Investigations into terrorist strikes, including the latest one in Bangalore, bring out evidence of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's unending jehad against India and the ways in which communal conflict has aided it.
"TODAY, inshallah, I announce the break-up of India," thundered Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the patron of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, at a rally in November 1999, organised by its parent organisation, the Markaz Dawa wal Irshad.
Held just months after the Kargil War, the Markaz rally was intended to proclaim to the world that Pakistan's principal Islamist group had not bowed in the face of what it saw as a humiliating, Western-authored capitulation to India. "We will not rest," Saeed assured his audience, "until the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan". In a subsequent speech, Saeed promised the mujahideen he was sending to India that "Allah will save them from the fires of hell", and that those martyred by "infidel enemies" will have "huge palaces in Paradise".
Saeed's speech, which not a single newspaper in India reported, almost obliterated much of South Asia. Just two years after it was delivered, an escalating spiral of jehadist attacks carried out by the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad culminated in the December 13, 2001, attack on Parliament House. Indian troops moved forward to offensive positions along the border with Pakistan, in the largest military mobilisation since the Second World War. Until some indelicate arm-twisting by the United States led Pakistan to promise an end to jehadist activities against India, it appeared that there was no escape from a war that could only too easily have escalated into a nuclear exchange.
Less than four years after that near-catastrophe, Indians have had to confront a renewed wave of jehadist terrorism: the December 28 Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the serial bombing of New Delhi just weeks earlier have made clear the war Saeed had promised is far from over. It is, however, a war that is little understood even in India.
A FEW bored residents of Mumbai's Mominpura slum were the only witnesses of a protracted harangue by an obscure West Bengal cleric named Abu Masood, declaring the birth of what would become the Indian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba: the Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen (TIM), or the Organisation for the Improvement of Muslims.
In the summer of 1985, inflamed by a wave of communal violence that had ripped apart the town of Bhiwandi, activists of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis' ultra-Right Gorba faction had gathered to discuss the need for Muslim reprisal. Azam Ghauri, the fifth of the 11 children of an impoverished Hyderabad family who had flirted with the People's War before discovering religion, spoke with passion of the community's need for a Shiv Sena-style vigilante organisation. Abdul Karim `Tunda', yet to earn the nickname that he earned after losing his left arm in a bomb-making accident, also delivered a speech.
Both men would go on to become the twin poles of the Lashkar's jehad in India, the founders of a terror apparatus that now has the capacity to strike nationwide. In the late-1980s, though, the TIM's activities barely merited an entry in the local police station's diaries of community events. Mimicking the drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh's (RSS) shakhas, Ghauri and Karim paraded their recruits around the grounds of the Young Men's Christian Association. Most of the TIM's membership consisted of young Mominpura residents who felt upset at the pervasive discrimination against Muslims in Mumbai, and were concerned that large-scale communal violence might break out in the city.
Among the TIM's most enthusiastic recruits was Jalees Ansari, the son of a worker at the now-closed Raghuvanshi Mill, on Tulsi Pipe Road. 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, after earning a degree in medicine from the Sion Medical College, started to work for the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Despite his success, Ansari was embittered by communalism. Students and staff at the Maratha College, Ansari later said, often insulted Muslims, and his Hindu colleagues did not treat their Muslim patients with care.
On December 6, 1992, the day Hindu fanatics demolished the Babri Masjid, the doctor decided that the time had come to give up his medical practice and to start to kill. Precisely a year after the Babri Masjid was brought down, Ansari organised a series of 43 small bombings in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate explosions on inter-city trains. While most of the explosions were small, it was demonstration of the group's formidable discipline and skills. Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) agents caught up with Ansari just 13 days before he had been ordered to set off a second series of reprisal bombings, this time scheduled for the Republic Day in 1994.
Both Karim and Ghauri, however, had by then disappeared. Karim travelled to Kolkata, and with the help of the TIM's old contacts in the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, travelled on to Dhaka. There he was taken under the wing of Zaki-ur-Rahman, a long-standing Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who had been tasked with developing the terror group's operational capabilities outside of Jammu and Kashmir. Ghauri, for his part, hid himself in Andhra Pradesh until he was able to obtain a fake passport. He then left for Saudi Arabia. In 1995, Indian intelligence officials believe, a Saudi national Hamid Bahajib arranged for his travel to Pakistan - and to a Lashkar training camp.
OVER coming years, the two men would set up the infrastructure for a terrorist network as complex as the most intricate carpet: a carpet with pan-India connections as its warp and transnational connections as its weave.
By 1996, operating through the Dhaka-based Islamic Chattra Shibir [Islamic Students Organisation], Karim was running a formidable network through North India: what Lashkar headquarters called the Mohammad bin-Qasim dasta, or squad. Amongst his first recruits was Amir Hashim, a young Delhi resident who had just completed his seventh grade at the Mazrul Islam Higher Secondary School when his family moved to Karachi. In Pakistan, Hashim discovered the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis - and, in late-1994, began to work for the Lashkar's new office in Karachi. He returned to India in 1996, and promptly executed a series of bombings in Delhi, Rohtak and Jalandhar.
Pakistani nationals also had an important role in Karim's operations. In July 1998, for example, the Delhi Police arrested Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faislabad district who had set up a covert terror cell in the town of Khurja. A year later, the Jammu and Kashmir Police broke up a cell run by another Pakistani, Amir Khan, with operatives in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi. Perhaps the most successful of the Lashkar's agents was Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran, in Pakistan's Jhelum district. Operating under the alias Salim Junaid, Ishtiaq obtained an Indian passport, set up a trucking business out of Hyderabad that served to transport explosives secretly, and even married a local resident, Momina Khatoon.
Ghauri returned to India in 1998, responding to desperate pleas from Karim after Junaid's arrest that year had left the Lashkar's Andhra Pradesh-based network in ruins. He soon discovered that the task of rebuilding the Lashkar would be less than easy. His key associate, Abdul Aziz Sheikh, had left the Lashkar and begun to work for the mafia of Shakeel Ahmad Babu, Dawood Ibrahim's Karachi-based lieutenant. Known to Hyderabad Police old-timers as `Bombay Javed', Sheikh continued to operate against Hindu-chauvinist targets. In the summer of 1999, for example, he attempted to assassinate the Shiv Sena leader Milind Vaidya, who had played a key role in the Mumbai communal pogrom of 1993. However, Sheikh now worked for cash - not ideological commitment alone.
Within six months, however, Ghauri had a new network in place. He turned to the Maqbool Zubair, a hit-man who had worked for Mohammad Fasiuddin, a Nalgonda-based gang leader. Fasiuddin, who was killed in a 1993 police encounter, had won some community legitimacy by executing local Hindu fundamentalist leaders Papiah Goud and Nanda Raj Goud as retaliation for the 1992 anti-Muslim pogrom in Hyderabad. With Zubair acting as his liaison with the local community, Ghauri succeeded in raising several recruits by the end of 1999, including Mansoor Khatik, who was charged with running an independent Lashkar cell in Nanded, and Sayyed Mukhtar Ahmed Shafiq, who was made responsible for communications with the organisation's headquarters near Lahore.
On February 6, 2000, the Lashkar's top ideologue, Abdul Rehman Makki, declared war. Speaking at a Lashkar convention, Makki announced that the organisation had set in place a new campaign to liberate Hyderabad from Hindu rule. Like Junagarh, he announced, Hyderabad had been seized by force - and would be won back through the sword. Bombs went off soon afterwards in cinema theatres in Karimnagar and Nanded; two explosive devices planted near a Defence Research and Development Organisation facility were defused before they could do damage. All these devices were low-grade, put together with potassium permanganate, aluminium powder and fertilizer: the very kind Karim had taught so many young operatives to make.
PAKISTAN, declared Makki at an August 11, 2004, press conference, "would only be complete when the Muslim-majority States of India became part of it". His assertion made clear one stark fact: despite Ghauri's elimination in an encounter that took place just eight weeks after Makki's declaration of war, and the loss of dozens of other Lashkar operatives to Indian counter-intelligence operations, its terror capabilities remained functional and committed to the organisation's war-without-end. Just how durable the networks set up by the Lashkar has been was made clear in the course of investigations into the Bangalore attack. Nalgonda resident Mohammad Riaz-ur-Rahman, held for having had a central role in the terrorist outrage, is alleged to have been recruited by the Lashkar during his 13 years in Saudi Arabia. Although it is unclear just what his links with the Hyderabad-based elements of the Lashkar might have been, Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) officials had long been monitoring his movements on suspicion that he was running funds to the organisation. "We're fairly certain he would have known Ghauri," a senior I.B. source told Frontline.
While the authorities have described Riaz-ur-Rahman as the head of the Lashkar's South Asian operations, the truth is that the organisation has no one single source of authority: more likely, the alleged Lashkar operative commanded just one of several parallel networks. Interestingly, investigators have also detained at least three individuals in Tamil Nadu for their possible role in the Bangalore attacks. Ever since the 1997 communal violence in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu has a strong, but little discussed, subculture of recruitment to the Lashkar-affiliated groups. Aided by competition between traditional Hindu trading elites and an emerging Muslim bourgeoisie, organisations such as the Islamic Defence Force, al-Mujahideen and the Muslim Defence Force have secured a slow trickle of recruits.
To those who have been following the workings of the Lashkar's pan-India war, the cross-State linkages that have emerged from the Bangalore investigation are no surprise. Mohammad Asghar Ali, charged by the CBI with having assassinated former Gujarat Minister of State for Home Haren Pandya, provides a graphic illustration of the workings of these linkages. The son of a retired police sub-inspector, Ali joined the Fasiuddin mafia in Nalgonda in 1991. Soon afterward, he joined in the mafia's efforts to carry out retaliatory strikes on Hindu fundamentalists engaged in the violence that broke out after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and was recruited by Ghauri in 1998. Ali was arrested by the Andhra Pradesh Police in 2000 on charges of possessing explosives, but he jumped bail.
Having made his way to Dubai, intelligence officials believe, he made contact with Abdul Bari, a Riyadh-based former resident of Hyderabad long involved in Lashkar operations. Bari, a key financier of several small Lashkar-affiliated groups such as the Muslim Defence Force, is believed to have organised a 2002 bombing of a Sai Baba temple. Bari, informed sources say, paid for Ali's stay in West Asia, and then arranged for him to be trained at a Lashkar camp in Pakistan. In early 2002, when the Gujarat communal pogrom began, Bari made contact with an Ahmedabad-based cleric, Maulana Sufiyan Patangia, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia for a pilgrimage. Patangia offered assistance to recruit cadre in order to help Ali stage a terror operation to avenge the pogrom.
Growing synergies between Lashkar cadre in Jammu and Kashmir and those operating elsewhere in India have also been apparent. In June, 2004, the Ahmedabad Police shot dead four Lashkar operatives believed by Indian intelligence to have been planning to assassinate former Union Home Minister L.K. Advani. Pune resident Javed Sheikh and his Mumbai-based girlfriend Ishrat Jehan Raza, it turned out, had been tasked by the Lashkar with conducting two Pakistani nationals to Ahmedabad for the strike. Sheikh was also central to separate Lashkar-led plans to attack the Mumbai Stock Exchange. An ethnic-Kashmiri medical student in Pune, Manzoor Ahmad Chilloo, was tasked by his Lashkar controllers in Srinagar with liaising between Sheikh and the operatives who would eventually have carried out the attack in Mumbai.
Learning from experience, the Lashkar has increasingly separated the fidayeen operatives used to execute a terror attack from the cells who facilitate it. In the case of the September 2002 attack on the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar, for example, the Jammu and Kashmir-based Lashkar operational commander Manzoor Zahid Chowdhury despatched two Pakistani nationals to carry out the attack. The weapons and explosives used were ferried through Chand Usman Khan, a Bareilly resident who ran a car mechanic's store. However, the fidayeen themselves were conducted to Akshardham by another circle of Lashkar operatives, recruited by Maulvi Abdul Qayoom, an Ahmedabad cleric. Similarly, Tariq Dar, the Lashkar operative assigned overall responsibility for organising the recent serial bombings in Delhi, did not personally involve himself in executing the terror strikes.
TO anyone willing to look seriously at the growing reach and capabilities of Islamist terrorism in India, several lessons are apparent. Sadly, successive governments have proved reluctant to learn them; the media, for the most part, have chosen to be economical with the truth.
What might these lessons be? First and foremost, the Lashkar's jehad has been fed and informed by the campaign of terror waged by Hindu fundamentalists against India's Muslims. Abdul Karim `Tunda' or the leaders of the Lashkar's Indian operations were not the only Muslims to have been pushed to terrorism by the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the communal pogroms that followed it. For example, the mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar, against the crime lord's own better judgment, engineered the serial bombings of Mumbai in 1993. So, too, as we have seen, did other mafia groups elsewhere: those of Fasiuddin in Andhra Pradesh, notably. Muslim mafia organisations and Islamist groups thus gained legitimacy from the failures of the Indian state.
Second, the failure of most mainstream parties to articulate Muslim anger at communal violence has led some in the community to turn to Islamist terror groups who at least offer the illusion of delivering justice. As a consequence, figures such as Ghauri, Tunda and even the Pakistani Lashkar operative were able to draw on cadre from the now-proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) with ease. With its wide reach, SIMI even developed transnational links. Abdul Rahman, an activist of the Dulkan organisation of ethnic Uighurs in China's Xinjiang region who was arrested by the Kolkata Police in January 2000, was sheltered in the city by two SIMI members, Aziz-ul-Haq and Nazrul Islam.
Banning SIMI has not, however, solved the problem. Jehadi groups continue to recruit from the religious Right, notably the Ahl-e-Hadis' Gorba faction and the Tablighi Jamaat. Where mainstream Ahl-e-Hadis bodies such as the Delhi-based Ahl-e-Hadis Conference accept the legitimacy of the Indian state, the Gorba sect rejects its right to exercise power. For its part, the Tablighi Jamaat, perhaps the largest Islamic proselytisation body in the world, formally rejects any involvement even in politics, let alone terrorism. However, its reactionary theological positions are only a short distance from the Lashkar belief system - and dozens of recruits in both India and Pakistan have made the journey.
What can be done? Better policing, improved intelligence and effective border management are part of the answer. However, without justice to victims of communal violence, and effective deterrents against it, the slow trickle of recruits to organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba will most likely continue. As India braces itself to deal with another jehad - the eastern jehad now being unleashed by Bangladesh-based Islamist groups such as the Harkat ul-Jihad Islami - the largest challenge before it is to give real substance to its own promise of secularism and democracy.
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