31.8.2003
Kashmir is just a bridgehead for a larger war on the whole of India. Praveen Swami on the jehadis' gameplan. |
Mumbai was a picture of chaos on the day of the blasts but the day after, the routine returned...
IN MARCH 2002, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's website welcomed visitors with a picture of Qutubuddin Ansari, the Ahmedabad riot victim, photographed begging for his life as his home burned and his neighbours were butchered. "Don't you think," the caption read, "he should have a gun instead?" Earlier this week, when two Research Department explosive-packed car bombs went off in the heart of south Mumbai, it became clear that at least a few people had been listening to the LeT. Yet there is little understanding in India of either the ideology or the objectives of the jehadi religious right. The Islamists' jehad is seen, for the most part, as a war for Jammu and Kashmir which occasionally spills into other parts of India. For the Islamist right, however, Jammu and Kashmir is just a bridgehead for a far larger war on the whole of India.
How does this war actually work? In popular imagination, the Mumbai mafia occupies a central place in the working of Islamist warfare in India. The belief is not without basis. The mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar organised and executed the Mumbai serial bombings of 1993, the worst single act of Islamist terrorism in India. The Dawood mafia used its existing trafficking resources, notably the marine fleet of the Karachi-based smugglers, to move the explosives used in the serial bombings. Its personnel then set up the bombs, and helped the perpetrators escape to Karachi.
There are at least two reasons for a mafia network that mainly worshipped money to join the armies of jehad. One, of course, was vengeance. Mumbai witnessed one of India's worst communal riots in 1992-1993, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Dawood Ibrahim, who had assiduously cultivated legitimacy as a defender of the city's Muslims, came under pressure to come good on his promises. The mafia, thus, set itself up as a Muslim avenger of the depredations of the Shiv Sena and the Mumbai Police, well documented by the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry.
Another possibility is that the mafia just had no choice. By the early 1990s, the decontrol of gold and silver brought the prices of these commodities tumbling down, stripping smugglers of their principal business.
The tourists were back at the Gateway of India. So were the pigeons.
The mafia now turned to heroin, but the new business came at a price. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence now began to lean on smugglers, allowing them to ship heroin only if they transported weapons and explosives as well. A twist in economic policy and a communal riot had placed an avowedly secular mafia under the thumb of the military-mullah combine which runs the ISI.
Signs of this new alliance were evident by 1992. That year, Operation K2, an ambitious plan for joint operations by the Khalistan and Kashmir terrorists, was put in place by the ISI's handler for the Babbar Khalsa International, Waqar Ahmad. The plan envisaged the use of smugglers to move weapons across the Rann of Kutch for eventual deployment by terrorists. Indian intelligence officials claim that Lal Singh, a top Khalistan terrorist recruited by Ahmad who was arrested in July that year, had planned to blow up the stock exchange in Chennai using smuggled explosives.
Smuggling and terror
Despite the failure of K2, and the embarrassment caused by the discovery of its role in the Mumbai serial bombings, the ISI continued to give the mafia-terrorist relationship a formal shape. At the end of 1994, it organised the formation of the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front. In 1995, the JKIF advertised its relations with the mafia by releasing a photograph of one of the key accused in the serial bombings, Abdul Razzak `Tiger' Memon, along with its leader, Sajjad Keno. The photograph, it was claimed in an effort to take the heat off the ISI for harbouring Memon in Karachi, had been taken in Srinagar. One of the participants in the affair, Usman Majid, has since publicly confirmed long-standing speculation that it was in fact shot at a safe house in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. Among the JKIF's more murderous acts was the bombing of the busy Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi in 1996, which claimed a dozen lives.
The explosives for this bombing operation were later discovered to have been smuggled into India by `Chhota' Javed Khan, who was arrested in Ahmedabad on June 2, 1996, along with Ayub Ahmad Bhatt and the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir resident, Abdul Rashid Jalaluddin. The group's leader, Kishtwar-resident Abdul Ghani Ghoni, told interrogators that their safehouses and weapons at Ahmedabad had been organised by Abdul Latif Abdul Wahab Sheikh, Dawood Ibrahim's associate.
Although the JKIF is now believed to be largely defunct, the interrogation of alleged ISI operatives picked up in Mumbai has also thrown up the name of its highest surviving leader, Bilal Baig. Samshad Haider, operating under the alias of Raj Kumar, and Javed Ghulam Hussain were arrested in Mumbai for carrying out a series of six bomb blasts in Mumbai between August 28, 1997, and February 27, 1998. Both named Baig as a key contact.
Sometimes, as the case of Hyderabad-resident Abdul Aziz Sheikh illustrates, the lines between the mafia and the jehadis can be blurred. Well known to Andhra Pradesh police officials as `Bombay Javed' because of his past history of extortion and theft in that city, Sheikh rejoined the mafia of `Chhota' Shakeel Ahmad Babu after training with the LeT in Pakistan. He was subsequently arrested after a July 1999 attempt on the life of the former Mumbai mayor, Milind Vaidya. At the time of his arrest, Sheikh was in a Lucknow hotel room, waiting for an arms courier to arrive from Kathmandu.
Like other terrorist groups, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen has flirted with the idea of expanding pan-India operations by using mafia structure. In 1998, the Jammu and Kashmir Police's Special Operations Group recovered extensive handwritten notes from the slain Hizb `commander,' Ali Mohammad Dar's Srinagar hideout. "Ways and means should be found," Dar had written, "to launch the movement in India on [a] priority basis." "Kingpins of the underworld [should] be contacted," he had advocated "to have the weapons and ammunition launched for us through other possible ways." Dar's project went with him to his grave — but no one really knows for certain.
The jehad channel
Early this month, officials of the Border Security Force shot dead the LeT commander, Manzoor Zahid Chaudhuri. Documents found in the terrorists' hideout showed that he had played a key role in organising the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat a year ago. His associates? A businessman and some local officials. But not one mafia member.
By the coming of the new millennium, the jehadis in Pakistan had gathered enough confidence to break with the mafia. Dozens of terrorist cells directly operated by groups such as LeT have been discovered nationwide and the arrest and elimination of terrorists now takes place with disquieting frequency.
The foundations for this independent jehadi infrastructure were laid in 1985, when activists of the Ahl-e-Hadis sect's ultra-conservative Gorba faction gathered in Mumbai to organise armed Muslim resistance. Two key figures were present at that meeting: Azam Ghauri, who went on to form a LeT-based unit in Andhra Pradesh, and Abdul Karim `Tunda,' nicknamed for his deformed arm, who later became the Lashkar's top operative in India.
Among their most enthusiastic recruits was Jalees Ansari, the son of a textile mill worker. Ansari's father, who had arrived as a penniless labourer from Uttar Pradesh, managed to save enough to give his children a future. In 1972, Ansari graduated from the Maratha College at Nagpara, and went on to study medicine. Despite his success, Ansari felt embittered by what he perceived as pervasive religious intolerance. The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the riots that followed made him — and his organisation — snap. Led by Ghauri and Karim, Ansari helped set off a series of 43 explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate explosions on trains on December 6, 1993, the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition.
Jehadi groups were quick to cash in on the fury of the young who had grown up in the ugly climate generated by pogrom after pogrom, a fury represented by those present at the 1985 meeting in Mumbai. One of Tunda's most effective recruits, for example, was the 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. He was then recruited by the LeT, and executed a series of bomb explosions in New Delhi, Rohtak and Jalandhar.
How did such recruitment work? For one, the jehadi groups consciously despatched their top personnel to recruit from riot-hit areas. In August 1999, the Jammu and Kashmir Police had arrested an 11-member Lashkar team led by the Pakistan national, Amir Khan. Khan had been tasked to recruit Indian members whose immediate family had been killed in communal violence. Having obtained Indian educational documents and a driver's licence with the aid of some Bhiwandi residents, Khan planned to marry into a family living in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra.
Similarly, top Lashkar activist Mohammad Salim Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan's Jhelum district, made deep links in the local community using SIMI volunteers. Junaid had begun his career with the Lashkar in 1991, as a foot soldier for the jehad in Jammu and Kashmir, rising rapidly through the organisation's hierarchy as a protégé of Azam Cheema, in charge of the LeT's trans-border movements. Junaid married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare-parts export enterprise. Azam Ghauri himself is known to have attended a SIMI conference at Aurangabad in November 2000 to recruit volunteers.
In the weeks preceding the Mumbai bombings, evidence has surfaced that local recruitment by jehadi groups has reached new levels. Upwards of 40 Gujarat residents, for example, are believed to be at the Lashkar training camps in Pakistan. In New Delhi, intelligence officials believe at least half-a-dozen terrorist cells are active in Maharashtra, each operating independently of the other. It is also clear that the Lashkar remains willing to invest in its all-India operations. Intelligence officials believe that a replacement is already in place for Faisal Khan, the southern region `commander' shot dead in Mumbai's Goregaon area this March. It is possible that the Lashkar facilitated the provision of RDX for the recent twin blasts.
Policemen and intelligence work will, without dispute, lead to the arrest or elimination of whoever carried out the tragic twin blasts in Mumbai. That will not, however, stop the next one from taking place. The Lashkar sowed its seed in India's only-too-fertile communal fields, and is now reaping the harvest. For this political problem, however, India's leaders, Hindu or Muslim, seem to have no solutions to offer.
Mumbai at dusk. The Shiv Sena's political aspirations could see the city turning into a communal cauldron yet again.
