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Behind Bangalore: the long jihad today

Praveen Swami

The second and concluding part of an investigation into the Lashkar-e-Taiba networks that operate across India.

PAKISTAN, DECLARED the Lashkar-e-Taiba ideologue Abdul Rahman Makki at an August 11, 2004, press conference, will "only be complete when the Muslim-majority States of India become a part of it."

Makki's assertion, which broke with two years of relatively tempered Lashkar polemic, made clear one stark fact: despite General Pervez Musharraf's promises that he would force Islamists to de-escalate their jihad against India, the terrorist group's intentions had not altered in the least. What Makki did not say was also of significance. Despite the haemorrhaging of Lashkar operatives in Indian counter-intelligence operations, its capabilities both in Pakistan and India remained more than adequate to mount a renewed offensive.

Since the India-Pakistan near-war of 2001-2002, however, Lashkar strategists had to address a difficult problem: how could the jihad against India be continued without provoking their adversary into initiating a potentially-catastrophic military encounter? After Bangalore, their answer is starting to become apparent.

Intelligence Bureau personnel had long been listening in to Mohammad Riaz-ur-Rehman's conversations with his associates in Hyderabad, as part of a communications intelligence operation targeting the Lashkar's operatives in India and their handlers in West Asia. Soon after the Nalgonda resident returned to India from Saudi Arabia on October 15, authorities in Karnataka received the first of a series of warnings from the Intelligence Bureau of a possible terror strike.

If the 35-year-old cleric who worked at an seminary in Riyadh does indeed turn out to be the individual who ordered the Bangalore attack, it will demonstrate just how resilient the Lashkar's recruitment apparatus has been. Azam Ghauri, an Andhra Pradesh resident who was among the founders of the Lashkar in India, had drawn much of his cadre from the Nalgonda-based mafia of Mohammad Fasiuddin. Fasiuddin's group had won community legitimacy by dispensing vigilante justice after the 1992 communal pogrom in Hyderabad, notably by assassinating two local Hindu fundamentalist leaders.

Riaz-ur-Rehman, investigators say, was introduced by Ghauri's Nalgonda associates to Maulana Abdul Bari, a Saudi Arabia-based cleric who has long played a major role in the Lashkar's pan-India jihad. A key financier of several Tamil Nadu-based Lashkar-affiliated groups such as the Muslim Defence Force, Bari is also believed to have organised the 2002 bombing of a Sai Baba Temple. Investigators have detained at least four individuals in Tamil Nadu for their possible role in the Bangalore attacks, illustrating once again the existence of a subculture of recruitment to Lashkar-affiliated groups ever since the Coimbatore riots of 1997.

To those who have been following the workings of the Lashkar's pan-India war, such linkages are no surprise. Mohammad Asghar Ali, charged by the Central Bureau of Investigations with having assassinated former Gujarat Minister of State for Home Haren Pandya, provided Indian counter-intelligence a graphic illustration of the workings of these linkages. The son of a retired police sub-inspector, Ali joined the Fasiuddin mafia in Nalgonda in 1991. Soon after, he joined in the mafia's efforts to carry out retaliatory strikes on Hindu fundamentalists engaged in the violence that broke out after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and was recruited by Ghauri in 1998.

Ali was arrested by the Andhra Pradesh Police in 2000, on charges of possessing explosives, but jumped bail. Having made his way to Dubai, intelligence officials believe, he made contact with Bari. Bari, sources say, paid for Ali's stay in West Asia and then arranged for him to be trained at a Lashkar camp in Pakistan. In early 2002, when the Gujarat communal pogrom began, Bari made contact with an Ahmedabad-based cleric, Maulana Sufiyan Patangia, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia for a pilgrimage. Patangia volunteered to help recruit cadre for the Lashkar, several of whom were subsequently despatched for training to Pakistan through the Line of Control in Poonch district.

New synergies

Since Pandya's murder, local Lashkar operatives have rarely involved themselves in physical attacks. Instead, the task of executing a terrorist operation is entrusted to Lashkar operatives based in Jammu and Kashmir, who return there after the assault. For its part, the local Lashkar cell retreats underground. Intelligence officials believe something of the kind might have taken place in Bangalore as well.

History suggests this is a plausible prospect. In June 2004, Ahmedabad police authorities shot dead four Lashkar operatives who were planning to assassinate the former Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani. A Pune resident, Javed Sheikh, and his Mumbai-based girlfriend, Ishrat Jehan Raza, were tasked with conducting two Pakistani nationals to Ahmedabad for the strike. Sheikh was also involved in a separate Lashkar plan to bomb the Mumbai Stock Exchange. An ethnic-Kashmiri medical student in Pune, Manzoor Ahmad Chilloo, was tasked by his Lashkar controllers in Srinagar with liaising between Sheikh and the operatives who would eventually have carried out the Mumbai attack.

Similar tactics were used in the September 2002 attack on the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar. Manzoor Zahid Chowdhury, a Jammu and Kashmir-based Lashkar operational commander, despatched two Pakistani nationals to carry out the attack. The weapons and explosives used were ferried through Chand Usman Khan, a Bareilly resident who ran a car mechanic's store. However, the fidayeen themselves were conducted to Akshardham by another circle of Lashkar operatives, recruited by an Ahmedabad cleric, Maulvi Abdul Qayoom. Similarly, Tariq Dar, the Lashkar operative assigned overall charge for the Delhi serial bombings, did not personally involve himself in the actual strike.

Further evidence that the Lashkar's core cadre in Jammu and Kashmir continue to operate on a pan-India level emerged on January 6, when the Mumbai Police announced the arrest of three operatives who were planning a bomb strike in the city. Acting on information provided by the Intelligence Bureau, the Mumbai Police's Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Khurshid Ahmad Lala, Arshad Badru, and Mohammad Ramzan Qazi from a safehouse in the city's Nagpada area. The group, which had carried electronic detonators from Jammu and Kashmir, is believed to have been waiting for a consignment of explosives that was to have been ferried to Mumbai by a separate Lashkar cell.

What does the Lashkar hope to achieve through such attacks? In purely military terms, they are less than useless. In times when dozens of fatalities have been claimed in terror strikes that have taken place across the world, a small shootout in Bangalore is unlikely to deter investors. Indeed, the current phase of the Lashkar's jihad-without-end is studiedly small-scale, in deference to Pakistan's strategic need to avoid provoking a war. Most victims of the Delhi serial bombings, for example, died because of the accidental detonation of gas cylinders in Sarojini Nagar market, not the explosives themselves.

But such actions are not, in fact, a waste of time. Terrorism, Islamist or otherwise, can usefully be understood as a form of theatre, a performance staged for those who watch the spectacle unfold. As the scholar Stephen Cohen has argued, the "goal of the terrorist is to use an extreme act to change the way in which this group [civil society] sees reality. Thus, the terrorist is literally a bad actor, a bit player in a drama that seeks to change reality by a theatrical performance of increasingly unimaginable horror. As in the case of violence in literature and films, the level of horror has to increase over time to attract the attention of bystanders, who have their own mechanism of coping with the awful."

However, greater numbers of deaths are not a core element of increasing levels of terror: just one or two well-executed killings can achieve the same end. Hassan Ibn al-Sabbah, the brilliant 11th century mystic who founded the fidayeen as a means of resistance against anti-Shia chauvinism, understood that terror was not just a means, but an end in itself. Al-Sabbah's fidayeen would conspire in great secrecy against their Sunni fundamentalist opponents, but strike before the largest audience possible. For these early terrorists, the historian Amin Maalouf has perceptively noted, "murder was not merely a means of disposing of an enemy but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public: first, the punishment of the victim and, second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner."

For all the apparent insanity of its jihadist campaign, the Lashkar is a careful student of history. When al-Sabbah's fidayeen claimed the life of a single man, the Seljuk Wazir Nizam-ul-Mulk, the state apparatus he had built over 30 years disintegrated with his death. Torn apart by wars of succession, the Seljuk empire never recovered its unity. It is precisely this kind of outcome that the Lashkar hopes its jihad will one day bring about. In the Lashkar's imagination, any of its acts can prove to be a catalyst for a historic moment where terrorism is transfigured into Hindu-Muslim communal war.

Improved intelligence and policing, then, are important components of India's war against the Lashkar — but so, too, is giving substance to India's promise of secularism.

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