India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 06 :: Mar. 13 - 26, 1999

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COVER STORY

Extending terror

Diaries seized from a senior Hizbul Mujahideen functionary's hideout point to a transformation in the Islamic far right's objectives: groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Hizbul Mujahideen are seeking to expand their operations to an all-India level.

PRAVEEN SWAMI

A FEW minutes past 3 a.m. on August 9, 1998, the Jammu and Kashmir Police's Special Operations Group (SOG) eliminated the Hizbul Mujahideen's top Kashmir Valley commander, Ali Mohammad Dar. Better known by his nom de guerre of Burhanuddin Hijazi, Dar was among the organisation's best minds when it comes to matters of strategy.

However, to the police investigators, more important than his death were the hundreds of sheets of hand-written notes recovered from Dar's temporary hideout in Srinagar. The diaries pointed to a dramatic transformation of the Islamic far right's objectives: the Hizbul Mujahideen and other far right groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba are seeking to expand their operations to an all-India scale.

An investigation conducted by Frontline over four months into the Dar diaries revealed a complicated web of relationships between terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, underworld groups and Islamic fundamentalist organisations in India. The investigation threw up disturbing evidence of plans by Pakistan-based pan-Islamist chauvinist organisations to intensify violence through India. It is evident that these plans are certain to be propelled by the deepening of communal fissures in India, an enterprise ironically undertaken by those who claim to be defending Indian nationhood.

The Dar diaries

Dar returned to India in April 1997 after a series of Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) operations wiped out much of the Hizbul Mujahideen's field command. His diaries were, in essence, a body of ideas for communication to the Hizbul Mujahideen's Pakistan-based supreme commander, Mohammad Yusuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin. They reveal with stark clarity that the Hizbul Mujahideen's activities in Kashmir no longer serve any meaningful strategic objective, and outline the possibilities of transfiguring terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir into an all-India pan-Islamic campaign.

In a sheet of paper marked "68" by officials, Dar pleads with Shah to "please take some practical steps to sustain the movement." He further states: "The routine launching and sending of arms and ammunition on head loads will not solve our problems. This can just be a life-saving drug, nothing else." One reason offered by Dar is that the recruitment of Pakistani and Afghan cadre had stripped the Hizbul Mujahideen of its mass legitimacy within Jammu and Kashmir. The other factors that were probably in his mind included the calls given by G.M. Bhatt, the Amir-e-Jamaat (chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami), to put an end to the "gun culture" in the State and break away from the Hizbul Mujahideen.

Reproductions from hand-written notes recovered from the Srinagar hideout of Ali Mohammad Dar, better known as Burhanuddin Hijazi, one of the top commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen in the Kashmir Valley. Page 66 states: "Ways and means should be found to launch the movement in India on priority basis... Kingpins of the underworld be contacted to have the weapons and ammunition launched for us through other possible ways."

Page 66 of the Dar diaries lays out the possible alternatives. Dar states: "Ways and means should be found to launch the movement in India on (a) priority basis." He suggests that a broad linkage be established with the Dubai underworld. "Kingpins of the underworld (should) be contacted to have the weapons and ammunition launched for us through other possible ways." "A cell of three persons" would work "to develop relations with underworld beings (sic.) like Dawood Ibrahim and trying to have a project of counterfeit currency." He further states that this cell would work out "ways and means from Sialkot to (the) Rajasthan border for infiltration and exfiltration (of Hizbul Mujahideen operatives)."

No one is entirely certain about whether Dar actually managed to enter into a sustained dialogue about an all-India operation with his Muzaffarabad-based commander. Dar is known to have occasionally transmitted coded information to Shah through two Hizbul Mujahideen wireless sets operating intermittently from central Srinagar, using the call signs 'Khurshid', 'Dawood' and, most frequently, 'Junaid'. Shah's response to Dar is not known. While low-level Hizbul Mujahideen operatives have been arrested from outside Jammu and Kashmir in the past, there is little hard information on whether the three-member cells that Dar's diaries refer to are functional.

However, two sets of events render Dar's diaries a credible indicator of the emerging shape of terror. In early December, the Command Council of the Hizbul Mujahideen issued a statement affirming its commitment to take the war in Jammu and Kashmir outside the State. In a similar proclamation made last summer, Shah had warned that if India failed to withdraw from Jammu and Kashmir, his organisation would ensure the destruction of the entire country. Other organisations too seem to be thinking on similar lines. In December, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, the head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's patron religious body, the Markaz Dawat wal'Irshad, outlined plans for an all-India operation. His remarks were reported in the December issue of Majallah al-Dawa, the Markaz's official organ.

That the Lashkar-e-Taiba is serious about its polemic has long been evident. Mohammad bin Qasim, the organisation's dasta (brigade), was responsible for a series of bombings in New Delhi, Haryana and Punjab between 1993 and 1998. Rumours that a body found on a railway track in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on October 14 last year was that of the dasta chief Abdul Karim 'Tunda', subsequently turned out to be part of a disinformation campaign. The Lashkar-e-Taiba appears to have had sustained official support in Pakistan ever since it set up its complex in Muridke, on land donated by the Zia-ul-Haq regime. The meeting at which Sayeed delivered his speech is believed to have been attended by several senior Pakistani political figures, including the chairman of Pakistan's House Committee on Defence, Ghulam Sarwar Cheema, and former Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul.

Polemic, however, is less important than the second event that lends credibility to Dar's diary: the circumstances surrounding his elimination. In July 1997, the Delhi Police's North District wing began to investigate hawala operators in the city. The investigation was provoked in part by news broken by Frontline on the links between money laundering and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir (Frontline, September 5, 1997). A team led by Additional Commissioner of Police Rajbir Singh focussed on hawala outfits working from the capital's old quarter, a favoured haunt of many organised crime operators.

Rajbir Singh's informants told him in early August of a major hawala transfer. A massive Rs.47 lakhs had been transferred through a Lahore-based hawala dealer known only by his alias "Qazi Sahib", who had in the past fronted for major underworld groups in Mumbai. An inward transfer of this scale attracted attention, and the Delhi Police investigated. On August 17, they picked up Mushtaq Gilkar, a resident of Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir's Doda district. Gilkar, father of a leading Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist from Doda, Yunus Gilkar, was once the Division Commander of the organisation. Although poor health forced him out of active operations, he continued to perform organisational roles.

Gilkar, it turned out, had brought the cash from Lahore under the false floor of a truck with Jammu and Kashmir registration. He told I.B. interrogators who took over the operation that the money was intended for a top Hizbul Mujahideen commander in Srinagar. Reliable sources told Frontline that Gilkar was then flown by a special flight to Srinagar to ensure that he kept his rendezvous. Meanwhile, in New Delhi, hawala operators Jatinder Singh 'Raju' and Mohammad Muslim 'Gullu' were placed under surveillance and their arrest was delayed till the end of August to avoid the slightest risk of jeopardising the I.B. operation to find the final recipient.

That recipient turned out to be Dar himself. What happened next is the subject of a bitter controversy. Delhi Police officials insist that they had, along with the I.B., located Dar through Gilkar, and that they had been robbed of credit for this. The Jammu and Kashmir Police, for its part, asserts that the arrest of Abdul Rauf Trambu, the Hizbul Mujahideen's finance controller, had already provided them with information about Dar's whereabouts. Whatever the truth - and both accounts seem plausible on the face of it - Dar's elimination led to a bitter turf war between those concerned. As a result, Dar's diaries generated no further information. No real effort was made even to identify the person or persons who routed the money into India.

However, at least three points are clear. In the first known instance of its kind, the Hizbul Mujahideen directly used the hawala route to bring funds into India, bypassing its traditional political fronts. The transfers were made not by hauling cash over the Line of Control, but through Lahore. The network used, with powerful patrons in the ISI, was one favoured by organised crime: the names of "Qazi Sahib", "Saqib", "Tariq" and "Iqbal" repeatedly figured in investigations of murky underworld dealings and arms shipments, including the recovery of 361 pistols from Delhi in February 1996. At least some of Dar's suggestions had evidently been put into practice.

On the page numbered 68, Dar pleads with Mohammad Yusuf Shah, the Mujahideen's Pakistan-based supreme commander, to "please take some practical steps to sustain the movement".

However, several other questions remained. For example, why would organised crime syndicates wish to collaborate with a terrorist enterprise, knowing full well that this could jeopardise its core activities by inviting harsh state reprisal? Were these contacts restricted merely to providing infrastructural support, or were there deeper linkages? Above all, what provoked the Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba to believe that they could find recruits for warfare at an all-India level? There are no real answers to these questions, but history provides some disturbing insights.

All-India Operation: The Background

Shortly after Dar was killed, the SOG raided a Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist's hideout in suburban Srinagar. Most of the recoveries were routine, mainly arms and ammunition. However, one was not. It was a small faded clipping of a photograph from a Pakistani religious magazine, evidently of enough significance to its owner to have been kept through years of constant movement and hardship. The photograph showed the Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front's (JKIF) top bomb maker, Sajjad Ahmad Keno, holding a press conference, surrounded by armed guards. To his left was Abdul Razzak 'Tiger' Memon, one of the key architects of the Mumbai serial blasts. Although the caption claimed that the photograph was taken in 1995 at the Hazratbal shrine, it more plausibly recorded a meeting in Muzaffarabad and represented the first effort to unite terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir with small terrorist groups elsewhere in India which sprang up after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the anti-Muslim pogroms that followed it.

Founded in early 1995, Keno's JKIF was, in many senses, a unique organisation. Unlike other terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, it had no parent religious or political body. What linkages it had were with bodies that received funding from Saudi Arabia, such as the World Association of Muslim Youth and the circle of clerics around Maulana Maqqi. Keno and his key colleagues Hilal Ahmad Baig, Bilal Ahmad Baig and Javed Krava, were all members of the once-powerful Jammu and Kashmir Student Liberation Front (SLF). Keno had been responsible for many of the activities that led to the ascendancy of terror in the State, including the assassinations of Mushir ul-Haq, the Vice-Chancellor of Kashmir University, and H.L. Khera, general manager of HMT Limited.

However, by the end of 1994, the SLF and its successor, the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, were in ruins: their cadre had defected in droves to pro-India militia organisations. In order to counter this collapse, the JKIF was set up to inflict harm outside the State: to create a new and hopefully decisive stage for terrorism. Negotiations to set up the outfit between Keno, Bilal Baig and an ISI official they knew only as "Colonel Farooq", began in June 1995 at the JKIF office in Rawalpindi. Memon's network was to provide the JKIF with safehouses and guides in Nepal and Gujarat to enable them to operate securely in northern and western India.

Memon, a close associate of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, had, like other members of the underworld, studiously resisted earlier overtures by the ISI to collaborate with terrorist activity. These overtures are believed to have been made by Yusuf Godrawala and Taufiq Jallianwala, powerful underworld figures in Karachi. ISI officials pointed to their control of the smugglers' shipping routes from Dubai to India's west coast, and demanded that the underworld reciprocate their tolerance by moving arms and ammunition. Yet the Dubai underworld, firmly secular in composition, correctly understood that backing terror would damage its core business interests.

A faded clipping of a photograph from a Pakistani religious magazine recovered from a Hizbul Mujahideen hideout in Srinagar. It shows the Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front's top bomb maker, Sajjad Ahmad Keno, holding a press conference, surrounded by armed guards. With him is Abdul Razzak 'Tiger' Memon, one of the key architects of the Mumbai serial blasts. (Keno was killed by the Kashmir Police's Special Operations Group in 1996.)

However, by 1993, all that changed. Memon, like other members of Dawood Ibrahim's group, was infuriated by the anti-Muslim violence in Surat, Ahmedabad and Mumbai after the Babri Masjid demolition. Confronted by a furious cadre, Dawood Ibrahim finally gave in to the ISI's intense pressure. In the first week of February 1993, with Mumbai in flames, the underworld lords met their rank and file. The confessional statement made by one of the key accused in the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Usman Gani Merchant, states: "In the meeting, it was discussed that Hindus had committed atrocities on Muslims in Bombay and other places in India. Therefore, revenge was to be taken and something was to be done in retaliation."

That retaliation was brutal. After the Mumbai serial blasts, Memon was forced to flee to Pakistan; he spent much of his time in Karachi's Defence Colony area. Although most of his family came back to India later, Memon stayed on in Karachi. He was soon put to work by the ISI. Abdul Latif Sheikh, Ahmedabad's top mafiosio and Mirza Dilshad Baig, a politician from Nepal who had links with Dawood Ibrahim and was assassinated in gang warfare last year, allegedly set up an elaborate support and operations networks at Memon's behest. There are even unconfirmed reports that Memon visited Jammu and Kashmir in early 1996. Former terrorist-turned-pro-India militia leader Javed Shah, who is now a Member of the Legislative Assembly, told Frontline that the claim was made by 'General' Mushtaq Ahmad Musa, commander of the now defunct al-Fatah Force, during the course of a deep undercover SOG operation, which ultimately ended with Musa being killed.

Memon's collaboration with the JKIF was to prove fruitful. Through 1995, the organisation was able to carry out a series of bomb blasts in New Delhi. After a brief period of incarceration in early 1995, Keno escaped from Rangreth Jail in Jammu in June 1995 and played a key role in these operations. He was eventually killed by the SOG in Srinagar's Natipora suburb on January 8, 1996, shortly after his return from one of Dilshad Beg's Nepal hideouts. However, the organisation's work continued. A second phase of bombings were planned in March 1996 to sabotage the Lok Sabha elections. This culminated in massive blasts on May 21, 1996 at New Delhi's Lajpat Nagar market, which killed over a dozen people.

Mohammad Salim Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan's Jhelum district, Abdul Sattar (right), a resident of Islamnagar in Pakistan's Faisalabad district. The two Lashkar-e-Taiba activists were arrested in India in July 1998.

Arrests made in Ahmedabad after the Lajpat Nagar blasts provided much of the available information on Memon's links with the JKIF. On June 2, 1996, four JKIF operatives were picked up by the Gujarat Police. Abdul Ghani Ghoni, a Kishtwar resident who operated under the code name "Assadullah", had been present during the meeting in March where Memon and Bilal Baig planned the latest bombing offensive. Ghoni said that the meeting had taken place in House Number 54, Lane 16, in Rawalpindi's Chalala Scheme. Arrangements were made for operations by Ghoni and his associates, Pakistani national Abdul Rashid "Jalaluddin", 'Chhota' Javed Ahmad and Ayub Ahmad Bhatt alias Zulfiqar. It turned out that 'Chhota' Javed had ferried the explosives used in the Delhi blasts from Kathmandu. After the first bomb planted in a Maruti car failed to work, a second operative, Riyaz Ahmad Sheikh, was flown in from Nepal to rectify the device.

The JKIF rapidly unravelled after the Lajpat Nagar blasts. The then Srinagar SOG chief, Farooq Khan, acted on the basis of intercepted telephone calls, and arrested Farida Wani, the JKIF's central organiser in the Kashmir Valley. Hilal Baig was shot dead by Farooq Khan's unit in an encounter on July 17, 1996. Javed Krava disappeared mysteriously and is believed to have spent much of his time shuttling between Nepal and Pakistan. Memon's aides did little better. Latif was arrested by the Gujarat Police's Anti-Terrorist Squad from New Delhi on October 10, 1996, and is now in Tihar Jail along with Farida Wani. Bilal Baig was left behind in Pakistan - a general without soldiers - operating from the Rawalpindi office.

WHY did the JKIF experiment fail? One central factor appears to have been the inability of the organisation and its underworld collaborators to find any real all-India Islamic solidarity. People such as Memon and Latif, despite their power, were deeply alienated from local Muslim communities, who, despite their anger over the riots of 1992-1993, saw little legitimacy in enterprises such as the Mumbai serial blasts. Similar lack of support led to the collapse of the K2M enterprise, an effort by the ISI to use its operative Lal Singh to forge solidarities between Khalistan terrorism, its Kashmir counterpart, and Muslim fundamentalist groups. Lal Singh was arrested in Mumbai's Dadar railway station on July 1992 by I.B. and police operatives.

New Trends: The Abdul Karim 'Tunda' Cell

Despite the JKIF's failure, other efforts to generate some kind of pan-Indian Islamic terror continued. Consider the case of Jalees Ansari, a key aide of the dasta Mohammad bin Qasim's chief Abdul Karim 'Tunda'. Ansari was arrested on December 4, 1997 for a series of terrorist bombings, including the New Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani Express bombing around the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition. A student of the Lokmanya Medical College in Mumbai's Sion area until 1972, he was an unlikely recruit to the Islamic far right's ranks. A bout of mental illness forced him out of college. He, however, went on to recover from his illness and finally passed college examinations in 1982. Ansari joined the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's Public Health Department, where he worked till 1990. He first made contact with the ultra-conservative Ahl-e-Hadis religious sect, which is closely linked with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, after the Bhiwandi riots. The organisation was involved in aiding the riot victims, and Ansari appears to have been traumatised enough by the violence to be attracted to its revanchism. With the Ram Janmabhoomi movement approaching its climax, Ansari decided to translate his beliefs into action. He was put in contact with Abdul Karim 'Tunda' by Nizambad resident and Lashkar activist Azam Ghauri. In October 1990, using the Lashkar-e-Taiba's network, he travelled to Srinagar, and from there to Pakistan. After training at the Lashkar-e-Taiba's camp in Pakistan, he returned to India in November 1991, again using the Line of Control route.

The stories of other younger recruits to the Islamic far right are similar. Aamer Hashim, operating under the alias of "Kamran", was responsible for a series of bomb blasts in New Delhi and Jalandhar in 1996 and 1997. Kamran had just completed his seventh grade at the Mazrul Islam Higher Secondary school, when his parents moved to be with their daughter and her husband in Pakistan. (Kamran did not study further.) In Karachi, the Ahl-e-Hadis' right wing religious establishment provided him with an outlet for the hostility he had learned to feel for India. After working at a new office the Markaz Dawat wal'Irshad had opened in Karachi in January 1994, Kamran returned to India to carry out his bombing campaign.

More recent arrests of members of Abdul Karim's Lashkar-e-Taiba outfit show that the organisation is deploying elsewhere in India personnel recruited for the war in Jammu and Kashmir. On July 1, 1998, I.B. surveillance led to the arrest of top Lashkar activist Mohammad Salim Junaid, who had 16 kg of RDX (Research Department Explosive) in his possession. Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan's Jhelum district, began his career with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1991 as a recruit for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, much against his parents' wishes. Azam Cheema, the Lashkar commander responsible for launching the outfit's cadre into India, presided over Junaid's rapid rise in the organisation's hierarchy. In the winter of 1995, after a brief stint in Jammu, Junaid moved to Delhi and then to Hyderabad.

Junaid's move to Hyderabad was on the orders of Zaki-ur-Rahman, Cheema's superior and the Lashkar-e-Taiba amir handling Abdul Karim 'Tunda's cell. Junaid was put in touch with other members of the Lashkar in India, including Kamran. Junaid maintained regular contact with 'Tunda', last crossing the border into Bangladesh in March 1998. His instructions were to maintain a low profile in Hyderabad and oversee an expansion in terrorist activities. The first part of his task went off well. He married Momina Khatoon, the daughter of a retired army soldier, who believed till the end that her husband ran a spare parts business in Pakistan. In the second task, Junaid was less fortunate. A bomb planted on the Dehradun Express on July 23, 1997 failed to go off; besides, a 200 kg RDX shipment intended for him was seized by the Border Security Force near Jodhpur last year.

Other Pakistani members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba were also arrested in north India. On July 30, 1998, the Delhi Police arrested three members belonging to the Abdul Karim 'Tunda' cell, led by Abdul Sattar, a resident of Islamnagar in Pakistan's Faisalabad district. Along with his colleagues Shoaib Alam and Mohammad Faisal Hussain, Sattar had built a base in the pottery centre of Khurja. The group built a bunker in the firing kiln to house explosives they expected would soon arrive, as well as timers and small arms and ammunition. Like Junaid, this cell too had been sent to India on the express instructions of Zaki-ur-Rahman. Kamran's arrest, however, led to the rapid termination of this enterprise as well.

However, others obviously saw potential in such ideas. On January 17, the SOG eliminated one of the top foreign terrorists operating in Jammu and Kashmir, Saifullah Chitrali, a resident of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. Chitrali had gone back to Pakistan in 1997 after working for four years in India for the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. SOG investigators learned that his return to Jammu and Kashmir had been through the Bangladesh border, and not through the conventional Line of Control route. Back in India, Chitrali arranged for his divisional commander, Abdul Qayoom, to have copies of the Raah-e-Jannat (Road to Paradise), a venomous 144-page propaganda tract, published at a press in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, through a network of supporters among local fundamentalist groups. Telephone numbers of contacts among the right-wing Islamic groups in Mumbai and Delhi, and 1,200 copies of the book were found among Chitrali's belongings.

"Zaki sahib," eyewitnesses recall the Lashkar-e-Taiba amir being asked by a group of visitors in 1995, "zara nazar Hindustan ki aur bhi to deejiye" (why don't you turn your gaze towards India?). Zaki-ur-Rahman kept that promise. The Dar diaries suggest that worse is on the way, for the Lashkar-e-Taiba is no longer the only terrorist organisation that seeks an all-India theatre of operations.

COMMUNALISM breeds communalism. The failure of the recruitment of the underworld in 1993 and the JKIF experiments does not guarantee such failures again. Just as the disquieting legacy of Bhiwandi, Moradabad and Maliana-Hashimpur drove individuals such as Jalees Ansari to the Islamic far right, the demolition of the Babri Masjid pushed an until-then secular underworld to engage in a campaign of communal terror. Their enterprises of terror found little mass legitimacy, but the Hindu right's persistence with its own communal agenda could ensure that they do so in the future.