July-August 2008 
Year 15    No.133
Global Concern


Bad news travels fast

 

The rapid escalation of terrorist attacks in India causes growing concern among
the global community

August 28, 2007: Asia Times Online
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.

July 28, 2008: Economist.com
Double impact

Every six months or so in recent years unknown terrorists have exploded crude bombs in India’s cities and trains and a dozen or more people have been killed. But these mystery killers have now upped the tempo. On Saturday, July 26, and in another bomb blast the day before, at least 50 people were killed in two Indian cities.

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.

 

 


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