[Reader-list] Mapping the Indian Mujahideen (From the Hindu)

[TaraPrakash]

Mapping the Indian Mujahideen

Praveen Swami

India's most feared terrorist group isn't so much an organisation as a
movement: a loose coalition of jihadists bound togetherby ideological
affiliation
and personal ties.

Eight days before he was shot dead, top Indian Mujahideen (IM)
operative Atif Amin helped to draft the manifesto that the terror
group was to issue after
the Delhi serial bombings. He insisted on the inclusion of a reference
to his heroes.

"We have carried out this attack," read the e-mail sent to newsrooms
after the September 13 bombings, "in the memory of two of the most
eminent mujahids
of India: Sayyid Ahmad, shaheed, and Shah Ismail, shaheed, (may Allah
bestow His Mercy upon them) who had raised the glorious banner of
jihad against the
disbelievers."

Ahmad and Ismail were killed at Balakote in May 1831, while waging an
unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire. The two men
had set out
with 600 followers from Rae Bareilly five years earlier to defend
Islam at a time when the Mughal power had, for all practical purposes,
given way to British
rule.

Like his heroes, Amin found the martyrdom he worshipped: his death was
the latest success in a string of nationwide intelligence-led
operations targeting
the IM. But the arrests of a bewildering succession of its operatives
- each proclaimed by police to be "leader", "top commander" and
"mastermind" - have
done little to further the understanding of just what the group is
about or the threat it still poses.

Mapping the IM isn't easy: it is more a social network than structured
organisation; a label used by a loose coalition of jihadists bound
together by ideological
affiliation and personal linkages. In this, it is not unlike the
al-Qaeda, whose operatives are drawn from the multiple transnational
terror groups allied
under the banner of the International Islamic Front for Jihad against
Jews and Crusaders.

Who, then, makes up the IM and how do its networks function? India's
intelligence services now believe Amin had the overall control of the
IM's operations
unit: a group of at least two dozen Uttar Pradesh residents, most from
the district of Azamgarh. Under Amin's command, the cell's operatives
were dispatched
nationwide to assemble and plant the explosive devices used in the
bombings which began with attacks on three trial court buildings in
the State in November
2007.

Amin and several other core members of the group are thought to have
trained with the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami in Bangladesh. In time, they
passed on their
skills to fresh recruits from Azamgarh, raised by local cleric Abul
Bashar Qasmi and Lucknow-based Islamist activist and businessman
Shahbaz Husain.

Gangster Riyaz Batkal - a lieutenant of mafioso-turned-jihadist Aftab
Ansari - ran a second group which provided funds and logistics support
to the IM.
Batkal's associate Afzal Usmani, for example, arranged for the theft
of the vehicles used as car bombs in Ahmedabad. More important,
Batkal's group provided
an interface among jihadists in India, the Harkat in Bangladesh, and
the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Investigators
in Maharashtra
believe that Batkal's cell provided infrastructure for several past
terror operations, including the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai.

Ansari himself is thought to have been radicalised by the top JeM
operative Syed Omar Sheikh - released in the December 1999 Indian
Airlines IC-814 hostages-for-terrorists
swap in Kandahar and now on death row in Pakistan - when both were in
prison together. Ansari then helped to create an organisation of
Indian jihadists
named after Asif Raza Khan, a gangster killed in a 2001 encounter with
the Gujarat police. Among other operations, the Asif Raza Commando
Force executed
a 2001 terror attack in Kolkata.

Scattered across India

The elements of other IM infrastructure and its top leadership are
scattered across India. Qayamuddin Kapadia, leader of the
Gujarat-based Students Islamic
Movement of India, drew on the banned group's membership for the local
guidance and support that Amin and Batkal needed. Bomb components were
manufactured
at a still unidentified facility near Mangalore. And Mumbai-based
Abdul Subhan Qureshi travelled across India, knitting these multiple
terror threads into
a single, lethal weave.

Most of those arrested so far are children of the prosperous, but
socially conservative, urban middle class. On his Orkut website, Amin
identified his camcorder
and laptop computer as his most valuable possessions. He also recorded
that a copy of the Koran could be found in his bedroom and that he
hated music and
dating.

Almost all of the Azamgarh cell members studied together in an
English-medium school; several went to New Delhi for higher studies in
business administration,
computers and the media. Parts of the IM manifesto issued after the
Delhi bombings, interestingly, were plagiarised from an article by
researcher K.K.
Shahina for the media critique website, Hoot. The Azamgarh jihadists
appear to have been drawn to the IM angered by the horror of the 2002
communal pogrom
in Gujarat.

For other IM members, those riots were a lived reality. Among them was
Vadodara resident Imran Sheikh, in whose home the bombs used to target
Surat are
alleged to have been assembled. His mother, Hameeda Bano, was
seriously injured in the pogrom. Sheikh's father, Ibrahim Sheikh, had
already been made invalid
by a chronic cardiac condition, and the loss of Hameeda Bano's income
forced him to drop out of school. He began to make a meagre living
selling saris
in Vadodara's Panigate area.

It was around this time, investigators say, that Kapadia recruited
Sheikh. First, he persuaded the sari salesman to abandon the
traditionalist religious
practices of his parents and join the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, a
neo-conservative sect founded by the followers of the Balakote
martyrs. Later, in 2005, Kapadia
introduced Sheikh to SIMI - and key IM figures like Abdul Subhan Qureshi.

By the time Sheikh was recruited, the IM had begun its war against
India - but without the name by which we now know it. In September
2002, just weeks after
the Gujarat pogrom, at least 14 young men from Hyderabad set out on
secret journeys to terror training camps in Pakistan. Gujarat-based
mafioso Rasool
Khan Pathan arranged for some to train with the Lashkar, while others
were routed to the JeM and the Harkat: a fluid dispersion of assets
across organisational
lines never seen before the 2002 pogrom.

Within weeks of their return, the new recruits executed their first
successful strikes. Asad Yazdani commanded the assassination of the
Gujarat pogrom-complicit,
the former Home Minister Haren Pandya. Later, Yazdani organised the
June 2005 bombing of the Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express, the first
post-Gujarat terror
bombing of real consequence. Yazdani was shot dead by the police in
March 2006, just hours after the bombing of the Sankat Mochan temple
in Varanasi -
an operation the IM claimed as its own in a manifesto released after
the November 2007 bombings in Uttar Pradesh.

Yazdani's killing did little, though, to dent the offensive
aspirations of the terror networks which now call themselves the IM.
Late in May 2005, the Maharashtra
police recovered over 24 kg of Research Department Explosive packed in
computer cases which had been shipped across the Indian Ocean to the
town of Aurangabad.
Investigators later discovered that the explosive was intended for a
massive terror campaign targeting Gujarat. Long-time SIMI activist
Zabiuddin Ansari,
who handled the operation, escaped to Pakistan.

Several similar terror attacks were attempted. In May 2006, the Delhi
police shot dead Pakistani Lashkar operative Mohammad Iqbal, the
author of another
attempted bombing in Gujarat. Feroze Ghaswala, a Mumbai automobile
mechanic who joined the jihad after witnessing the 2002 pogrom, and
Abdul Chhippa, a
computer engineer, were held for their role in the plot. Soon after,
India's post-Gujarat jihadists finally succeeded in delivering the
vengeance they
had long sought: the Mumbai serial bombings of 2006.

Since the Mumbai serial bombings, though, pressure has been mounted on
Pakistan to terminate the jihad against India. Indian jihadists based
in Pakistan
were told they could no longer have the direct operational support of
the Harkat or the Lashkar. Explosives like RDX, which could be traced
back to Pakistan-based
groups, were no longer to be used.

Altered jihadist strategies

Last year, evidence of altered jihadist strategies began to emerge.
The police learned from a one-time Andhra Pradesh resident Raziuddin
Nasir, who was
arrested while planning attacks targeting tourists in Goa, that Rasool
Khan 'Party' had ordered an escalation of jihadist operations in
India. Funds had
been collected from Indian supporters of jihad based in West Asia.
Later, the interrogation of top SIMI leaders threw up revelations that
dozens of men
had been recruited to the IM at camps held in Kerala, Karnataka,
Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh through 2007 and early 2008.

No one is certain just who first thought of the name Indian
Mujahideen, and under what circumstances. Most of the men who could
provide an answer - among
them Qureshi and Kapadia - are missing; Amin, of course, is dead.

Where might things go from here? India's police and intelligence
services will be focussing on the immediate task: locating and
neutralising the IM's surviving
leadership before the next big bombing.

But politicians in New Delhi could learn lessons from Sayyid Ahmad's
failed jihad. The Balakote jihad was defeated, in part, because of the
superior military
resources and intelligence assets of Ranjit Singh's armies - and also,
historian Ayesha Jalal reminds us, because of the resistance of the
Pashtun tribes
to Sayyid Ahmad's coercive, shariah-based order. India's politicians
must reach out to the young people drawn to the jihad if it is to be
defeated, and
restore faith in the idea that democracy can indeed deliver justice.