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From medicine man to murderer

Praveen Swami

Abdul Karim Tunda's extraordinary journey offers deep insight into the factors behind the Lashkar-e-Taiba's growth in India.

BACK IN the summer of 1985, a handful of bored residents of Mumbai's Mominpura slum gathered to hear an obscure cleric from West Bengal named Abu Masood promise vengeance against the Hindu fanatics who had unleashed a hideous wave of violence in the textile town of Bhiwandi.

Standing amidst the crowd was a stocky 52-year-old from New Delhi, with a flowing henna-dyed beard. On Thursday night, it is possible at least some of those present at that meeting learned on television that the man they called Hakim-ji, because of his part-time practice of indigenous medicine, had been arrested in Mombassa, Kenya — and will now stand trial for his role in dozens of bombings that have claimed dozens of lives since 1993.

Little is known about Syed Abdul Karim's journey into the ranks of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — even though India's intelligence and police services have documented his smallest action ever since. Born to a lower middle class family in Delhi, Karim is believed to have moved to Pilkhuwa, near the town of Ghaziabad, in his teens. He then shifted base to Mumbai, where he set up a business dyeing textiles.

By most accounts, Karim had almost nothing to do with politics until the 1985 meeting in Mominpura, although he was drawn to the ultra-conservative religious traditions of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis. The meeting reflected the growing belief amongst the ranks of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis' far-right Gorba faction that the time had come for armed self-defence against Hindu fundamentalism. At the end of the meeting, Karim agreed to join the new Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen (TIM), or Organisation for the Improvement of Muslims.

Mimicking the drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's shakhas, Karim paraded TIM recruits around the grounds of — ironically enough — the local Young Men's Christian Association. Most were young men upset at the pervasive discrimination against Muslims in Mumbai — among them Jalees Ansari, the son of a worker at the now-defunct Raghuvanshi Mill, and Azam Ghauri, the fifth of 11 children of an impoverished Hyderabad family, who had flirted with Maoist groups before discovering religion.

Ansari's story helps understand just what drove the TIM's cadre. His father, who had arrived as a penniless labourer from Uttar Pradesh, managed to save enough to give his children a future. After earning a degree from the Sion Medical College, Ansari started to work for the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Despite his success, though, Ansari was embittered by communalism. Students and staff at his college, Ansari later claimed, 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, Karim sat down with Ghauri and Ansari to discuss what would be the first action outside of Jammu and Kashmir of a Pakistan-based terrorist group with which they had established contact — the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Precisely a year after the Babri Masjid was brought down, India's first Lashkar cell executed 43 small bombings in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate explosions on inter-city trains.

Compared with later strikes, the bombings had little impact: just two people were killed. Flaws in planning and communication amongst the cell's members, moreover, allowed the Central Bureau of Investigations to make rapid progress in locating the perpetrators. Ansari was arrested 13 days before he was to set off a second series of bombings, this time on Republic Day in 1994. But the sheer scale of the bombings had demonstrated the skill, resolve and lethal ambitions of the new terror group.

Spreading terror

Karim now travelled to Kolkata, and with the help of the TIM's old contacts in the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, crossed the border into Bangladesh. There he was taken under the wing of Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, a long-standing Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who had been tasked with developing the terror group's pan-India capabilities. By 1996, operating through the Dhaka-based Islamic Chattra Shibir (Islamic Students Organisation), Karim was running a formidable network throughout north India.

Among the first recruits of what Lashkar headquarters called the Mohammad bin-Qasim dasta, or squad, 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, Hashim discovered the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis in Pakistan. 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 rule 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. Karim had used his expanding network in India to provide Sattar with fake identification papers, cash, guides — and a landlord willing to look the other way while the Pakistani terrorist built a bunker to house explosives inside a pottery kiln.

Perhaps the most successful of the long-term Lashkar 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. Indian intelligence broke up Ishtiaq's operations before he could execute major operations, but Karim's networks survived.

Azam Ghauri's return to India in 1998, in response to desperate pleas from Karim after Junaid's arrest, made new resources available to the Lashkar. Ghauri turned to the world of organised crime for help. Abdul Aziz Sheikh, a long-standing lieutenant of Karachi-based mafioso Shakeel Ahmad Babu, agreed to target Shiv Sena politicians in Mumbai. Maqbool Zubair, a hit man who had worked for Nalgonda-based gangster Mohammad Fasiuddin, also joined the group.

By the end of 1999, the Lashkar announced a new phase of its pan-India campaign: "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. Many of the cells Karim had set up were broken by Indian counter-intelligence, and Ghauri himself was dead — but the speech indicated just how confident the Lashkar was of its capabilities.

Karim himself retreated into the background, shuttling between Lashkar safehouses in Dhaka, Kathmandu, and Lahore. Rumours that he had died were circulated on occasion, to throw India's covert services off the trail. However, he was spotted by Indian intelligence agents at the Lashkar's campus near Murdike, near Lahore, on more than one occasion. Lashkar recruits who joined the organisation after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom often met Karim, now a mentor and guide to a new generation of terror operatives.

Sacrificed?

Just what Karim was doing in Mombassa, though, remains unclear. Some believe he was betrayed by Pakistan's covert services; a sacrifice to still Indian anger in the wake of the serial bombings of India. Others believe he was engaged in exploring new fundraising and infrastructure opportunities offered by the mafia. Dawood Ibrahim's brother, Anees Ibrahim Kaskar, is known to have had extensive investments in Mombassa, both in legitimate businesses and for running narcotics.

What Karim will tell his interrogators in the days and weeks to come will provide India with its first glimpses into the highest levels of Lashkar decision-making: into the strategic intentions that underpin its ongoing bombing offensive, its links with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, and the real reach of its networks in India. That his arrest will mark a blow to the Lashkar from which it will prove unable to recover, though, is profoundly unlikely.

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