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OPINION

The Jihad Runs Deep
Ajai Sahni

The reminders are as relentless as our efforts to deny, to forget. So, again, a little over a month after the Delhi cinema hall blasts of May 22, 2005, sought to inflame Sikh passions, a fidayeen (suicide squad) attack on the disputed Ramjanmabhoomi Site at Ayodhya in the State of Uttar Pradesh was engineered to polarize Hindus and Muslims across the country. Both incidents failed to provoke the wider backlash they were intended to trigger, but the intent, the purpose, the efforts, remain unwavering, and evidence of the enormous supportive infrastructure based in Pakistan, and an expanding network of subversive cells in India, adds up continuously.

It is premature to speak authoritatively of the identity and affiliations of the individuals involved in the July 5 Ayodhya attack, but some indicators bear notice. Cell phone records traced back from one of the instruments recovered from the terrorists have helped track their movements back to Lucknow and Akbarpur in Uttar Pradesh, and calls to Pakistan have also confirmed their linkages with handlers or associates in that country. Significantly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose the aftermath of the Ayodhya incident to reiterate that the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan was yet to be dismantled and stated, further, that incidents like Ayodhya could impact adversely on the peace process. It is a different matter, of course, that he was contradicted in this latter claim by his own Home Minister, who was quick to state that Ayodhya would have 'no impact' on the Indo-Pak talks. The apparent contradiction is, perhaps, explicable in terms of the different time frames within which the two leaders were speaking, the Prime Minister focusing on the long term impact of continued Pakistan-backed subversion and terror, the Home Minister speaking of the direct impact of this specific incident; or it could be explained in terms of the habitual muddle-headedness that afflicts India's top policy echelons.

Despite the efforts of a sensationalist media and opportunistic elements within the Hindu far-right to milk the Ayodhya incident, it is abundantly clear that this failed attack was just another and abortive attempt to polarize communities within the country. Once the dust has settled, its abject failure will relegate it to a long list of minor terrorist attacks in the country. But Ayodhya is no more than the tip of the iceberg.

The enormity of Pakistan's subversive enterprise in India can be gauged from the fact that, since mid-1998, a single Central intelligence unit charged with monitoring Pakistan backed Islamist terrorist and subversive activities outside Jammu & Kashmir has identified and neutralized as many as 222 terrorist and espionage cells across the country. 641 persons were arrested (39 of these were Pakistani nationals) and another 51 (30 Pakistanis) were killed during these operations. In addition, while consolidated data on this is unavailable, there has been a significant number of arrests carried out by various State Police units. No region and virtually no State in the country has remained unaffected by the activities of these cells. While a comprehensive listing of all these cells, their activities and their affiliations is not possible here, it is useful to look at a sample of the more important modules detected and neutralized in the current year.

January 16, 2005: The Delhi Police arrested a Pakistan trained terrorist, Aijaz Ahmed Farash of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) at Karol Bagh. February 12, 2005: The Delhi Police arrested a Pakistani agent, Mohammed Ahsun Untoo, from Church road in the Cantonment area. March 7, 2005: A Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) cadre, Iftikar Ehsan Malik, was arrested from Dehradun, Uttranchal. March 10, 2005: Khalil Husain Shah, a suspected Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent, arrested at Lalkurti, Uttar Pradesh. March 19, 2005: Eyaz Mohammad, a member of the Al Badr, arrested at Kaliachak in Malda, West Bengal. April 28, 2005: Abdul Rezzak, a suspected ISI agent, arrested in Mumbai, Maharashtra, for running a fake currency racket. May 11, 2005: Mohammad Aish-ur-Rahman, a citizen of Nepal suspected to be linked with the ISI, arrested from the New Delhi Railway Station with high quality heroin worth INR 10 million and fake currency of INR 195,000. May 12, 2005: Harun Rashid, a resident of Siwan, Bihar, working with the LeT, arrested at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi. May 15, 2005: Mohammed Hasifuddin, working for the ISI, arrested at Minkrie Village, Khliehriat Police Station, Meghalaya, with 400 gelatine sticks. He is believed to have supplied explosives for the August 15, 2004, blasts in the Dhemaji town of Assam. May 30, 2005: ISI agent Mohammad Mehmood @ Sahil @ Aplu arrested from a hotel in Ajmer, Rajasthan. June 10, 2005: An HM cadre, Ali Mohammed, arrested with RDX at the Inter-State Bus Terminus, New Delhi. He transported explosives to supply to a module of the organisation in Delhi. July 1, 2005: Four terrorists, Masood, Zahid, Bashir and Nazir, are arrested from the South-West Delhi area. Recoveries included arms, ammunition and a map of the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

In addition to these, the Pakistan backed Sikh terrorist module involved in the Delhi cinema hall blasts was also uncovered:

June 1, 2005: Jaspal Singh arrested at Inderpuri in Delhi with 1 kilogram of RDX, a timer, detonator, rifle, ammunition and several fake driving licenses. June 5, 2005: Two Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) activists, Bahadur Singh and Gurdip Singh, arrested from Nawanshahar, Punjab. A kilogram of RDX, 11 detonators and cordex wires were recovered from them. June 8, 2005: Jagtar Singh Hawara, 'operations chief' of the BKI in India arrested with two other accused in the Cinema hall blasts from an industrial area in Narela, West Delhi. 10.35 kilograms of RDX, pistols, ammunition, three remote-controlled explosive devices, and hand grenades were recovered during the arrests.

Several other arrests have also taken place since in a 'mopping up' exercise targeting Hawara's associates and the support structure that facilitated the module's shelter, movement and operations.

This small selection of cells - linked together only by the accident of the timing of their detection - illustrates the sheer spread, intensity and relentless character of the Pakistan-backed enterprise of terror in India. While terrorist activities and attacks offer the most dramatic instances of the existing threat, there is a far more insidious danger that continues to be nurtured in, and exported from, Pakistan: the continued, vigorous and universal propagation of the ideology of jihad, of communal polarization and hatred, the demonization of all other faiths in the eyes of the Muslims, the continuous recruitment of cadres and the build-up of widely distributed arms caches for future use.

This process is not unique to India, and the Islamist extremist enterprise - both with state support from Pakistan and within more autonomous non-state groups - is replicating a process of 'encirclement and penetration' in target communities across the world. The process often precedes actual terrorist activity by years, if not decades, and passes through the following stages:

A 'hardening' of Islam through a distortion of the relatively pluralistic practices of South Asian Muslims - a process of "religious mobilisation and an extremist Islamist reorientation" that may extend over decades before it is translated into violence. This involves a triad of ideological concepts: the transnational Islamic ummah, khilafat and jihad. The transfer of populations and demographic destabilisation - both externally induced and natural - have been powerful complementarities in these processes.

The second stage of this process is the mobilisation of motivated Islamist cadres for political action, and for support activities to existing terrorist operations, both in present areas of such operation as well as in all potential areas of expansion. Such potential areas are conceived, within the pan-Islamist perspective, to comprehend all concentrations of Muslim populations, wherever these may be located.

The third stage involves exfiltration and training of such cadres for terrorist operations - in the past, primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These processes continue in camps in Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). The fourth stage involves the infiltration of these cadres back into the target communities, either for immediate terrorist operation in 'active' theatres, or for the creation of cells that engage in consolidation activities, further recruitment, the build-up of arms and ammunition caches, financial mobilisation, propaganda, the creation of 'front organisations' that engage in legal and political activities based on an exploitation of the institutions and processes of democracy to undermine democracy, or as 'sleepers', awaiting instructions for deployment and terrorist action.

The actual scope of the penetration of these processes comprehends elements - large or small - within virtually every major pocket of Muslim populations in South Asia - particularly, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Most of the major groups involved in Islamist terrorist activities in India have a transnational presence, with bases, training facilities, headquarters and supply lines located particularly in Pakistan, with Bangladesh as a secondary player, and with operational linkages with the larger pan-Islamist enterprise of terrorism. More specifically, the major Islamist terrorist actors in the region are either directly connected, or have had mediated linkages, with the Al Qaeda.

There is sufficient evidence of Pakistan's abiding support to a wide range of jihadi groups in its covert war against India. The export of terror to J&K, thus continues, although there has been a secular decline in the number of incidents and fatalities since 9/11, related essentially to an erosion of Pakistan's capacities to sustain a high intensity conflict in this State as a result of increasing international - and particular US - pressures, as well as an enormous media focus on Pakistani activities in this region. Significantly, the trends in fatalities have, since 9/11, shown no correlation between 'peace processes' or periods of acute belligerence between the two countries. Thus, even as peace talks with India continue to be pursued as a parallel tactic, 1,810 persons were killed in J&K in 2004 in violence related to Pakistan-backed terrorism; another 915 had lost their lives in 2005, by July 10. Pakistan also continues to extend support to terrorism by ideologically incompatible groups such as the Khalistani (Sikh) terrorists to whom it continues to play host even over twelve years after the comprehensive defeat of terrorism in the Indian province of Punjab; and to ethnic insurgencies in India's Northeast. There is now some evidence of arms and ammunition supplies to Left Wing extremists active across a widening swathe of territory along India's eastern board.

Further, across Europe, America, South, South East and Central Asia, and Africa, evidence of continued subversion and of the persistence of terrorist training camps and activities in Pakistan continues to crop up with the arrest and disruption of a number of Islamist extremist cells. In the US alone, this has included the arrest of several 'modules', the latest in Lodi, California, in which one of the accused confessed that he had attended a jihadi training facility run by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, as recently as 2003-2004, at, according to reports, "Tamal in Rawalpindi" (probably Dhamial in Rawalpindi, where Rehman has run a 'jihad factory' for many years). While investigations into the London bombings of July 7, 2005, are yet in the preliminary stages, Pakistani linkages have repeatedly cropped up in media reports, and varying estimates of British citizens who have undergone terrorist training in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been thrown up in assessments of the future potential of terrorist activities in the UK. Unless the production lines of the global jihad are destroyed, more and more terrorist modules are going to be discovered across the world - and at least some of these are going to slip through intelligence filters to execute their missions of devastation.

The proclivity of states and the international community to focus only on the most dramatic incidents of terrorist violence, and on the dubious pronouncements of Pakistan's military dictator and his proxies in Government, ignores this gradual and sustained campaign of subversive mobilisation and capacity building. This, and not the sporadic manifestation of these capacities in specific acts of terror, comprehends the real potential that counter-terrorist agencies, operations and policies are required to confront and neutralize.

The writer is the Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management.

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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