India in the dark over terror attack
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - The bloody trail of terror attacks continues in India. Delhi was
the target this weekend, with TV channels splattered with the increasingly
common pictures of gory scenes and wailing relatives - and the country nowhere
closer to stopping the bloodshed.
Five serial bomb blasts (in the space of 45 minutes) killed at least 25 and
wounded more than 100 people, most out on Saturday evening, shopping for a
festival and a holiday season.
Terrorists struck at the heart of the capital's entertainment, commercial and
shopping hub, Connaught Place, and the casualties would have been much higher
had two bombs not been defused at the same location.
The pattern of the attacks has been the same over the past two
years of incidents across the country, including Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Delhi,
Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Varanasi, that have claimed thousands of
lives.
The bombs used are easy to assemble and difficult to detect as they used
low-to-medium intensity ammonium nitrate packets filled with scrap iron that
turns into deadly shrapnel when the device is ignited.
The remote-controlled bombs are strategically placed (in dustbins, on cycles)
at carefully chosen soft targets such as crowded weekend markets in the
evening, landmarks and places of worship to inflict maximum damage.
In May, similar serial blasts killed 80 people and injured 200 in the western
Indian city of Jaipur, the capital of the tourist state Rajasthan. Serial
explosions in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state, in July left more than 50 dead and
over 200 injured.
The latest Delhi bombings have been claimed by the Indian Mujahideen (IM), an
Islamist militant group, which sent an online warning by hacking into the
e-mail address of a Mumbai-based private firm. The IM has claimed
responsibility for blasts in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Jaipur in the past three
months, again via hacked Wi-Fi accounts.
Indian intelligence and security agencies say the IM is derived from elements
in the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami and the Pakistan-based
Lashkar-e-Toiba, with the local banned Students Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI) being a party.
The IM came into national focus for the first time in November last year,
following bomb blasts in three trial courts in Uttar Pradesh, a large central
Indian state with a sizeable Muslim population and marked by a lack of
development and millions of poor.
Emails were sent to the media and authorities minutes before the bombs exploded
- a pattern that has been followed in subsequent blasts.
Officials say they are in particular looking for a tech-savvy SIMI functionary
named Abdul Subhan Qureshi, alias Tauqeer, considered to be a mastermind in the
Ahmedabad blasts.
Tauqeer is reported to be a computer engineer based in Mumbai and a former
employee of software major Wipro. He is strongly suspected to have designed the
bombs in Surat and possibly Ahmedabad and now Delhi.
Failure of security
Despite claims of breakthroughs and arrests in the recent past, especially in
Gujarat and Mumbai, it is apparent that the Indian security networks have
failed in detecting and preventing terror attacks.
Although security agencies claim the situation would be much worse were it not
for their preventive vigil and crackdowns, their comments do not inspire much
public confidence.
Officials also privately admit that the entire security apparatus is geared
towards protecting important people such as politicians and their families,
leaving little manpower and money for ground-level security and
counter-terrorism exercises.
Even if police do manage to arrest Qureshi, would the attacks stop? It appears
unlikely, and there is even an air of helplessness among those who are supposed
to protect citizens. This was reflected in a security review chaired by federal
Home Minister Shivraj Patil following the Delhi blasts.
Intelligence Bureau chief P C Haldar is reported to have said that it was
difficult to track every terror module of the IM, which has enrolled people
from many cities in India. Haldar is reported to have admitted that the
hierarchy and structure of the IM are still hazy.
He reportedly said that given their mutually exclusive style of operations, the
IM cells that have been cracked are not in a position to provide clues about
the activities of others.
Earlier, in a more damning self-indictment, National Security Advisor (NSA) M K
Narayanan, who reports to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh directly, blamed the
intelligence agencies that he ironically leads, for not providing "actionable
intelligence" on attacks.
The NSA reportedly told the cabinet that there was no warning about the attack
on Jaipur in May. "There is no proper coordination between the state
intelligence-gathering machinery and the Federal Intelligence Bureau [IB - that
looks at internal security matters]. The inputs provided by the IB are
imprecise."
Yet, the security agencies cannot be blamed in isolation of the political
leaders, who are engaged in another round of brinkmanship, instead of giving
serious thought to revamping the security apparatus.
Narendra Modi, Gujarat's chief minister belonging to the opposition Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), claimed he had personally alerted Manmohan about an
impending attack in Delhi.
"Ten days back when I met the prime minister and the NSA, I informed them that
the people arrested in connection with the Gujarat blasts had told the police
that a plan was on for blasts in Delhi. Only the location was not known," he
said.
However, such broad assertions are always suspect, especially with general
elections slated in India next summer and the BJP keen to paint the
Congress-led New Delhi government as soft on terror.
Following the terror attacks in Jaipur (where a provincial BJP government
rules), Modi said that terror warnings from Delhi to the states are like vague
weather bulletins that nobody can take them seriously nor understand.
The BJP has been calling for the reinstatement of anti-terror laws, such as the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002, that was scrapped by the Congress due to
alleged human rights violations, especially against Muslims, that the party
counts as its support base.
Yet, the problem is beyond just laws. The preventive mechanism is woefully
inadequate and India's lax security structure has become a fertile ground for
terror groups to gain cheap global publicity via easy-to-execute attacks,
without incurring much expenditures or risk of lives to their cadres.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
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