[Reader-list] The rebirth of the Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI

[Pawan Durani]

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article402892.ece

Saturday's bombings in Bangalore are a grim reminder that the jihadist
movement is far from spent.

Less than an hour before police surrounded the Indian Mujahideen
bomb-factory hidden away on the fringes of the Bhadra forests in
Chikmagalur, Mohammad Zarar Siddi Bawa had slipped away on a bus bound
for Mangalore — the first step in a journey that would take him to the
safety of a Lashkar-e-Taiba safehouse in Karachi.

Inside the house, officers involved in the October, 2008, raid found
evidence of Bawa's work: laboratory equipment used to test and prepare
chemicals, precision tools, and five complete improvised explosive
devices. Even as investigators across India set about filing paperwork
declaring Bawa a fugitive, few believed they would ever be able to lay
eyes on him again.

But in February, a closed-circuit television camera placed over the
cashier's counter at the Germany Bakery in Pune recorded evidence that
Bawa had returned to India — just minutes before an improvised
explosive device ripped through the popular restaurant killing
seventeen people, and injuring at least sixty.

Dressed in a loose-fitting blue shirt, a rucksack slung over his back,
the fair, slight young man with a wispy beard has been identified by
police sources in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka as “Yasin
Bhatkal” — the man who made the bombs which ripped apart ten Indian
towns and cities between 2005 and 2008. Witnesses at the restaurant
also identified Bawa from photographs, noting that he was wearing
trousers rolled up above his ankles — a style favoured by some
neo-fundamentalists.

Bawa is emerging as the key suspect in Saturday's bombings outside the
M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore — a grim reminder that the
jihadist offensive that began after the 2002 communal violence in
India is very far from spent.

The obscure jihadist

Little is known about just what led Bawa to join the jihadist
movement. Educated at Bhatkal's well-respected Anjuman
Hami-e-Muslimeen school, 32-year-old Bawa left for Pune as a teenager.
He was later introduced to other members of the Indian Mujahideen as
an engineer, but police in Pune have found no documentation suggesting
he ever studied in the city.

Instead, Bawa spent much of his time with a childhood friend living in
Pune, Unani medicine practitioner-turned-Islamist proselytiser Iqbal
Ismail Shahbandri. Like his brother Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri — now the
Indian Mujahideen's top military commander — Ismail Shahbandri had
become an ideological mentor to many young Islamists in Pune and
Mumbai, many of them highly-educated professionals.

The Shahbandari brothers' parents, like many members of the Bhatkal
elite, had relocated to Mumbai in search of new economic
opportunities. Ismail Shahbandri, their father, set up leather-tanning
factory in Mumbai's Kurla area in the mid-1970s. Riyaz Shahbandri went
on to obtain a civil engineering degree from Mumbai's Saboo Siddiqui
Engineering College and, in 2002, was married to Nasuha Ismail, the
daughter of an electronics store owner in Bhatkal's Dubai Market.

Shafiq Ahmad, Nasuha's brother, had drawn Riyaz Shahbandri into the
Students Islamic Movement of India. He first met his Indian Mujahideen
co-founders Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Sadiq Israr Sheikh, in the months
before his marriage. Later, Riyaz Shahbandri made contact with
ganglord-turned-jihadist Amir Raza Khan. In the wake of the communal
violence that ripped Gujarat apart in 2002, the men set about
funnelling recruits to Lashkar camps in Pakistan.

Early in the summer of 2004, investigators say, the core members of
the network that was later to call itself the Indian Mujahideen met at
Bhatkal's beachfront to discuss their plans. Iqbal Shahbandri and
Bhatkal-based cleric Shabbir Gangoli are alleged to have held
ideological classes; the group also took time out to practice shooting
with airguns. Bawa had overall charge of arrangements — a task that
illustrated his status as the Bhatkal brothers' most trusted
lieutenant.

Bhatkal, police investigators say, became the centre of the Indian
Mujahideen's operations. From their safehouses in Vitthalamakki and
Hakkalamane, bombs were despatched to operational cells dispersed
across the country, feeding the most sustained jihadist offensive
India has ever seen.

Communal war

Like so many of his peers in the Indian Mujahideen, Bawa emerged from
a fraught communal landscape. Bhatkal's Nawayath Muslims, made
prosperous by hundreds of years of trade across the Indian Ocean,
emerged as the region's dominant land-owning community. Early in the
twentieth century, inspired by call of Aligarh reformer Syed Ahmed
Khan, Bhatkal notables led a campaign to bring modern education for
the community. The Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen school where Bawa studied
was one product of their efforts, which eventually spawned
highly-regarded institutions that now cater to over several thousand
students.

Organisations like the Anjuman helped the Navayath Muslims capitalise
on the new opportunities for work and business with opened up in the
United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia during the 1970s. But this
wealth, in turn, engendered resentments which laid the ground for an
communal conflict. In the years after the Emergency, the Jana Sangh
and its affiliates began to capitalise on resentments Bhatkal's Hindus
felt about the prosperity and political power of the Navayaths. The
campaign paid off in 1983, when the Hindu right-wing succeeded in
dethroning legislator S.M. Yahya, who had served as a state minister
between 1972 and 1982.

Both communities entered into a competitive communal confrontation,
which involved the ostentatious display of piety and power. The
Tablighi Jamaat, a neo-fundamentalist organisation which calls on
followers to live life in a style claimed to be modelled on that of
the Prophet Mohammad, drew a growing mass of followers. Hindutva
groups like the Karavalli Hindu Samiti, too, staged ever-larger
religious displays to demonstrate their clout.

Early in 1993, Bhatkal was hit by communal riots which claimed
seventeen lives and left dozens injured. The violence, which began
after Hindutva groups claimed stones had been thrown at a Ram Navami
procession, and lasted nine months. Later, in April 1996, two Muslims
were murdered in retaliation for the assassination of Bharatiya Janata
Party legislator U. Chittaranjan — a crime that investigators now say
may have been linked to the Bhatkal brothers. More violence broke out
in 2004, after the assassination of BJP leader Thimmappa Naik.

Iqbal Shahbandri and his recruits were, in key senses, rebels against
a traditional political order that appeared to have failed to defend
Muslim rights and interests. Inside the Indian Mujahideen safehouses
raided in October, 2008, police found no evidence that traditional
theological literature or the writings of the Tablighi Jamaat had
influenced the group. Instead, they found pro-Taliban videos and
speeches by Zakir Naik — a popular but controversial Mumbai-based
televangelist who has, among other things, defends Al-Qaeda chief
Osama bin-Laden.

“If he is fighting the enemies of Islam”, Naik said in one speech, “I
am for him. If he is terrorising America the terrorist—the biggest
terrorist — I am with him.” “Every Muslim” Naik concluded, “should be
a terrorist. The thing is, if he is terrorising a terrorist, he is
following Islam”. Naik has never been found to be involved in
violence, but his words have fired the imagination of a diverse
jihadists — among them, Glasgow suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed, 2006
Mumbai train-bombing accused Feroze Deshmukh, and New York taxi driver
Najibullah Zazi, who faces trial for planning to attack the city's
Grand Central Railway Station.

Language like this spoke to concerns of the young people who were
drawn to separate jihadist cells that began to spring up across India
after the 2002 violence, mirroring the growth of the Indian
Mujahideen. SIMI leader Safdar Nagori set up a group that included the
Bangalore information-technology professionals Peedical Abdul Shibli
and Yahya Kamakutty; in Kerala Tadiyantavide Nasir, Abdul Sattar, and
Abdul Jabbar set up a separate organisation that is alleged to have
bombed Bangalore in 2008

Storms of hate

Well-entrenched in the political system, Bhatkal's Muslim leadership
has been hostile to radical Islamism. Efforts by Islamist political
groups to establish a presence there have, for the most part, been
unsuccessful. But authorities acknowledge Bhatkal, like much of the
Dakshina Kannada region, remains communally fraught. Small-scale
confrontations are routine. Earlier this month, the Karavalli Hindu
Samiti even staged demonstrations in support of the Sanatana Sanstha,
the Hindutva group police in Goa say was responsible for terrorist
bombings carried out last year.

Pakistan's intelligence services and transnational jihadist groups
like the Lashkar nurtured and fed India's jihadist movement — but its
birth was the outcome of an ugly communal contestation that remains
unresolved. Even as India's police and intelligence services work to
dismantle the jihadist project, politicians need to find means to
still the storms of hate which sustain it.