Bibhu Prasad Routray
Pragati Magazine, November 2013, page: 37-39.
Terrorist
attacks serve a variety of purposes – avenging perceived injustices, sending
out messages, and serving as reminders to the adversaries that the threat has
not disappeared. They also underline the incomplete knowledge of the state about
the dynamism of the terrorist movements. Apart from the usual blame game about
intelligence failure, lack of preparedness among the police, and political
opportunism, the Patna blasts on 27 October demonstrated that our insight into
the world of Indian Mujahideen (IM)– the outfit responsible for at least 18
episodes of explosions in 14 Indian cities since 2005, accounting for hundreds
of deaths– is elementary, if not pretentious. It is this acute and inexplicable
knowledge gap, which continues to facilitate the group’s interminable violent
campaign and contributes to its near unassailability.
Lets try to
answer the following five questions, on the basis of what is known about the
outfit.
First, what
are the IM’s aims and objectives, which by all means remain extremely fluid, expanding
and contracting as per its convenience? The first ever ‘manifesto’ of the group
released in 2007, after the bombings of court complexes in Lucknow, Varanasi
and Faizabad, claimed that the blasts are intended to “punish local lawyers who
had attacked suspects held for an abortive Jaish-e-Muhammad kidnap plot.” Two
other manifestos, released after the 2008 blasts in Delhi and the 2010
explosions in Varanasi, blamed “the Supreme Court, the high courts, the lower
courts and all the commissions” for failing the Muslims. The focus from the
judiciary has since shifted and in fact has become more mysterious with the
outfit discontinuing the practice of mailing its manifesto following each
attack, forcing the agencies to depend upon the interrogation of arrested
cadres to unravel the intentions behind the explosions.
As per such
interrogation reports, the Pune explosions of August 2012 were intended to
avenge the killing of its cadre Qateel Siddique in Yerawada Jail. Blasts
targeting the Buddhist shrine in Bodhgaya in July 2013 were supposed to avenge
the attacks on the Rohingyas in Myanmar Patna
Second, who
are the leaders of IM? Names of the Bhatkal brothers, Yasin Bhatkal, Amir Reza
Khan, Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Tahseen Akhtar have been quoted frequently. The
National Investigative Agency (NIA) has announced a reward of Rupees four lakh
leading to the arrest of Qureshi and ten lakh each for Amir Reza Khan and
Tahseen Akhtar. But how important are these leaders for the outfit’s
operational purposes? What explains the Patna
Third, how
much do we know about the group’s actual size? Few years back, “memos for
internal use” by intelligence agencies estimated the outfit’s cadre strength at
less than 100. Some of these ‘memos’ even claimed that beyond about 20 hardcore
cadres, IM is only a motley of estranged youths who do not subscribe to any of
the outfit’s ideology. Each explosion and interrogation of arrested cadres, however,
have since expanded the outfit’s strength to multiples of the original
estimates. The number of ideologically interlinked, yet functionally
independent IM ‘modules’, too continue to increase. Small towns in Bihar and
Jharkhand alone appear to host at least 12 such modules, as of now.
Fourth, how
are IM cadres recruited? This is probably one of the most intriguing posers
that continues to defy answer. Narratives based on intelligence reports point
at a vertical split within the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), with
a hyper radical group walking out of the extremist organisation and forming the
IM. Founding members of IM then went about using a mix of personal connections,
countrywide travels and persuasive techniques to recruit a number of young and
not so young men into the outfit. The latter then were charged to seek more
cadres. Also roped into the outfit were school dropouts, petty criminals, and
history-sheeters who initially developed contacts with the outfit to provide
logistical support and then became a permanent part of it. IM apparently has
undergone another split after the Batla house encounter in 2008. These
explanations still do not solve several riddles. What role has online
radicalisation programme played in such recruitment campaigns? How has anti-India
propaganda material on the web, uploaded from outside the country, helped
swelling the ranks of the IM? What is the state of the SIMI faction that stayed
behind with the parent organisation and how many of them over the period of
time have made common cause with the IM? What is the percentage of Pakistani
citizens in the IM?
Finally, has
IM weakened over the years or has it gathered strength? Official’s assessments
have varied significantly from one another. In
2011, based on the interrogation of IM cadre Danish Riyaz, the agencies
concluded that the arrests of a large number of cadres have severely dented the
group’s operations and badly affected its recruitment and fund-raising drives. Recent
assessments, however, portray the picture of the IM not just regaining strength
within India Pakistan Afghanistan
A lot has been
written about the absence of a culture of strategic writing in the country. That
the think tanks are not allowed to contribute significantly to policymaking has
been a common refrain among the researchers. However, how much field-based
research on internal security is being done in the government and private
funded think tanks remains a valid question. As a result, the void is being
filled up by media snippets, which by their very nature are combinations of
“churning of the known” and “feeding of the obvious” into the mainstream.
Past
statements by leaders of various political formations have attempted to link
origin of the IM to an assortment of issues including communal riots, alienation
among the Muslims, and even India Israel
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