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Monday, Jan 09, 2006

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Behind Bangalore: the origins of the long jihad

Praveen Swami

The first part of an investigation into how the Lashkar-e-Taiba's terror campaign against India was born, and the forces that drive it today.

"TODAY, INSHALLAH, I announce the break-up of India," thundered Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the patron of the Lashkar-e-Taiba at a giant November 1999 rally organised by its parent organisation, the Markaz Dawat wal Irshad.

Held just months after the Kargil war, the Markaz rally was organised to proclaim to the world that Pakistan's principal Islamist group had not bowed in the face of what it saw as a humiliating, western-authored capitulation to India. "We will not rest," Saeed assured his audience, "until the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan." In a subsequent speech Saeed promised the mujahideen he was sending to India that "Allah will save them from the fires of hell," and that "huge palaces in paradise" awaited those martyred by "infidel enemies."

Saeed's speech was to set off events that could have led to the obliteration of much of South Asia. Two years after it was delivered, an escalating spiral of jihadist attacks carried out by the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad culminated in the December 13, 2001, attack on India's Parliament House. Indian troops moved forward to offensive positions along the border with Pakistan. Until some indelicate arm-twisting by the United States led Pakistan to promise an end to jihadist activities against India, it appeared there was no escape from a war that could only too easily have escalated into a nuclear exchange.

Less than four years after that near-catastrophe, Indians have had to confront a renewed wave of jihadist terrorism: the December 28 Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and the serial bombing of New Delhi just weeks earlier, have made clear the war Saeed had promised is far from over.

A few bored residents of Mumbai's Mominpura slum were the only witnesses of a protracted harangue by an obscure West Bengal cleric named Abu Masood, declaring the birth of what would become the Indian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba: the Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen, or the Organisation for the Improvement of Muslims.

In the summer of 1985, inflamed by a wave of communal violence that had ripped apart the town of Bhiwandi, activists of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis' ultra-right Gorba faction had gathered to discuss the need for Muslim reprisal. Azam Ghauri, the fifth of the 11 children of an impoverished Hyderabad family who had flirted with the People's War Group before discovering religion, spoke with passion of the community's need for a Shiv Sena-style vigilante organisation. Abdul Karim `Tunda,' yet to earn the nickname that stuck after he lost his left arm in a bomb-making accident, also delivered a speech.

Both men would go on to build a terror apparatus that now has the capacity to strike nationwide. In the late-1980s, though, the TIM's activities barely merited an entry in the local police station's diary of community events. Mimicking the drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's shakhas, Ghauri and Karim paraded their recruits around the grounds of the Young Men's Christian Association. Most of the TIM's membership consisted of young Mominpura residents who felt upset at the pervasive discrimination against Muslims in Mumbai, and were concerned about widespread communal riots.

Among the TIM's most enthusiastic recruits was Jalees Ansari, the son of worker at the now-closed Raghuvanshi Mill on Tulsi Pipe Road. Ansari's father, who had arrived as a penniless labourer from Uttar Pradesh, managed to save enough to give his children a future. In 1972, Ansari graduated from the Maratha College at Nagpara, and, after earning a degree in medicine from the Sion Medical College, started to work for the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Despite his success, Ansari was embittered by communalism. Students and staff at the Maratha College, Ansari later alleged, often insulted Muslims, and his Hindu colleagues did not treat their Muslim patients with care.

On December 6, 1992, the day Hindu fanatics demolished the Babri Masjid, the doctor decided the time had come to give up his practice of medicine and to start to kill instead. Precisely a year after the Babri Masjid was brought down, Ansari organised a series of 43 small bombings in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate explosions on inter-city trains. While most of the explosions were small, they were a demonstration of the group's formidable discipline and skills. Central Bureau of Investigations agents caught up with Ansari just 13 days before he was to set off a second series of reprisal bombings, this time scheduled for India's Republic Day in 1994.

Both Karim and Ghauri, however, had by then disappeared. Karim travelled to Kolkata, and with the help of the TIM's old contacts in the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, travelled on to Dhaka. There he was taken under the wing of Zaki-ur-Rahman, a longstanding Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who had been tasked with developing the terror group's operational capabilities outside of Jammu and Kashmir. Ghauri, for his part, hid out in Andhra Pradesh until he was able to obtain a fake passport. He then left for Saudi Arabia. In 1995, Indian intelligence officials believe, a Saudi national Hamid Bahajib arranged for his travel to Pakistan — and to a Lashkar training camp.

The Lashkar's warp and weft

Karim and Ghauri knit together networks as elaborate as the most intricate Persian carpet: a carpet that had pan-India connections as its warp and transnational connections as its weft.

By 1996, operating through the Dhaka-based Islamic Chattra Shibir (Islamic Students Organisation), Karim was running a formidable network throughout north India: what Lashkar headquarters called the Mohammad bin-Qasim dasta, or squad. Amongst his first recruits was Amir Hashim, a young Delhi resident who had just completed his seventh grade at the Mazrul Islam Higher Secondary School when his family moved to Karachi. In Pakistan, Hashim discovered the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis. From late 1994, he began to work for the Lashkar's new office in Karachi. He returned to India in 1996, and promptly executed a series of bombings in Delhi, Rohtak, and Jalandhar.

Pakistani nationals also had an important role in Karim's operations. In July 1998, for example, the Delhi Police arrested Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faislabad district who had set up a covert terror cell in the town of Khurja. A year later, the Jammu and Kashmir Police broke up a cell run by another Pakistani, Amir Khan, with operatives in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Delhi. Perhaps the most successful of the Lashkar's agents was Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan's Jhelum district. Operating under the alias Salim Junaid, Ishtiaq obtained an Indian passport, set up a trucking business out of Hyderabad that secretly served to transport explosives — and even married a local resident, Momina Khatoon.

Ghauri returned to India in 1998, responding to desperate pleas from Karim after Junaid's arrest that year left the Lashkar's Andhra Pradesh-based network in ruins. He soon discovered that the task of rebuilding the Lashkar would be less than easy. His key associate, Abdul Aziz Sheikh, had left the Lashkar to work for the mafia of Shakeel Ahmad Babu, Dawood Ibrahim's Karachi-based lieutenant. Known to Hyderabad Police old-timers as `Bombay Javed,' Sheikh continued to operate against Hindu-chauvinist targets. In the summer of 1999, for example, he attempted to assassinate the Shiv Sena leader Milind Vaidya, who was alleged to have played a key role in the Mumbai communal pogrom of 1993. However, Sheikh now worked for cash — not ideological commitment.

Within six months, however, Ghauri had a new network in place. He turned to Maqbool Zubair, a hitman who had worked for Mohammad Fasiuddin, a Nalagonda-based gang leader. Fasiuddin, who was killed in a 1993 police encounter, had won some community legitimacy by killing local Hindu fundamentalist leaders Papiah Goud and Nanda Raj Goud as retaliation for the 1992 anti-Muslim pogrom in Hyderabad. With Zubair acting as his liaison with the local community, Ghauri succeeded in raising several recruits by the end of 1999, including Mansoor Khatik, who was charged with running an independent Lashkar cell in Nanded, and Sayyed Mukhtar Ahmed Shafiq, who was made responsible for communications with the organisation's headquarters near Lahore.

On February 6, 2000, the Lashkar's top ideologue, Abdul Rehman Makki, declared war. Speaking at a Lashkar convention, Makki announced the organisation had set in place a new campaign to liberate Hyderabad from Hindu rule. Like Junagarh, he announced, Hyderabad had been seized by force — and would be won back through the sword. Bombs went off soon afterwards in cinema theatres in Karimnagar and Nanded; two explosive devices planted near a Defence Research and Development Organisation facility were defused before they could do damage. All these devices were low-grade, put together with potassium permanganate, aluminium powder, and fertilizer: the very kind Karim had taught so many young operatives to make.

Less than eight weeks after these bombings, Ghauri was shot dead in a police encounter. For the Lashkar, however, his elimination would prove to be just a punctuation mark: the organisation Ghauri and Karim had built would gain new personnel and develop increasingly sophisticated capabilities, which would be used to engineer the December 28 tragedy in Bangalore.

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