Arrest of Yasin Bhatkal: All those Vantage Point Descriptions

Bibhu Prasad Routray

30 August 2013

Several divergent descriptions have emerged explaining the circumstances leading to the arrest of Yasin Bhatkal, one of the founders of the Indian Mujahideen (IM), along with one of his close associate, Asadullah Akhtar. Given that media personnel scurrying for information during such ‘big time’ events are generally expected and encouraged to be quite imaginative in their descriptions, such wide variations in the details are not entirely unexpected. They provide interesting pointers to what the researchers on terrorism must navigate through while piecing together the narrative and trying to link the dots.

Lets focus on three such descriptions here.

Who arrested Bhatkal? The arrest is a tremendous achievement for the intelligence agencies. Which agency was responsible for the arrest, however, remains a matter of intense speculation. Whether it was a Nepalese agency, the Bihar Police, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) or the National Investigation Agency (NIA)? Newspapers and television channels have used various combos from the list to explain the arrest. One of the reports even speculated the tip offs Indians could have received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). To be on the safe side the Times of India concluded, “(Yasin Bhatkal)  has been arrested in a joint operation by the central intelligence agencies and the Bihar Police.” The Telegraph went a step forward in concluding the operation was "plotted apparently with help from the Research and Analysis Wing, Intelligence Bureau and America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation."

The Nepal Connection: Yasin was apparently arrested somewhere in Nepal. Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told the media, “Yasin Bhatkal has been traced and detained at the India-Nepal border in Bihar.”

Times of India, however, was at variance with Shinde. It read, Bhatkal was picked up from Pokhara in Nepal where he was living in the guise of a Unani doctor. Pokhara is not exactly on the Indo-Nepal border. So was Yasin arrested while trying to cross over the “porous Indo-Nepal border” (Times of India’s earlier report) or was he picked up in Nepal and brought over to India remains unsolved.

The Hindu appeared to corroborate the Times of India in its report which categorically asserted that Bhatkal was not “living along the Indo-Nepal border”. Its report on how Bhatkal was captured provided a narrative of an “unrelenting monitoring of phone calls from Nepal to various places in India” by the IB. The report quoted an unnamed Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) official. “The IB relentlessly monitored these calls and got some other crucial leads. We soon managed to locate Yasin, one of India’s top 10 wanted terrorists, who had taken refuge in a small town deep inside Nepal“, the official said.

The Pune Mirror's "investigative report", on the other hand, termed the NIA's effort "just a lucky break". Asserting that Bhatkal was arrested from Raxaul (in Bihar), the report elaborated, 

The NIA team had arrived in Raxaul around five days back looking for Assadullah Akhtar, Indian Mujahideen’s improvised explosives expert. On Wednesday, when they picked up Akhtar around 11.30 pm, they asked him to lead them to his house, hoping to seize some arms and explosives. Instead, they found a young man with a fuzzy beard sitting there — he was Yasin Bhatkal, the brain behind more than a dozen blasts across the country.

Expert in Persuasion: Bhatkal’s power to persuade apparently transcended his ability to convince the Muslim youth to join the terrorist outfit and even die for the cause. One of the most popular stories doing rounds is how Bhatkal on previous occasions managed to evade arrest, even after being picked up in a theft case in Kolkata in 2009. According to the report, Bhatkal managed to convince the cops that he actually is “Bulla Mallik, a small time fake currency supplier” (Times of India and NDTV). Never mind the oxymoronic description “Small time fake currency supplier”.  India Today, on the other hand, says Bhatkal introduced himself as “Md Asraf” before the city police officers.

Irrespective of whether it was Bulla Mallik or Md. Asraf, how did Kolkata police let go a “fake currency supplier” within three months (his reported period of incarceration was December 2009 to February 2010) remains a mystery. How did a non-Bengali speaking Bhatkal manage to convince the essentially Bengali speaking Kolkata police to release him also remains unanswered.

All of us in this field of terrorism research follow the writings of some of the most authoritative media personnel with much care, not just for the lucidity with which they describe the events and the sound arguments they make, but also for their capacity to lay bare ‘official information’ in the public sphere. For the time being, the ingenious stories of the newspapers dwarf such close-to-reality, yet not so interesting analyses. Anyways, its a perfect time to sit back and read on.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/31082013-arrest-of-yasin-bhatkal-all-those-vantage-point-descriptions%E2%80%8F-analysis/