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ANUPAMA KATAKAM
"ISLAM is our nation," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad at a Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) conference in 1999, "not India."
Sitting in the audience was one of the founding fathers of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Indian operations, Azam Ghauri, who would die just six months later in a shootout with the Andhra Pradesh Police. For months after the speech, intelligence operatives carefully monitored Ahmad's movements, certain that he was linked to Ghauri. Despite painstaking surveillance, not the slightest bit of evidence emerged that Ahmad had links to the Lashkar. Ahmad barked loudly, investigators concluded, but had no intention of biting.
Earlier this month, Ahmad's name surfaced again: now as a core member of one of two independent Lashkar cells assigned with executing major terrorist strikes in Gujarat. Operating without knowledge of each other's existence, the twin cells had been ordered to carry out bombings that would demonstrate the Lashkar's commitment to avenge the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and provoke a fresh wave of violence that would bring the terrorist group's dream of tearing apart India along communal lines closer to realisation.
Last month, the Intelligence Bureau learned that a major consignment of arms was to be ferried through Maharashtra to a Lashkar unit in Gujarat. The State police's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) assigned four units to watch the likely axis of movement identified by the Intelligence Bureau. Late on May 9, one of the teams attempted to stop a speeding jeep on the Aurangabad-Manmad highway, which evaded their efforts. After an hour-long chase, the jeep was found abandoned on the outskirts of Aurangabad.
What the ATS personnel found inside the jeep confirmed their suspicions. Over two-dozen kilograms of lethal Research Department Explosive (RDX) had been packed inside 10 computer central processing unit (CPU) cases, along with 11 AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition. Over the next four days, the ATS arrested Abdul Azim, the driver of a car that had tailed the jeep, and succeeded in locating a second cache of explosives, again stored inside computer CPU cases.
Eight people have so far been arrested for their role in moving the explosives. Ahmad, along with Aurangabad residents Sayeed Zubair Anwar and Mohammed Muzaffar Tanvir, are alleged to have driven the jeep in which the bulk of the explosives were stored. However, the cell's key organiser, who authorities have identified as Zainuddin Ansari, is still to be located. A computer technician from Beed, Ansari travelled in the car that was tailing the jeep.
Just where the explosives came from is still under investigation. Officials are particularly concerned that they arrived on the Maharashtra coast by sea - the same route used to move in the RDX used for the 1993 serial bombings of Mumbai. If so, it would suggest that Karachi-based trafficking networks of mafia baron the Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar have once again been committed to the Islamist terror campaign against India. Given the near-impossibility of securing the coast, India's vulnerabilities are considerable.
Links between Islamist terror groups and the Karachi mafia have long been evident. Dawood Ibrahim-affiliated gang-lord `Chhota' Shakeel Ahmad Babu, for example, helped transport several Ahmedabad residents recruited by the Jaish-e-Mohammad from Dhaka to Karachi in 2001. Another Dawood Ibrahim aide, Fahim Machmach, helped a separate group of terror recruits transit through Bangkok, including two Bangalore residents who identified themselves using the code-names `Iqbal' and `Sohail.'
Machmach, interestingly, is alleged to have supervised a 2003 attempt on the lives of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Bharat Banot and Ashok Bhat, using the services of a long-standing mafia hit-man, Ali Mohammad Kanjari. Other mafia figures have also played a direct role in several terror attacks. Aftab Ansari, who executed a 2002 attack on the United States Information Service building in Kolkata, was recruited by Jaish-e-Mohammad co-founder Syed Omar Sheikh while both were serving in Tihar Jail.
The Ahmedabad Cell
Even as the Lashkar's Pakistan-based operation was putting its Aurangabad plans in place, a second cell was being prepared to execute parallel operations in Gujarat. Feroze Abdul Latif Ghaswala, a Mumbai-based engine mechanic, had decided to join the Islamist jehad against India after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. He tapped his contacts among local clerics and, in the summer of 2004, was put in touch with Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami (HuJI) operatives in Srinagar.
Ghaswala had initially hoped to cross the Line of Control (LoC) into Pakistan for training in a Harkat camp. His contacts, however, eventually arranged for him to head east to Bangladesh. Under the tutelage of Mufti Abdul Hannan - a Peshawar-trained HuJI commander responsible for a 2002 assassination attempt on then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, as well as the 2005 serial bombings that rocked Bangladesh - he learned the basic tradecraft of terrorism, such as fabricating bombs from easily available chemicals.
During his time in Bangladesh, Ghaswala met one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's most aggressive young operatives, a Hyderabad resident named Asad Yazdani. Operating under the code-name Naved Gul, Yazdani had joined the Lashkar in the wake of the Gujarat pogrom along with 13 other men from Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. After training in Pakistan, Yazdani organised the assassination of former Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya in 2003 and a series of bombings in northern India.
Using his riot-revenge credentials to good effect, Yazdani persuaded Ghaswala to work with the Lashkar. In June 2005, Ghaswala caught a Mumbai-Teheran flight, after obtaining a visa to visit shrines in Iran. Ghaswala's intentions, though, had little to do with piety: his handlers wished to ensure that there would be no documentation that ever linked him to Pakistan. A Lashkar operative helped him cross the porous border into Pakistan's Balochistan province, from where he was driven to a safe-house in the town of Bahawalpur.
Professor Azam `Baba' Cheema, a religious scholar who has long headed the Lashkar's operations against India, took personal charge of Ghaswala's education. He received training in the use of automatic weapons at the Maskar Aqsa, a camp where the Lashkar conducts advanced combat courses. His education in explosives also proceeded apace, notably in techniques to make defusing of bombs more difficult. At the end of his training, Ghaswala returned to Tehran, and caught a flight back to Mumbai.
In July last year, Ghaswala relocated to Ahmedabad and began setting up a base from which he could operate. Lashkar sympathisers in the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, the ultra-Right religious order from which the terror group draws much of its cadre, put him in touch with another potential recruit. Mohammad Ali Chhipa, a computer hardware engineer, volunteered for service and was like his boss despatched on an Iran Air flight through Mumbai and Teheran for training at the Maskar Aqsa.
Soon after Chhipa's return to Ahmedabad, the Lashkar cell moved into offensive mode. Mohammad Iqbal, a Bahawalpur resident who had operated in Jammu and Kashmir under the code-name Abu Hamza from 2002-2003, was assigned direct charge of its operations. Nine kilograms of high-grade explosives, along with two assault rifles and a Thuraya satellite-phone set, a communications system known to be resistant to penetration by Indian signals intelligence, were smuggled across the Bhuj border under his supervision.
Even as Iqbal and Ghaswala finalised targets, their operation was nearing its end. In February, an Intelligence Bureau-led operation had led the Delhi Police to two Bangladeshi nationals from whom Yazdani had sourced explosives. Days later, Yazdani himself was shot dead. Delhi Police investigators developed the information that became available in the course of this operation. On May 9, Iqbal was killed in an exchange of fire with the Delhi Police, while Ghaswala and Chhipa were arrested.
For reasons it alone understands the Delhi Police chose not to share what it knew about the cell with either its counterparts in Gujarat and Maharashtra, or the Intelligence Bureau. As a result, highly placed sources told Frontline, at least two Pakistan-trained members of the cell, including a Bhuj resident instrumental in facilitating the cross-border movement of explosives, succeeded in escaping once news of the arrests broke. Besides, the men who helped Ghaswala make contact with HuJI have not been detected so far.
Despite the Delhi Police's appalling handling of the case, though, investigations into the Aurangabad cell give not a little insight into the networks that have facilitated the Lashkar's operations in India. Elements associated with the proscribed SIMI, clerics affiliated to the ultra-Right Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, a clerical order which seeks to reconstruct the modern world using the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad as a model, and a welter of new Islamist social welfare organisations all appear to have a role.
Ahmad's story is instructive. A school dropout from an impoverished Aurangabad family, Ahmad, like thousands of other young men from ghettoised urban communities across northern and western India, found meaning and purpose in SIMI. But his sole run-in with the law came after he was charged with being part of a mob that attemped to burn Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) banners. Last year, Ahmad set up a roadside stall selling kebabs and, by the account of local residents, succeeded in running a reasonably successful business.
Like Ahmad, the two other Aurangabad men arrested with him came from impoverished backgrounds. Neither, however, had direct SIMI links. Nor, unlike Ghaswala or Chhipa, did they have direct ties to the communal violence in Gujarat. Indeed, despite the sometimes-fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims in the city, violence is relatively rare. Aurangabad has not had a riot since 1999, nor has it ever experienced large-scale pogroms of the kind seen in Bhiwandi or Mumbai.
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the denial of opportunity, both educational and economic, has opened up space for organisations of the Right. Aurangabad has, in recent years, seen a flourishing of fundamentalist organisations seeking to impose an Islamist social order. While these organisations have not been linked directly to terrorism and do not advocate it, they have contributed to communal polarisation in much the same way as Hindu fundamentalist organisations such as the VHP.
One example is the Islah Mashara, which was founded in November 2005 by former SIMI members Ziauddin Siddiqui, Hidayat Ali and Owais Ahmed. The Islah Mashara recently acquired prominence after intervening in a charged controversy that broke out after shopkeepers demanded that Muslim women clients lift their burkhas.
Shopkeepers claimed that their action was forced by the misuse of the all-enveloping dress to facilitate shoplifting, a charge that provoked angry responses from Aurangabad Muslims.
However, the organisation's agenda goes far further than the defence of the veil. Islah Mashara has promoted what it believes to be an appropriate social order by beating up Muslim boys seen with Hindu girls and harassing women seen without the burkha. It has also been encouraging Aurangabad Muslims to send their children to seminaries, rather than state-run or private schools, and has campaigned against television, which it sees as an instrument of cultural pollution.
A number of other Islamist organisations, such as the Markaz-e-Majlis-e-Shura, have been working to promote a non-state legal apparatus amongst Aurangabad's Muslims. Like the Jamait Shabab ul-Ullema, it seeks to resolve family and property issues through the clerics and their interpretation of the Sharia. Proselytising organisations, such as Maulana Owais Ahmad's Fazai Millat Trust, which is affiliated to Mohammad Musa Malabari's Tamil Nadu-based Jamia Dar ul-Salam Umrabad Madrasa, have also grown rapidly.
While it would be facile to link such organisations with terrorist violence, the fact is that they are the products of a cultural climate in which religious reactionaries are able to flourish. Decades of communal violence - and the state's manifest failure either to act against its perpetrators or to address the backwardness of Muslim communities in many parts of India - have created institutions which provide ideological legitimacy to organisations such as the Lashkar and HuJI.
Despite self-congratulatory official polemic on Indian Muslims' minimal participation in Islamist terrorism, there is real reason for concern. Not a decade ago, the Lashkar's pan-India operations were heavily reliant on Pakistani nationals. As late as 1998, Cheema had to assign Pakistani national Salim Junaid for its operations in Andhra Pradesh. Junaid married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare parts enterprise to build a cover identity. Today, neither the Lashkar nor HuJI has great trouble finding local recruits.
All of this is happening even as Pakistan's covert services seem to be initiating a significant escalation in the pan-India jehad. Even as the jehad in Jammu and Kashmir has wound down, terror strikes elsewhere in India are growing in frequency. Some experts believe this is just a new variant of Pakistan's long-standing search for strategic leverage against India, others say that the campaign is a reprisal for covert Indian offensive activities in Balochistan and Afghanistan.
Whatever the truth, the challenge needs to be addressed head on. India's covert services and police forces deserve not a little credit for preventing major terror strikes in Gujarat. However, policing is a palliative, not a cure. What is needed is vigorous political intervention to isolate Islamist forces, founded on the principles of justice and equality. Of a programme for such action, though, there is so far no sign.
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