Twenty-first Century India

AT WAR

Mumbai
India is now facing homegrown jihadis.

BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA
Sunday, July 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

When "London pride" was invoked a year ago to describe the grit and resilience of a city that remained undaunted by the horrible terrorist attacks on the Underground, it carried a measure of novelty in the contemporary era. By contrast, there was absolutely nothing unprecedented in the gushing--by either politicians or the media of Bombay (now renamed Mumbai)--over the remarkable display of the "Mumbai spirit" after the bomb blasts that killed nearly 200 people on Tuesday.

Human life, it is said, is remarkably cheap in India. Even so, it speaks volumes for the fortitude of Mumbaikars, as they like to refer to themselves, that after enduring Tuesday's carnage and the total disruption of the public transport system, it was back to business with a vengeance the very next morning--with the stock exchange climbing 3%.

After 9/11 heralded the scourge of Islamist terror, Mumbai was attacked on Aug. 25, 2003. Two powerful car bombs, including one in the parking lot of the Gateway of India, a British-made monument that has become the symbol of the city, killed 60 people. The perpetrators were Muslim activists who, it was said, wanted to extract revenge for the murder of fellow Muslims during riots in the neighboring state of Gujarat. Mumbai, once again, refused to be provoked, not least because the purpose of the bombings was never clear. It was a case of mysterious enemies targeting innocent people.

The rationale behind Tuesday's seven serial explosions in the first-class carriages of commuter trains wasn't quite apparent 24 hours later. At least 200 people have died and the identity of the terrorists is still a matter of conjecture. Intelligence agencies and the police strongly believe the blasts were the handiwork of Islamist terrorists. The involvement of shadowy organizations such as the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), which has training camps in neighboring Bangladesh, is suspected. There are also suggestions that the Mumbai blasts were timed to coincide with the grenade attacks in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, by LeT terrorists, which killed six tourists from Calcutta.

Police investigations may bring out the details of the murderous conspiracy in Mumbai. For the moment, however, bewildered Mumbaikars are asking the questions: Why us? What do these terrorists want? In London and Madrid, the bombers were, avowedly, protesting the presence of British and Spanish forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there are no Indian troops assisting U.S. peacekeepers anywhere in the world. There is, of course, a Muslim secessionist movement in Jammu and Kashmir but, with the exception of last October's bombing of two crowded markets in Delhi, Kashmiri separatists have confined activities to the northern state.

The Mumbai blasts lack both a face and an ostensible reason. Some of the terrorists may be motivated by a crazy wish to usher in an Islamic Caliphate throughout the world, but this desire is too fantastic for ordinary comprehension. There are also rogue elements within the Pakistan security establishment which yearn to bleed India with "a thousand cuts"--to use a metaphor from across the border. Yet, popular antipathy toward Pakistan is nowhere as intense as it was when the Indian Parliament was attacked on Dec. 13, 2001, and the then-prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, angrily promised a "war to the finish."

Today, Mumbaikars combine a sense of horror with an air of phlegmatic resignation. They have put their admirable sense of community--rushing the wounded to hospital, donating blood, feeding stranded commuters and offering rides to total strangers--over any contrived outrage against an invisible enemy.

The adversary, however, is not entirely unknown. Over the past two years, India has been in a state of denial over mounting evidence that the emerging threat is not from those acting at the behest of their controllers in Islamabad, but homegrown jihadis. In Mumbai, the finger of suspicion is pointing to terrorist modules based in either the town of Aurangabad, east of Mumbai, or the cyber-city of Hyderabad, to the south. Last month, police seized an incredible 43 kilograms of RDX and 13 AK-47s from the tourist town of Ellora, near Aurangabad. The man facing charges for organizing the bombings in the temple town of Varanasi on March 7 this year is an imam from a neighboring town who was once a full-time SIMI organizer. An audacious attack on the disputed mosque in Ayodhya last year, too, was facilitated by local Muslims acting in concert with terrorists who entered from Bangladesh.

The suggestion that Islamist terrorism has developed strong roots within India is one that the government in New Delhi does not relish. The Congress Party, the regional parties and the Communists who are the constituents of the ruling coalition, depend substantially on Muslims--13% of the population--for political sustenance. This explains why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has encountered strong resistance against pressing on with India's deepening strategic relationship with the U.S. It also accounts for the government's complete unwillingness to act on intelligence reports that the protests against George Bush's visit in February had the financial backing of the clerics in Iran.

India has often boasted that its vibrant democracy ensured that there was no Indian to be found in al Qaeda. Nominally, the claim is incontrovertible, but Islamist terrorism is not manifested through the direct control of bin Laden alone. The LeT, HuJI and SIMI are carbon copies of al Qaeda. They all have Indian Muslim adherents, including educated professionals, many of whom have received arms training in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Indian politicians frequently blame a "foreign hand" for terrorism. The assertion is not untrue. But after Tuesday's savagery, they would also do well to look at a burgeoning homegrown menace. The Mumbai blasts may symbolize the coming of age of Islamism in India.