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"MOHABBAT di gaddi [the train of love]," Allah Ditta, a Pakistani locomotive driver, once called the Samjhauta Express.
Since the February 18 firebombing of the train connecting India and Pakistan, investigators have inched ever closer towards identifying the perpetrators of the first terror strike directed at Pakistani nationals on Indian soil. Police in New Delhi and Haryana have determined that the perpetrators packed kerosene-filled plastic bottles along with cotton fabric, in six or more suitcases and bags. An electronic circuit-board, of a type often used to construct improvised explosive devices, linked the detonator to the battery. A digital alarm clock was rigged to control just when the bomb would go off. A small amount of fast burning powder, most likely sulphur, was packed around the detonator. Each of these devices was designed to cause a fast spreading fire.
What the construction of the bombs makes clear is this: the perpetrators hoped that the fire on the Samjhauta Express would look like an accident set off, may be, by a malfunctioning kerosene stove, or an act of arson executed by a mob. Experts will now revisit thousands of phone calls made to Pakistan in the hours before and after the bombings, of which the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) routinely maintains secret recordings. Investigators will also comb details of past bombings in search of patterns.
Khalistan terrorist groups, for example, have repeatedly used incendiary devices over the past two years. Firebombs went off on buses in Jalandhar in April and May 2006. A bus was bombed in Chandigarh in 2005. Several people were injured in these low-intensity bombings, which were at first mistaken as accidents, but there were no fatalities. Punjab Police investigators recently charged two alleged members of the proscribed Khalistan Zindabad Force (KZF), Lasuri resident Satnam Singh and Phagwara-based Charanjeet Singh, with executing this series of attacks.
Interestingly, the KZF has well-documented links with the Hizbul Mujahideen and other Jammu and Kashmir-based terrorist groups. Its Pakistan-based chief, Ranjit Singh Neeta, was originally a trans-border trafficker operating out of Jammu. One of 20 terrorists whom India wants Pakistan to deport, Neeta is alleged to be responsible for the bombing of six trains and buses running between Jammu and Pathankot between 1988 and 1999. However, the detonators used in the 2005-06 KZF attacks were crude in comparison with the complex, timer-controlled devices used to firebomb the Samjhauta Express. It is possible, though, that the KZF operations inspired another set of bomb-makers with more sophisticated skills.
If it had not been for the accidental heroism of a drunk Karachi resident, no one would have tried to find out details like these. Investigators of the Samjhauta Express fire would still have been attempting to establish whether the disaster was the work of an arsonist or just an accident.
As the Samjhauta Express caught fire, Karachi resident Osman Mohammad awoke to find his compartment shrouded in smoke. Befuddled after a night's heavy drinking, he at first refused his fellow passengers' entreaties to vacate the compartment. A few minutes later, though, as Mohammad tried to find his own way out he noticed a small light flashing inside a cheap, plastic-lined suitcase that is now known to be one of several firebombs planted on the train. It was a light-emitting diode linked to the circuit, indicating that the device was armed and ready to detonate. Mohammad threw one suitcase out of the compartment and had dragged a second up to the door as rescuers entered.
Mohammad's act of blind courage - or drunken foolhardiness - is the sole reason why Islamists have not been able to persuade their constituency in Pakistan that the firebombing was an outrage executed by Hindu fundamentalists.
But for answers to the most important question - why the Samjhauta bombing was executed - we must turn elsewhere for clues.
Inside the bombers' minds
Pakistan's Islamist press, little read in India, provides not a little insight into the hearts and minds of the terrorists who most likely carried out the attack.
In the weeks before the bombing, Islamists repeatedly argued that the India-Pakistan peace process posed a threat to both Pakistan's economic survival and its ideological raison d'etre. Growing interaction at the level of ordinary people, Islamists claimed, had softened the hatred they believe is necessary to protect their nation. In their imagination, the train of love was a Trojan Horse, a vehicle for the destruction of the project of Pakistan.
On January 15, the Lashkar's parent body, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, organised a national consultative conference to formulate an Islamist response to the peace process. Attended among others by the President of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, Raja Zulqarnain Khan, the conference "completely rejected President Pervez Musharraf's current suggestions regarding the resolution of the Kashmir issue".
"Indo-Pak negotiations on the Kashmir issue have never borne any fruit," the January 31 issue of the Lashkar house journal Ghazwa explained. "Up until now," it stated, "only India has enjoyed the benefits of the Islamabad Declaration. All Pakistan got from that agreement is an exchange of cultural troupes. And as if that was not enough, Indian politicians have taken the exchange of such cultural troupes a step forward by suggesting eradication of borders between India and Pakistan."
"On the other hand," Ghazwa went on, "our own rulers are trying to weaken our ideological borders, instead of strengthening them. Efforts are under way by the Pakistani government to remove facts and material from the curriculum that educates our youth about the designs of Hindus and exposes their real mindset about Muslims in general and Pakistan in particular." Islamists had long claimed that India-Pakistan people-to-people détente, of which the Samjhauta Express is a key medium, is a plot to undermine these "ideological borders". In April 2004, for instance, the Lashkar-linked magazine Zarb-e-Taiba called on its readers to "throw the bat, seize the sword" and "instead of hitting `six' or `four', cut the throats of the Hindus and the Jews".
According to Zarb-e-Taiba, the "sports of a mujahid are archery, horse-riding and swimming. Apart from these three sports, every other hobby is un-Islamic. The above are not just sports but exercises for jehad. Cricket is an evil and sinful sport. Under the intoxication of cricket, Pakistanis have forgotten that these Hindu players come from the same nation that had raped our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and daughters-in-law."
Ghazwa approvingly quoted a participant in the Conference, retired Pakistan Army General Faiz Ali Chishti, as asserting that "jehad remains the only solution of this conflict". However, General Chishti noted, the pursuit of this strategy had been undermined by changing attitudes to India within Pakistan. Said Ghazwa: "He vociferously lamented, we have neglected to educate our younger generations about the Hindu mindset." Magazines such as Ghazwa and Zarb-e-Taiba are required reading for Lashkar cadre - a fact that makes it possible that the perpetrators of the firebombing hoped to "educate" audiences in Pakistan. To the jehadi mind, this kind of action would have been all the more important after a World Bank-appointed arbitrator ruled in favour of the Indian position on the construction of the Baghlihar Dam - an action the jehadi press marketed as an existential threat to Pakistan.
Days before the Samjhauta Express firebombing, Lashkar political chief Abdul Rahman Makki claimed that "India cannot build any dams at all on the Chenab river according to the stipulations of the Sindh-Taas Agreement". Makki claimed that the Baghlihar Dam was being built because Pakistan's "timid rulers are so terrified of India".
"Pakistan's vast agricultural lands," Ghazwa had explained to its readers in January, "are extremely dependent upon the large amount of river water which originates in Kashmir. India, on the other hand, is making all-out efforts to construct dams and barrages on these rivers so that it can gain another edge over Pakistan by choking its essential water resources."
"In such a scenario," Ghazwa argued, "to say that Kashmir is Pakistan's `jugular vein' is an understatement. If India succeeds in depriving Pakistan of these vital water resources, nothing can stop Pakistan's agricultural lands from turning into a desert."
Such ideas have long constituted part of the strategic consensus in Pakistan - and were a major reason for its 1947 attack on Jammu and Kashmir. In his memoirs, Major-General Akbar Khan, the commander-in-chief of Pakistan's assault forces in the first India-Pakistan war, observed that Pakistan's "agricultural economy was dependent particularly upon the rivers coming out of Kashmir". "The Mangla Headworks," General Khan wrote, "were actually in Kashmir and the Marala Headworks were within a mile or so of the border. What then would be our position if Kashmir was in Indian hands?"
Lashkar leaders have long argued that only jehad can prevent this apocalyptic outcome. In an April 2003 interview to The Friday Times, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed asserted that Pakistan ought not to "bow before India and beg for dialogue". Since "they only understood the language of jehad", he continued, "we have no choice but to respond by killing Hindus".
Jehadis and the General
In the days after the Samjhauta bombing, Islamist groups in Pakistan repeatedly claimed that Hindu fundamentalist groups and the Indian state were the murderers of the passengers on the Samjhauta Express.
A United Jehad Council Press release said the "act can only be the handiwork of Indian agencies or the Hindu fundamentalists to sabotage the ongoing Indo-Pak peace process". Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who is backed by both the Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba, said that no "sane person could carry out such act". However, he added: "In India there is no dearth of such people who for fulfilling their nefarious designs can stoop down to any extent." In a press release late on February 19, he demanded that an international commission be set up to probe the incident.
If such polemic has not washed in Pakistan, it is in large part owing to one stark fact: a string of recent suicide bombings and shootouts targeting civilians have made it clear that Islamist terror groups care little for the ordinary Muslims in whose name their jehad is being waged.
Groups such as the Lashkar have increasingly turned their guns away from India and Hindus to General Musharraf - and not just because of his policies on Jammu and Kashmir. In the January 2006 issue of the Lashkar magazine Voice of Islam, Makki charged General Musharraf with "inviting God's wrath" by repealing Pakistan's controversial Hudood laws, which prescribed among other things that rape victims' allegations must be supported by the testimony of male witnesses. He added that the Pakistan government was spreading "evil, obscenity and rebellion against Allah's way".
Saeed himself told a prayer congregation in Lahore in January that General Musharraf's policies would "advance vulgarity and lewdness in our society". In particular, the Lashkar's spiritual head singled out "the foolish and stupid encouragement of men and women to run together in marathon races, and efforts to give legal sanction to the killer sport of kite-flying". Islamists in Pakistan oppose kite-flying during Basant, a province-wide peasant festival in Punjab that the religious right claims has Hindu origins.
Despite its invective against General Musharraf, though, the Lashkar continues to operate with impunity in Pakistan. On January 3, for instance, Jamaat-ud-Dawa volunteers delivered meat from animals sacrificed during Eid to prisoners at Lahore's Central Jail and Camp Jail. Noting that many prisoners "had been locked up for petty crimes", a Jamaat press release stated that the organisation had "decided to pay the fines of these poor inmates so that they can go home and begin their lives anew and become productive citizens".
For reasons that analysts are divided on, General Musharraf has proved either unwilling or unable to confront his Islamist opponents.
In recent hearings of the United States' House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Hank Johnson publicly aired what anyone following Pakistan's courageous journalists has long known - "that the Pakistani intelligence service continues to collaborate with the Taliban and other insurgent groups operating out of its border regions".
Pressure is mounting on the General to make his choice - and soon. Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry, who until recently led the United States forces in Afghanistan, has noted that cross-border Al Qaeda and Taliban attacks into Afghanistan have tripled since the September 2006 peace deal between Pakistan and Islamists. General Eikenberry called for "steady and direct" attacks on terror camps in Pakistan - a phrase some have interpreted as a threat of war.
South Asia's rulers - witness the experience of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in Punjab - have shown a remarkable unwillingness to understand that rearing tigers in one's backyard is a perilous hobby. Pakistan is learning the same lessons - and the time has come to make hard choices.
Soon, General Musharraf's regime must decide whether it wishes to act against the sponsors of the Samjhauta Express bombings - or retreat, as it has done in the past, into vague name-calling directed at India. Either way, the choice will prove fateful.
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