THE VOICE OF WORDS

By M H AHSAN 

Intelligence agencies are frantically trying to unravel their new nightmare, which goes by the name of Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami

In 1998 when intelligence agencies started combing the heights of Kargil after Indian troops had reclaimed it they found several documents and letters written in Bengali. At that time the significance of their find did not sink in. 

But now, over the last two years, not only is the significance sinking in with telling effect, the hierarchy of terror outfits is also getting clearer. There are two versions of Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI) - the Pakistani version, on which the agencies have always trained their spotlight on, and the Bangladeshi one, which has emerged out of the shadows with devastating force.

“HuJI has been successful in India due to local participation,” say a senior official of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Born during the Afghan Mujahideen operations, HuJI was never expected to be a threat to India. Taking a leaf out of BPOs

Ever since President Pervez Musharraf joined the US War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani intelligence establishment has been under immense pressure to clean up their act. The emergence of HuJI-Bangladesh can be traced back to this pressure. Most of the actual operations being carried out by HuJI-Pakistan were siphoned off to HuJI-Bangladesh.

The transfer of operations was followed by funds.

“It was as if Pakistan had taken a leaf out of Indian BPOs. The cost of carrying out an operation from Bangladesh was significantly cheaper,” an intelligence officer told HNN. “Everything from raw materials - ammonium nitrate, triggers and RDX - to personnel (read jihadis) was cheaper.” 

But the change of base also meant a change in focus. The Pakistani intelligence establishment reduced its focus on Jammu and Kashmir. While everyone from the international community to the Indian Army rejoiced in the declining militant activity in the state, the new targets became India’s financial and economic heart - Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai.

“The Pakistani intelligence establishment has changed its strategy. It now realises that the only way to hobble India is to hit it where it hurts most - economy,” says a top intelligence official.

Local muscle is deadly
HuJI has probably the largest number of non-Kashmiri supporters from within India. HuJI’s stunning attacks have been mounted by local recruits. “HuJI changed dynamics of terrorism. They minimised the role of foreigners, recruited locals, trained them in terror tactics,” an official says.

Investigators believe among HuJI’s most significant recruits is Shahid Bilal- key suspect behind the recent Hyderabad blasts. Bilal is suspected to be involved in all three attacks in Hyderabad - suicide attack on headquarters of STF in 2005, attack on Mecca Masjid and last week’s blasts.

Cog in global terror network
A key man behind HuJI-Bangladesh was Mufti Abdul Hannan, an Afghan veteran who had education in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoband, one of the world’s largest Islamic schools imparting training in the ultra-conservative Wahabi beliefs. 

“Today HuJI seems to have internalised and successfully executed the strategy of global jihad networks of Europe, Iraq and other areas. They are making bombs out of chemicals commonly available,” says an official. “This has significantly brought down the risk of an operation.” 

The greatest success of HuJI comes from the fact that they have able to create their India cells-where the brain and the foot soldiers are all mostly Indians. “It is their success, and our biggest challenge,” says an official who has spent a long period in Kashmir through the 1990s.

By HNN Special Investigation Team

It’s a shocking tale that exposes the dark underbelly of Capital’s adoption market.

A HNN Special Investigation reveals how a placement agency located in Shakoorpur area of West Delhi forces minor girls into conceiving and later sells the babies for big money.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) had information that the agency brought girls below 18 years of age from Jharkhand and West Bengal and made them work as domestic helps in Delhi.

But that’s only half the story.

The minor girls were forced to conceive and their babies were sold off through agents.

Following a tip-off, two decoys of HNN Special Investigation team followed up on the case and went to the placement agency - Adivasi Seva Samiti Service - posing as a couple wanting to buy an infant.

The agency is run by one Vinod and his wife Preeti. HNN spoke with Preeti first. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation

HNN: How much do you take per baby?

Preeti: We sold the last baby for Rs 10000

While trying to fix a price for a baby, with Preeti, the team met Sukhmui, a young girl who had delivered a baby 20 days ago. Basanti, the midwife who helped deliver the baby, was also present. She and Preeti had differing takes on Sukhmui’s age.

Here’s an excerpt of a conversation with them, shot on a hidden cam.

Basanti: She must be 16-17 years old

Preeti: No, i think she’s older.

Basanti: I’ve delivered her baby. I know she’s a minor

The girl herself was unclear about when exactly she conceived the child. “It happened in my village,” is all that she recalls.

By M H Ahsan

For nations, it matters what happens to them; but the course of their history is often determined less by what happened and more by how they reacted. What is happening to India on the terrorist front is bad, but what is worse is the way we are reacting to it. The worst reaction of a government to such a serious national challenge would be to underplay it, divert the discourse from core issues to the peripherals. Asserting that all is well and nothing needs to be changed, emphasising maintenance of social harmony as the core concern, complimenting people for bravely suffering losses and returning to normal lives, talking about human rights and protection of minorities — these are all laudable objectives. No one disputes them, but they do not address the core issues.

In the face of a threat as serious as this, the national focus should be on: how serious is the threat; its long and short-term implications; our capacities to counter the threat, both in policy formulation and policy execution; and how to address the deficiencies. This would involve considering ways to leverage civil society, media, the scientific community, religious leaders to the best national advantage; ways to neutralise the fast-growing domestic base of terrorism, including availability of hardware and human resource, collaborative linkages of the terrorists with organised crime, gun runners, drug syndicates, hawala operators, subversive radical groups, and how to break the nexus. Debate on the adequacy of the country’s laws, judicial administration, security systems and doctrines, etc, in the light of assessed threats is also important.

The right discourse should also centre on our policy options vis-à-vis countries and groups involved in terrorist incidents in India. This is not happening, and that’s the tragedy. It is not happening because a basic requirement is missing: a political culture that can subordinate electoral and other political considerations to the nation’s supreme sovereign interests. This requires the political will and ability to carry the whole country together. If the nation fails to do so, it may face many Hyderabads, and worse. That Hyderabad is on the terrorist radar has been well known for quite some time. Here are a few illustrative events that could have served as alerts to undertake surgical operations, covert and overt, to sanitise the city, whatever the cost.

On April 1, 2007, an ISI agent, Maqsood Ahmed, was arrested while recruiting youths for sabotage and espionage activities. Neither was he thoroughly interrogated nor was follow-up action taken. On May 20, 2007, Mohamed Sayeed was arrested by the West Bengal police from Jharkhand’s Jantara district. He gave copious details of his links with terrorist modules in Hyderabad. On May 25, 2007, Shoaib Faqruddin Jagirdar, muttawali (custodian) of a local dargah, was arrested for sending RDX and youths from Jalna in Maharashtra to Hyderabad for terrorist actions. He was reportedly released under political pressure.

On June 15, 2007, Mohamed Abdul Sattar, an ISI agent, confessed he had received armed training in Pakistan along with Shahid who was responsible for the May 18 Hyderabad blasts. On August 12, 2007, the Aurangabad police seized 29 kg of ammonium nitrate explosive, abandoned by a man who came from Secunderabad (near Hyderabad). If we have to win the battle against terror, political considerations, communal pressures, administrative and police lethargy, and a weak legal-judicial regime will have to be negated. Let us not sugarcoat our response, like announcing that India and Pakistan as victims of terrorism are in the same league, lest we sent ambiguous signals to India’s enemies. It is a myth that terrorists strike anywhere, any time and against any target. Had that been so, they would have caused havoc not just in India.

Terrorists strike where their intentions and capabilities meet the opportunities. The success of counter-terrorism lies in degrading their capabilities, forcing them to change their intentions and denying them opportunities to strike. We appear to be failing on all three counts. Their extended capabilities are obvious by their spreading the arc of violence to cover almost the entire country. The fact that masterminds and critical perpetrators of all the recent terrorist depredations remain by and large unidentified is a matter of concern. This brings the deterrence threshold down. There is no change in the intentions of those within and outside the country who seek to bleed India, appeasement within and peace parleys outside notwithstanding.

We have also not been able to deny them the opportunities. All these infirmities can be corrected only through an integrated strategic and tactical action plan aimed at empowering and enabling security agencies, strengthening our legal-judicial response regime, upgrading intelligence, and complementing our defensive regime with defensive offence capabilities. Besides the government and its security agencies, civil society has a seminal role in this. The nation has not been able to produce a powerful ideological movement within the Muslim community to counter the radicals and deprive them of religious legitimacy within the community.

The last few years have witnessed alarming growth of Salafism and Wahabism at the cost of the indigenous variant of Islam, which is more tolerant and accommodative. Funding to such organisations from outside the country also has to be stopped, if need be, by further strengthening our laws on the subject and their implementation. India’s neighbourhood, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, must be understood. Fundamentalist forces have acquired strengths, resources and capabilities to survive and strike on their own strength. They have global collaborative linkages, sustainable channels of funding, access to modern technology and an unending stream of jihadis keen to kill and die.

The global growth of Islamic radicalism, proximity of jihadi epicentres close to Indian borders and the tilting of some sections of Muslims within the country pose real problems. The imported variety of terrorism whose planning, infrastructure and resources are of foreign origin will continue to haunt us for quite some time. The current phase of terrorism has a marked Bangladeshi dimension, closely linked to illegal immigration. Most of the recent cases are linked to Harkat-ul-Jihad-e Islami, which operates from Bangladesh, where it has an extensive network. Al-Qaeda’s linkages with HUJI are old and intimate with total ideological convergence. Al-Qaeda is out-sourcing terror through franchised groups, who enjoy local advantages and can raise their own resources and operate as stand-alone entities. A special action plan needs to be formulated to contain HUJI’s entrenchment.

All this will happen if we bring the discourse on the right track and set priorities right. We need to do a quick VED analysis focusing on the vitals, keeping a watch on the essentials and leaving the desirables till the vitals have been achieved and essentials addressed. For those who govern, let political interests, at best, fall in the category of desirables.