It is, of course, nigh-impossible to prevent soft-target terrorist attacks; but after decades of experience, the state’s responses to such incidents should, minimally, have attained a modicum of professionalism, order and efficiency. Instead, chaos invariably reigns at every incident location after each such incident. The Police and emergency services’ responses are slow and clumsy, with a repeated and abject failure to secure the incident location, with crowds milling over the crime scene with impunity even long after the arrival of the Police, and with ordinary, untrained, albeit well-intentioned, civilians picking up the injured – and often the dismembered body parts of the dead – to transfer them to hospitals in whatever makeshift transport that is available, often increasing the trauma of injuries sustained by the victims.

The incompetence of responses is particularly manifest in the political commentary that follows each such incident, reflecting the appalling lack of comprehension that the country’s political leadership displays of the nature and dimensions of the terrorism that has come to afflict ever-widening areas in the country. Beyond the utter inanities of condemning the ‘dastardly deed’, wisely informing the public that this is a ‘terrorist act’, and expressing determination to fight the menace, there is little that could inspire confidence in the public that the people in charge have, in fact, a clue about what they are doing. In any event, once the media furore after the latest incident dies down, things tend to return to the routine, with no evidence of any coherent or significant change attitudes, orientation or capacities that could diminish the possibilities of future attacks, or improve the character and quality of future responses.

This was particularly visible in the ludicrous and ignorant ‘blame game’ that commenced immediately after the serial blasts in Uttar Pradesh. Chief Minister Mayawati was quick to call a Press Conference, where she declared that the attacks were no fault of her Government, because the central Intelligence agencies had failed to warn her that such an attack was imminent. That an individual who is serving her fourth tenure as Chief Minister of a State should display such complete ignorance of the Constitutional distribution of powers and obligations, reflects the sad plight of India’s political leadership. The Chief Minister then proceeded – incomprehensibly, if we are to accept her own argument of the Centre’s culpability – to transfer the Additional Director General of the Special Task Force (STF) responsible for counter-terrorism responses in the State, purportedly in order to facilitate "better operational purposes", and to berate State Police officers for their laxity.

The response to Mayawati’s accusations against the Centre came in the form of a ‘rebuttal’ by the Union Minister of State for Home, Sri Prakash Jaiswal, who declared that Uttar Pradesh had, in fact, been ‘alerted about the possibility of terrorist attacks at public places’. It is incomprehensible, again, how such a generalised ‘alert’ could have helped prevent an attack on any specific target.

The truth is, there was a sufficient history of Islamist terrorist activity in Uttar Pradesh over the past years, and specific intelligence available with the UP Police and administration relating to possible attacks against lawyers in the State to justify far greater vigilance and preparedness around the Courts in the State. According to the State Police, at least 34 Districts out of a total of 70, including the capital city, Lucknow, have been identified as ‘sensitive’ in terms of activities of Islamist terrorists and subversives backed by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). In November 2006, a UP Police report indicated that there had been terrorist-related crimes in 17 of the State’s 70 Districts – including Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi, which were targeted in the Friday, November 23, serial bombings. Another Police report indicated that "UP had emerged as one of the major centres of the activities of the ISI and its proxy terrorist groups in India, and that ‘sleeper modules’ had infiltrated several cities and small towns in the State, with both the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) active across wide areas of the State. In addition, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which was founded in the State, had substantial networks and support in several towns and Districts, including Lucknow, Kanpur, Aligarh, Agra, Faizabad, Bahraich, Barabanki, Lakhimpur Kheri and Azamgarh. Further recruitment drives by the SIMI had also been noticed in Jaunpur, Allahabad, Sonauli, Ferozabad and Hathras.

Significantly, according to the Union Home Ministry, out of 39 Pakistani espionage modules interdicted across the country between 2004 and November 20, 2007, 10 were located and neutralised in UP, in Agra, Meerut, Varanasi, Rampur, Lucknow and Saharanpur Districts. The South Asia Terrorism Portal database indicates, further, that, of the 91 terrorist modules that were identified and neutralised across the country (outside Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast) between 2004 and November 25, 2007, eight were located in UP.

Crucially, the now abruptly disgraced STF had, on November 16, 2007, arrested three suspected JeM militants with RDX, detonators, grenades, AK rifles and other weapons and ammunition. The group is believed to have been tasked to target various political leaders, including the Congress Party General Secretary and Member of Parliament, Rahul Gandhi. Earlier, on July 27, 2007, the STF had recovered two kilograms of RDX and two detonators from an industrial area on the Lucknow-Kanpur Road in Unnao District, following information provided by an arrested HuJI militant, Noor Islam Mandal of 24 Paragana District, West Bengal.

More specifically, there was a clearly recognized risk of attack against lawyers in UP, in view of their collective refusal to defend any accused in cases of Islamist terrorism in the past, as well as at least two incidents in which such accused persons were roughed up by lawyers when they were brought to the Courts to attend proceedings. There was sufficient intelligence relating to this danger within the State Police echelons.

How then were the serial blasts possible?

The answers are simple. First, as stated before, it is impossible to preclude the possibility of all soft-target strikes, except if specific intelligence relating to target, timing and operational agency is available – and no such intelligence was, in fact, available. Two, there is always a protected perimeter within which prevention is possible, but wherever such a perimeter is placed, the areas outside remain vulnerable – and it is physically impossible to extend the protective perimeter to all vulnerable areas. It is significant that the serial blasts on November 23 occurred, not within the Courts’ building complexes, where entry is monitored and some security measures are in place, but in the wider Court compounds, outside the security perimeter, where there is unmonitored public access. This is similar to the attack at the Sankat Mochan Temple in Varanasi on March 7, 2006, when the attack occurred just outside the Police barricades where people were frisked before entry into the Temple complex.

Crucially, however, such attacks occur – and will continue to occur with sickening regularity – because there are acute deficiencies in India’s Police and Intelligence capacities. Uttar Pradesh is a glaring case in point, with just 94 policemen per 100,000 population, as against a national average of 143, and international norms that recommend at least 250 per 100,000. Significantly, some Western countries have forces in ratios close to 500 per 100,000 population.

As regards national capacities for intelligence gathering, the less said the better. The Girish Saxena Committee, set up to look into the deficiencies of the intelligence establishment after the Kargil War, recommended massive upgrading of the country’s technical, imaging, signal, electronic counter-intelligence and economic intelligence capabilities, and a system-wide reform of conventional human-intelligence gathering. Every recommendation of the Saxena Committee was accepted by the Group of Ministers, who released their recommendations in February 2001. However, these recommendations remain unimplemented, over six years later, beyond a few symbolic changes. One of the recommendations called for a ‘multi-agency set up’ to confront the challenges of terrorism, and this was, at least formally, implemented through the creation of two new wings under the Intelligence Bureau (IB): the Multi Agency Centre (MAC), collecting and coordinating terrorism-related information from across the country, and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI), for passing on this information to the State Governments in real-time. Regrettably, both MAC and JTFI remain under-staffed, under-equipped and ineffective, with even basic issues relating to their administration unsettled. Their principal objective, the creation of a national terrorism database, has made little progress. The JTFI was also given the responsibility of upgrading counter-terrorism capabilities in the State Police Forces, but no effective programmes for training or capacity enhancement have been initiated. Another critical aspect of existing intelligence gathering operations in India is that these continue to rely overwhelmingly on HUMINT, with the TECHINT component in urgent and drastic need for improvement. Difficulties of integration of intelligence, professionalism, autonomy and, crucially, modernization are acute, and in many areas the gap between capacities and needs is growing. India’s intelligence penetration is severely inadequate, and is overwhelmingly limited to urban and strategic locations, leaving vast hinterlands ‘uncovered’.

The Saxena Committee had, further, recommended at least an additional 3,000 cadres in the IB in 2001. Till date, just 800 additional posts have been sanctioned (in 2004), though the requirements would now be even greater.

Indeed, the results that the IB has been able to secure despite these tremendous capacity deficits are astonishing. While authoritative figures on the subject are hard to come by, sources indicate that the total manpower available with the IB for intelligence gathering across the country is no more than 3,500, in a population of over a billion people, and counter-terrorist intelligence comprehends only a very small fraction of the IB’s mandate.

Moreover, enforcement and intelligence agencies are further inhibited by unscrupulous and self-serving political interference that directly undermines national security. As K.P.S. Gill noted shortly after the November 23 attack,

Vote bank politics has given free rein to Islamist fundamentalist forces, and politicians have repeatedly interfered in actions against those who have facilitated the extremist-terrorist entrenchment in the State. Police officials in the State have constantly warned against the rising dangers, but such officers have often been hounded by the political executive for doing their duty.

The serial blasts in Court compounds in Uttar Pradesh are best seen as the latest link in a long chain of comparable terrorist attacks by Islamist groupings that have long received safe haven, sustenance and support from Pakistan and, increasingly, Bangladesh. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that a number of Indians are now an integral part of the operational cadres of these groups, and that the networks of Islamist extremism and terror, assiduously cultivated by Pakistani agencies over the decades, have now established a substantial footprint across India. If this threat is to be neutralised before it gets out of hand, and before it is infinitely augmented by compounding developments in the South and West Asian neighbourhoods, a tremendous effort of enhancement in India’s policing and intelligence capacities across State and Central institutions and agencies is an imperative. These are the issues that the country’s political executive needs to address, instead of trading nonsense in the wake of every terrorist strike, and then quickly lapsing into a habitual torpor.

The writer is the Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi, India.

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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