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By Peter Foster Globe Last updated: November 27th, 2008
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India’s rush to fix the blame for the Mumbai attacks on a non-specific combination of Pakistan, its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the Kashmir-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is entirely predictable, but should also be viewed with a certain amount of context and caution.
Few evil things that occur in India are not attributed by someone,
Microsoft Office 2007 Pro Plus, at some point, to the ISI, and the statement by the Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh that it was ‘evident’ that a ‘group based outside the country’ was behind the attacks fits into a well-established pattern.
Dr Singh didn’t need to mention Pakistan for all his countrymen to know exactly who he was talking about.
It was the same story after the 2006 Mumbai bombings which killed 180 people. Then Mumbai police and government ministers were issuing strongly worded statements saying that LeT were to blame for the attacks and they had ‘clinching’ evidence to prove this that would be produced to Pakistan.
In the event, the evidence wasn’t nearly as clear cut as had been suggested. “I would hesitate to say we have clinching evidence but we have pretty good evidence,” India’s own National Security Advisor M K Narayanan later admitted to an Indian news channel.
Dossiers were exchanged between India and Pakistan at two terror summits in 2007, but you can be fairly sure that if the Indian authorities really did have clinching evidence they would have shared it with the rest of the entire world, and with some glee.
Unfortunately blaming ‘Pakistan’ or the ‘ISI’ or ’LeT’ is no fig-leaf for the fact that India and its security agencies don’t have a handle on their own domestic terror problem.
They may be right about outsiders in this case, but until solid evidence is produced the accusations against Pakistan should still be seen in historical context.
It is true that the Mumbai attacks, as several commentators have observed, have the definite look of an Al Qa’eda-style operation, targetting as they did a Jewish-owned house and British and American passport holders.
But this is not entirely surprising and in itself proves nothing. Islamic terrorism is a global phenomenon and Indian intelligence has long been aware that Bangladeshi and Pakistani-based militant groups have put ’sleeper cells’ into India.
The fear is that these ‘outsiders’ have become absorbed into Indian society and,
Microsoft Office Standard, like a virus or cancer, have created fresh home-grown copies of themselves.
The fact that the gunmen ‘arrived by boats’ and one of the gunman ’spoke with a Punjabi accent’ is typical of the kind of information that is given out for domestic consumption by Indian government and police.
Who knows? The gunman in question could quite possibly have come from North India and the boats from just down the coast, but that’s not the conclusion that the Indian street would draw from those pieces of information.
The difficult truth is that these ‘outside groups’ and their ideas of global jihad now appear to have taken root in India itself,
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SIMI is banned but terrorism being the Hydra-headed monster that it is, spawned a fresh head in the shape of the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ (which claimed responsbility for attacks this year in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi) and,
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However a growing global consciousness has been visible in the mind of this particular indigenous Indian terror group for some time now.
Indeed previous May the Indian Mujahideen leader, Abdul Subhan Qureshi – known as “India’s Bin Laden” – explicitly promised that India’s recent raprochement with America (of which the Indo-nuclear deal is but one manifestation) would be met with retaliatory attacks against tourist sites.
It is therefore not at all without the bounds of possibility that a group like the Indian Mujahideen could have carried out this attack.
The media likes to talk about ‘extensive planning’ and a ‘highly co-ordinated, sophisticated operation’ but when you think about it, all that was actually required for this operation was several watches all telling the same time.
The killers arrived by boat – so didn’t even need to pass through police or state customs posts – and were armed with nothing more sophisticated than assault rifles, grenades and some explosives, all of which are readily available in the Indian underground.
What separates this atrocity from the past is the ideas of global jihad that lie behind it and this is what must really scare Dr Singh: the global brand of Islamist terror – usually referred to as Al Qa’eda – has apparently found a fresh and fertile outlet in his country.
That is an internal Indian problem, but it’s also one which the entire entire world (having arguably ignored it for too long) is going to have to deal with.
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