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Almost famous: Raziuddin Nasir’s jihad

By the accounts of those who knew him, Raziuddin Nasir always wanted to be famous just like his father. Now, he is. Little known even to Indian counter-terrorism officials, Nasir has acquired almost mythic proportions after his arrest in Karnataka last month. He was an associate of the Taliban’s one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, some have it; a protégé of the Jaish-e-Mohammad supreme leader Maulana Masood Azhar, others claim.

Interrogators from Indian intelligence and police services who have spent days sifting through Nasir’s story, though, are starting to suspect the truth is more prosaic. Many of Nasir’s claims, they believe, are fantasies which reconstruct reality with himself at their core. The son of Maulana Naseeruddin, one of the architects of violent Islamism in Andhra Pradesh, Nasir appears to have aspired an important role in the jihad his father helped build — but never quite made the grade.

Nasir’s journey into Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HUJI) began in 2005, when he visited Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage visa. He stayed with his sister, Aneesa Somaiya, and brother-in-law, Abdul Aziz Khalid. A department store employee in Riyadh, Khalid had long-standing links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, for which he had served time in an Indian jail. Nasir used these connections to volunteer his services for the Lashkar, and left for Pakistan.

After six months under the tutelage of ‘Muzammil’ — the alias used by the still-unidentified Rawalpindi-based Lashkar commander responsible for operations outside of Jammu and Kashmir — Nasir moved to Karachi. There, he served under Mohammad Shahid, a Hyderabad resident who trained with the Lashkar before taking charge of a HUJI cell responsible for at least half-a-dozen terror strikes across India over the last two years.

In July this year, Nasir returned to India, travelling first on a Pakistani passport to Dhaka, and then on a Bangladesh passport to Kathmandu. His instructions were to help set up an operational cell in Karnataka, drawing on Students Islamic Movement of India cadre active in the region. Soon, though, things began to go wrong. At the end of August 2007, all contact with Shahid ended. Soon after, Nasir’s sister told him what had happened: HUJI’s top commander, it transpired, had been killed by his own Inter-Services Intelligence bosses in Karachi.

No one knows for certain just what happened but some believe India’s intelligence services had gathered enough evidence on Shahid’s presence in Pakistan for it to become an embarrassment. Moreover, Shahid’s indiscretions — notably, a series of mistakes that compelled the Bangladesh authorities to eliminate HUJI’s bomb-maker, Dhaka-based Mohammad Sharifuddin — also earned him the wrath of his one-time mentors.

Shahid’s second-in-command, Lahore-based Mohammad Amjad, sent repeated orders for Nasir to return to Pakistan. Fearful for his life, he refused. Instead, he based himself out of Karnataka, stealing vehicles he told associates were meant for a series of bombings targeting western nationals and Israelis in Goa. Although there is little doubt that Nasir had both the skills and resources needed for such an operation, no evidence has emerged that he made serious preparations for it. Nor have the explosives needed for a large-scale operation been recovered.

As such, there is at least some reason to suspect that the vehicle thefts weren’t for a major terror strike — but for purchasing his way into the good life.

Five years ago, when Maulana Naseeruddin started recruiting the young men he hoped would deliver vengeance for the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, the ageing cleric steered clear of his own sons.

In the wake of the massacres, a Karachi-based ganglord had contacted Maulana Naseeruddin for help. Rasool Khan ‘Party’— who draws his nickname from Gujarati argot for a business associate — knew Maulana Naseeruddin well. Fleeing crackdown on organised crime, Khan had fled to Hyderabad in 1992-1993 where he lived posing as a Gujarati cloth merchant. He helped fund Islamist groups and causes during the six years he lived there, earning Naseeruddin’s trust and friendship in the process.

Khan told Maulana Naseeruddin about emerging plans to assassinate Hindu-communalist politicians who had helped organise the violence in Gujarat. Mufti Sufian Patangia, a Salafi neoconservative who ran a small seminary in the Kalpur area, had already raised some volunteers for training at Lashkar facilities in Pakistan. But more men, Khan said, were needed. In the event, Naseeruddin and Mohammad Abdul Rauf, a Majlis Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen leader long associated with Islamist movements in Hyderabad, joined hands to make that possible.

Over a dozen men from Hyderabad and Ahmedabad were eventually flown to training camps in Pakistan. Some, like the assassins of Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya, returned to India to execute the reprisal-terrorism operations for which they had volunteered. Others, like Shahid and Amjad, stayed on in Pakistan to help operate the terror networks responsible for the vast bulk of attacks against targets in India since 2003.

Terrorism, though, isn’t what Naseeruddin had set out to inflict. Back in April, 2001, clerics and politicians from across India met at the Hamdard University in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, to discuss how best Islamists might respond to the increasing aggression of the Hindu right. With both traditionalist clerics and political leaders discredited by their failure to combat Hindu communalism, the Islamists who met in Ghaziabad believed space existed for a new Muslim leadership that could articulate the community’s interests forcefully. Their deliberations gave birth to the Tehreek Tahaffuz-e-Sha’air-e-Islam, a coalition committed to the protection of Islamic monuments and symbols.

In June 2001, the TTSI made public its intentions at a press conference. Speakers said that no power, including the Supreme Court of India, would stop them from rebuilding the Babri Masjid. Several TTSI leaders present at the press conference charged the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government with being engaged in a project to destroy Islam.

While the TTSI included several clerics of eminence — among them Maulana Kalbe Sadiq of Lucknow, Maulana Mujibullah Nadvi of Azamgarh and Maulana Abdul Wahab Khilji of Delhi — its agenda was in practice shaped by political Islamists. One reason for this was the deep influence of the then-legal SIMI-possessed networks that, in their geographical reach and organisational rigour, were far superior to those of the clerics who had lent their names to the new coalition. Former SIMI leaders Ashraf Jaffri and Ziauddin Siddique, not surprisingly, played a central role in shaping the TTSI agenda.

In Andhra Pradesh, the TTSI served as a political kindergarten for many of the young men who would later join the jihad against India. Maulana Naseeruddin set about mobilising cadre for a proposed march to Ayodhya, where he promised to rebuild the Babri Masjid. Protests were organised against a welter of real and imagined slights against Islam, ranging from the cross-border romance Gadar to the alleged burning of copies of the Koran by Hindu fundamentalists. TTSI leaders also organised self-defence courses for Muslims in riot-hit inner city areas, offering martial arts and airgun-marksmanship courses.

It seems probable, given the evidence, that the Andhra Pradesh TTSI had the endorsement of jihadi groups. Abdul Aziz Khalid — Nasir’s Saudi Arabia-based brother-in-law — had served time in prison for his links with Lashkar agent Mohammad Ishtiaq. The son of a shopkeeper from Pakistan’s Jhelum district, Ishtiaq set up a Lashkar cell based out of Hyderabad in 1998. Khalid was among a small group of local Islamists who helped Ishtiaq — who operated under the code-name ‘Junaid’— obtain a driver’s licence, passport and, to further strengthen his cover identity, a wife. Most of these local supporters, like the TTSI’s rank-and-file, were SIMI members.

Naseeruddin’s closest ally in the TTSI, the Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahdat’s (Centre for Crusading and Martyrdom) Mehboob Ali, had similar links to jihadist groups. Formed in 1983 as an Islamic version of the RSS, the DSJ acquired a formal shape in 1987, with a manifesto stating that “Islamic supremacy is our goal.” Ali — who composed pages for the Gazette published by the Government Press at Chanchalguda before turning to politics —started off organising street-corner meetings attacking Hindu communal violence, and calling for retaliation.

DJS cadre appear to have begun developing links with Islamist terror groups soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In 1993, the police in Hyderabad charged the DJS with helping the Jammu and Kashmir-based Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen recruit operatives for training in Pakistan. Later that year, DJS activist Masood Khan was among several local Islamists contacted by Ghauri in his abortive efforts to set up a local Lashkar affiliate called the Indian Muslim Mohammadi Mujahideen.

Nasir’s almost casual journey into the jihad is, thus, the product of decades of work. Where involvement with jihadists was the end point of a long process of political transformation for an earlier generation of Islamists, Nasir’s story shows the point of initiation.

While Nasir’s jihad might have failed, the seeds his father helped plant, it would seem, are just starting to flower.

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