Groping in the dark

India's handling of the terror attacks on its soil post-9/11 points to a deep-rooted anti-Muslim bias.

in New Delhi

INDIA'S polity in the decade after the 9/11 twin tower attacks has been dominated by four streams relating to issues of terrorism, security, governance, policy orientation, communalisation and societal discrimination. The cumulative impact of these has reflected as unrest and turbulence among large sections of the population, particularly the Muslim minority community. A number of instances highlighting these four dominant streams had unravelled themselves over the past decade, and there was one more in the national capital, Delhi, just four days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11. This came in the form of a bomb attack on the Delhi High court, which left 12 persons dead and approximately 50 injured.

The September 7 attack once again highlighted the inability of the administrative and security mechanisms to effectively monitor terrorist groups and their operations and prevent attacks on key institutions and locations. The Delhi High Court is located hardly a couple of kilometres away from the centres of national power such as the Parliament building and the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). In the days following the blast, two terrorist organisations the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami (HuJI) and the Indian Mujahideen (IM) claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The investigating agencies, however, refused to come up with a firm statement on their findings. Union Home Secretary R.K. Singh commented three days after the explosion that it was not necessary that the e-mails claiming responsibility for the blast were sent by the actual perpetrators. The inability of the investigating machinery to find the real perpetrators of terrorist attacks and lead them to the due process of law is nothing new. The Indian security establishment has time and again proved its incapacity over the past decade.

Informal estimates show that there were 25 major terrorist attacks in the country in the past decade. The most significant among them are the attack on Parliament House in December 2001, the blast in the busy Sarojini Nagar Market in Delhi in October 2005, the Mumbai blasts of July 2006, the Malegaon blast of September 2006, the Samjhauta Express blast of February 2007, the Hyderabad Mecca Masjid attack of May 2007, the Ajmer Dargah blasts of October 2007 and, the most blatant and heinous of all, the attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008. In most of these incidents, the security officials failed to identify the real perpetrators, and in some cases they ended up detaining and torturing scores of innocent people.

As a rule, the innocents who suffered detention and torture belonged to the Muslim community, essentially on account of an anti-Muslim mindset that has taken deep root in society in the years following 9/11. Several instances highlight the emergence and growth of this societal discrimination, but it is most starkly captured in the investigation that was carried out into five terrorist attacks that took place between 2006 and 2008. Specifically, these cases are related to the Malegaon blasts of September 2006 and September 2008, the Samjhauta Express blast, the Mecca Masjid attack, and the Ajmer blasts.

After each of these attacks, the security establishment came up with confident statements that they were carried out by jehadi organisations or their international associates. These were followed by the release of graphic details to show how the jehadi groups had carried out the attacks. Organisations such as the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the HuJI were specifically named. Several people were arrested and tried as part of the investigations.

The investigations into the Mecca Masjid attack, which witnessed the detention of 60 persons, are a case in point. Most of the arrested persons were branded as supporters of HuJI. The line of investigation advanced at that time by the Hyderabad Police, and broadly supported by the Central investigating agencies, was that Shahid Bilal, a resident of Moosrambagh in the Old City of Hyderabad, had carried out the blasts in order to create communal tension.

There were two first information reports (FIRs) in this case, one dealing with the blasts and the other dealing with the recovery of unexploded explosives. Charges ranging from involvement in seditious activity to conspiracy were brought against all the 60. The viewing of video recordings of the Babri Masjid demolition (in 1992) was held to be an act that spurred the suspects into resorting to terrorist acts. Large sections of the media approved these stories wholeheartedly and unquestioningly and spread them as the truth.

However, three years later, investigations by a section of the Maharashtra Police revealed that certain Hindutva groups had perpetrated all the five attacks in retaliation for jehadi terrorism. One of the persons apparently involved in the attacks, Swami Aseemanand, even made a confession in December 2010. It was revealed during the confession that a wide network of Hindutva terror groups had advanced its extremist activities systematically over seven years with the help of many leaders in mainstream Hindutva organisations as also groups within the organisations that are a part of the Sangh Parivar.

Aseemanand's confessional statement revealed that the Hindutva terror network drew sustenance from people of varied backgrounds social activists, religious leaders, politicians and even people from the defence. Some of the names mentioned included Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Lokesh Sharma, Lt. Col. Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Major (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, Swami Dayanand Pandey and Indresh Kumar, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh's national executive.

Aseemanand later retracted some portions of his confession, and the cases themselves are pending judicial scrutiny. Whatever the final verdict in these cases, the very nature of the investigation and the conflicting lines that emerged subsequently point to the presence of a deep-rooted anti-Muslim bias in a significant section of the Indian administrative and security establishment. According to the Azamgarh-based Muslim social activist Maulavi Faizal, these discriminatory practices have made life a living hell for hundreds of Muslims across the country. Faizal quoted the experience of Waliyullah and his family of Phoolpur in Uttar Pradesh as a case in point. Waliyullah was arrested in 2006 on the charge of perpetrating the blast at the Sankat Mochan mandir in Varanasi. He was tried in a fast-track court in Lucknow, but the charges of sedition and terrorism against him could not be proved. However, in 2008 he was convicted for possessing illegal arms and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Interestingly, a month after Waliyullah was convicted, an encounter took place at the Batla House in the Jamia Milia University area in New Delhi in which two youth were killed. A section of the security establishment branded them as the main perpetrators of the 2006 blast. The emergence of new perpetrators [of the same crime] points to the malfunctioning of the security system, Faizal pointed out. Obaidullah, Waliyullah's brother, told Frontline that every time a terrorist attack took place, he was rounded up for investigation and the media promptly found a connection between the Waliyullah family and the blast. Life indeed becomes hell for us in such times. Routine actions like going to the market to buy household items or sending children to school become tedious, dangerous tasks, Obaidullah says.

Faizal added that in several parts of the country this discrimination and its rabid manifestation had given rise to a new breed of Muslim youngsters who resorted to adventurism as a solution to their problems. In a sense, places as far-flung and relatively peaceful as Kerala have become a sort of breeding ground for terrorism. These youth organise themselves and recruit others to carry out dastardly acts of crime. The societal discrimination that Faizal highlighted is one of the major reasons for recurring terror attacks post-9/11.

Another dimension to the issue of terrorism, reflected at the level of policy orientation, manifested itself in the week after the 9/11 attack. This had come in the form of the Indian government's offer of unconditional support to the U.S. in its war against terror. By all indications, the understanding in the political establishment at that time was that the U.S. would naturally prefer India over neighbouring Pakistan, given Pakistan's close association with the Al Qaeda leadership.

In a sense, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee seemed to expect a qualitatively new relationship with Washington in the context of 9/11.

The U.S. rejected the offer, but the government persisted with it hoping for a U.S. rethink. These expectations were not fulfilled during the NDA's regime. In 2004, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance headed by Manmohan Singh, which formed the government, persisted with the pro-U.S. policy and in due course surrendered to U.S. interests through instruments such as the India-U.S. nuclear deal and the civilian Nuclear Liability Bill. But, despite this, India does not have a prominent role in America's war on terror, whereas Pakistan continues to have some role in it. Several segments of mainstream Indian polity, including the Left parties, have pointed to this policy orientation as a shift fraught with long-term negative ramifications. But, at the moment there seems to be no takers for such warnings.

Clearly, an overall assessment of India's policy responses in the decade after 9/11, especially in relation to the impact it has had, shows that it has wavered on many fronts.