, planning and personnel, terror attacks in India easily
catch the attention of the global community.
Terrorists have also attacked places of worship, in which
both Hindus and Muslims have been victims, which some say is a distorted
attempt to show the existence of Hindu terrorist groups capable of
fomenting communal clashes.
Investigators are surprised at the alacrity with which
visuals of the [Mecca Masjid] Hyderabad blast were telecast on a
Bangladeshi television channel whose antecedents are not very well known.
TV channels around the world quickly picked up these images. It is
reasoned that the terrorists in Hyderabad actually filmed the blasts and
passed them on using multimedia messaging on their cellular phones.
India has already been under fire from anti-outsourcing
sections in the West because of the involvement of Bangalore-based Indian
doctors and an engineer in failed terror plots in London and Glasgow. This
has put India’s business process outsourcing industry on the defensive.
Failed Glasgow suicide bomber, Kafeel Ahmed, worked for Bangalore-based
Infotech Enterprises.
This incident was the first in which Indians had been
involved in an international terror incident since the blowing up of an
Air India flight from Canada more than two decades ago.
The British plot brought into focus an elaborate network
of indoctrination via the Internet that makes Indian technology workers
particularly vulnerable.
Indeed the picture does not look good.
The deadliest attacks were in Ahmedabad in the prosperous
western state of Gujarat…
The Indian Mujahideen, or those calling themselves by that
name, also claimed responsibility for blasts in Jaipur in May. They killed
over 60 people. Indian commentators have been quick to blame Pakistan, or
members of its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, for the
attack. They always are. But in the absence, so far, of any evidence to
support this claim it is hard to know how seriously to take it. In
Ahmedabad, police responded, as they invariably do, with a hasty round-up:
of some 30 "suspects". It would be surprising, on past form, if any is
convicted of the crime.
In fact, it is quite likely that the ISI is involved in
the killing to some degree. The question is: by how many degrees of
separation from it? During a 60-year rivalry Pakistan has made skilful use
of Islamist militants against India, in the contested region of Kashmir
and elsewhere. This must have bequeathed its current spooks a heavy
caseload of proven and would-be terrorists, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and
many parts of India.
It is almost inconceivable that the ISI is no longer
trying to keep tabs on these men. It is also likely that some in its
ranks, despite the progress of a four-year effort to make peace between
India and Pakistan, want to keep up the fight. But the extent to which
they are having their wish seems to be largely a matter of guesswork.
Nonetheless, India has been making some increasingly
confident guesses. After a suicide bomber attacked India’s embassy in
Kabul last month, killing 41 people, including an Indian diplomat and army
general, India’s national security adviser, MK Narayanan said: "We have no
doubt that the ISI is behind this."
Meanwhile, the effects of the recent spate of violence are
all too concrete. The last round of peace talks between India and
Pakistan, which were held in Islamabad in May, a week after the blasts in
Jaipur, achieved little. Further bilateral meetings, mainly on trade, will
be held this week [August 2] in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, at an annual
regional shindig: a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation. But the atmosphere has been tainted.
Among India’s senior bureaucrats and soldiers the violence
serves to confirm their reluctance to forge closer ties with Pakistan on
any level. That is a tragedy but one that India can afford. For Pakistan,
a more fragile place, which faces a much bigger Islamist threat within its
own borders, the relative benefits of peace would be greater.
August 1, 2008: Financial Times
Multilateral damage
By Amy Kazmin in New Delhi and Arush Chopra in Mumbai
Coming on the heels of a May bomb attack that killed 63
people in the popular tourist town of Jaipur in the northern state of
Rajasthan, the bombings have created a sense of siege in urban India,
increasingly unnerved by the frequency and apparent randomness of bomb
attacks in key cities in recent years.
While authorities are still scrambling to gather evidence of who
planted the bombs, the violence appears to reflect the growing
radicalisation and technical sophistication of India’s indigenous Islamist
militants who have lost faith in the promise of India’s ostensibly secular
democracy.
"India is being connected to the global terrorist mainstream in a way
that it wasn’t before," a western diplomat told the Financial Times.
"There are substantial home-grown networks supporting and carrying out
attacks – possibly with technical help from overseas."
Traditionally, Indian authorities have blamed Pakistani intelligence
agencies for most terrorist attacks and the long-running separatist
insurgency in Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Himalayan region. Indeed many
still see Pakistani fingerprints on last week’s attacks, which Narendra
Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, called "a proxy war" on India. Pakistan
has always denied the accusations.
But the diplomat said: "It is no longer sustainable to claim that there
is no home-grown threat" among India’s 140 million Muslims, aggrieved over
their economic and social marginalisation and problems like the state’s
failure to bring to justice most of those responsible for the bloodshed in
Gujarat.
"What seems to be happening is that the recruiters have managed to
relate people’s experience in India of communal violence with the global
narrative of Muslims being oppressed globally," the diplomat said.
Washington’s National Counterterrorism Centre has calculated that from
January 2004 to March 2007 the death toll from terrorist attacks in India
was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq during the same period.
The majority of these Indian terror attacks stemmed from conflicts in
Kashmir, still affected by separatist unrest; India’s isolated North-east
which has multiple ethnic rebel groups; and remote rural areas where a
radical Maoist guerrilla movement holds sway.
Yet it is bombings in important economic centres that many middle-class
Indians fear could jeopardise their economic aspirations by deterring
investment and undermining confidence.