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

[Javed]

Everyone means those who agreed (that Praveen's writing are not
trustworthy) and those who didn't object to that fact.



On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
> Everyone ? Who all consists of everyone ? Pls enlighten
>
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Javed <javedmasoo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Pawan
>> If you remember, some weeks ago, everyone on this list agreed that
>> whatever Praveen Swami says is not to be trusted. So, kindly do not
>> forward any of Swami's write-ups here.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Javed
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
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>>
>