INDIA NEW FRONT FOR TERRORISTS?

Behind India’s strategic alliance with the United States and its potential to be an emerging superpower lurks an ever present threat of terrorism that could destabilize the country.
With so much focus on the Middle East and Afghanistan there has been little emphasis on the fact that in India in 2006/07 almost twice as many people died in terrorism related incidents as perished in the 9/11 attacks. Recent terror bombings by a group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen have exposed the fact that India lacks a sophisticated anti-terrorism task force and the hi-tech means of tracking small terror cells. The country’s Central Intelligence Bureau has even admitted there may be several thousand tiny terror “sleeper cells” hiding within the nation’s population of 1.1 billion.
According to the US State Department, India is at the apex of countries facing serious terror threats. In 2007, 10% of worldwide terror attacks happened throughout India. The range of terrorists groupings involved in the violence covered a wide panoply of players including Maoist rebels, who may number in the thousands. They are known as Naxalites and they exploit anger and disenchantment within the teeming masses of the poor in a country that displays startling extremes of wealth and poverty. Other terrorists come from within the Sikh and Hindu communities who have a history of internecine rivalry. But for US intelligence agencies advising the Indian government on how to deal with terror, the emerging threat that needs to be addressed urgently comes from Islamic organizations like Lashkar e Toiba, the Indian Mujahideen and the Students Islamic Movement, also known as SIMI. Some counter terrorism experts suspect that the Indian Mujahideen, a relatively new player on the terror watch list, is a convenient umbrella label used by different terror groupings to claim responsibility for atrocities.
While India in its post-British colonial past has suffered recurring violence as a result of tribal and religious problems within its boundaries, the Islamic terror threat is more worrying because it is believed to have backers in neighboring countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Islamic militants in India are also known to have ties to terrorists within the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan.
India and Pakistan have a troubled history and the fact that both countries have nuclear weapons aimed at each other has frequently made the rest of the world nervous. The US has tried to dampen down the enmity between them because it sees advantages in having alliances with both nations at a time when their neighbor China is flexing its economic muscles and increasing the size of its military. After 9/11 the US drew closer to Pakistan because it needed that country’s help in the war on terror but the moment China exhibited a growing desire to dominate south-east Asia Washington recognized the importance of a strategic alliance with India, a nation with the same growth potential as China. For Pentagon planners India now represents a bulwark against China’s expansionist policies.
In the past year, the US has consistently warned the Indian government that it faces a terror threat as much from without as from within its borders. The overall threat, however, may well have its roots in the belief of Indian Muslim that their government failed to bring to justice Hindu leaders involved in the slaughter of Muslims in the state of Gujarat between March and June 2002. During that period, Muslim women were raped by mobs and their children butchered in front of them. Unofficial estimates put the Muslim death toll at close to 2,000. The attacks on Muslims began after a train bombing in which 59 Hindus, many of them women and children, died. Muslims were blamed for the bombing and lies were deliberately spread among the majority Hindus throughout the state that Muslim fanatics were holding captive three young Hindu girls. Evidence now shows the massacre of Muslims was a planned atrocity, which had the approval of the Hindu authorities in Gujarat state. Police in the region were complicit in what occurred. Over one hundred and fifty Hindus also died in subsequent communal strife.
The fact that the Indian government failed to act quickly stop the massacre of Muslims alienated Muslim communities throughout the country and made them bitter. As a consequence, terror groupings, some from neighboring nations, have preyed on angry young Indian Muslims and sucked them into their ranks. It was no coincidence that the recent terror bombings that killed scores of people happened in the western state of Gujarat, raising the specter of another massacre on the horizon. That would suit the terrorists who see communal violence as a means to destabilize India. The Indian authorities believe terrorists in Kashmir and Pakistan are determined to set Hindus and Muslims at each others’ throats.
The US is now as concerned about Islamic terrorism in India as it is about Pakistan’s failure to eradicate the Taliban and Al Qaeda threat within its borders. For Indians who watched the recent bombings there was a common tendency to see a Pakistan hand in them. In the past, Indian intelligence experts were not shy about pointing an accusing finger at ISI, the Pakistan intelligence service, in the same way the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, accused the spy agency of masterminding Taliban operations against his government. For diplomatic reasons, Washington is reluctant to blame Pakistan’s powerful intelligence body but it is nevertheless aware that terrorists based in Pakistan may be seeking to fuel an insurgency in India. Such an eventuality could undermine a secular nation that tries to keep its volatile tribal and religious divisions from tearing the country apart.