Spy talk makes sense

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Talking out of the box, AS Dulat, a former chief of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s foreign intelligence agency, suggested last week that the government should invite Pakistan Army chief Qamar Jawad Bajwa for talks.

Dulat’s suggestion may not fit into the protocol regime but it makes sense as the army has a decisive role in shaping Pakistan’s relations with India even when there is a civilian government.

Dulat headed RAW during 1999-2000 when Bharatiya Janata Party leader AB Vajapayee was the Prime Minister. When he retired, Vajpayee appointed him as his Advisor on Kashmir. He participated in Track II talks with Pakistan while in service as also later.

Vajpayee had made a bold bid to find a solution to outstanding problems with Pakistan, including Kashmir, through talks with President Pervez Mushaarraf and leaders of the Hurriyat movement. After his exit, Manmohan Singh tried to carry forward the process he had initiated. At a meeting on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit at Havana, he and Musharraf decided to set up a joint anti-terrorism institutional mechanism. It never took off because ground conditions were not favourable.

Three years ago, in a book titled “Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years”, co-authored with Aditya Sinha, a journalist, Dulat talked of missed peace opportunities. 

In an India-Pakistan Track II meeting in Berlin in 2011, he and former ISI chief Lt-Gen Asad Durrani jointly presented a paper on the need for intelligence cooperation between the two countries. In it they said, “When countries are faced with common external or internal threats, exchange of mutually beneficial information might not only be thinkable but also desirable, even prudent.” 

They also mentioned a few occasions when the two sides had exchanged information to avoid any moves by the other side based on misreading of events.

Dulat made his suggestion for talks with Pakistan’s Army chief in the presence of a distinguished New Delhi gathering which included Manmohan Singh, former Vice-President Hamid Ansari and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. No one associated with the Narendra Modi government was present.

The occasion was the release of a book, “Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace”, based on a series of recorded conversations between Dulat and Durrani in the presence of Aditya Sinha. The three had met at different locations outside India and Pakistan. 

According to the publishers, another volume with more extracts from the conversations will follow.

Durrani could not attend the book release as India did not give him a visa. After media circulated reports based on its contents, the Pakistan Army summoned him to its headquarters “to explain his position on views attributed to him in the book”.

In a panel discussion that followed the book release several speakers criticised the Modi government’s Pakistan policy.

Farooq Abdullah said India and Pakistan were still carrying the baggage of partition. Former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon saw double-standards in India holding talks with China after its border transgressions and not having talks with Pakistan after the Pathankot and Uri terror attacks.

Former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha, who recently quit the BJP after criticising Modi on a range of issues, said, “Muscular policies are brainless policies because muscles don’t have brains.”

Apart from making some gestures, like inviting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in and making a visit to Lahore to greet him on his birthday, Modi has not taken any meaningful step to improve bilateral relations. His muscular responses have led to escalation of violence.

According to an official press release, Pakistani cease-fire violations along the Line of Control in Kashmir rose from 152 in 2015 to 228 in 2016 and 860 in 2017. In these incidents 83 persons were killed, 41 of them civilians. This year, in January alone, there were 192 cease-fire violations, resulting in the death of 16 persons, including eight civilians. 

Each side routinely attributes all truce violations to the other and describes its own actions as fitting responses. The cycle of violations and reprisals continue partly because it suits the interests of certain sections on both sides.

Apparently spies are able to talk sense because, unlike politicians, they don’t have to fight elections. 

There is a precedent of 1955 which can help overcome the protocol issue involved in inviting Gen Bajwa for political talks. In that year India had invited Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev to visit the country along with Prime Minister Nicholai Bulganin in recognition of his place in the Soviet hierarchy. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 29, 2018

Back to square one

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

There is no need to shed tears over the aborted meeting of National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan. It could only have produced more rancour.

Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif was present, along with other South Asian leaders, at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in in 2014. The goodwill his presence generated evaporated when, barely three months later, the government cancelled a scheduled meeting of Foreign Secretaries of the two countries, to show its disapproval of Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit’s consultations with leaders of the Kashmir’s separatist All Party Hurriyat Conference.

The meeting of officials was part of composite India-Pakistan talks, which have a long history. In 1997, a Foreign Secretary-level meeting outlined eight outstanding issues of concern to the two countries and proposed mechanisms to address them in an integrated manner. Over the years the process yielded some small gains but lack of determined political intervention inhibited progress on major issues.

The 2008 Mumbai terror attack derailed the process. It was put back on track in 2011 with a meeting of Home Secretaries at which terrorism was on the agenda. A few rounds of talks followed but there was little to show.

The cancellation of the Foreign Secretaries’ meeting attracted some criticism at home since India had previously overlooked the Pakistani envoy’s contacts with Kashmiri separatists. But Modi was determined to send across a message that they were not acceptable to him.

Last month, Modi and Nawaz Sharif shook hands at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at Ufa, Russia, and discussed modalities of resuming bilateral talks. A joint statement issued later said they agreed India and Pakistan had a collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development and that “they are prepared to discuss all outstanding issues”. It spelt out five specific steps, including NSA level talks, and contacts between army officials to improve the situation along the Line of Control which had witnessed continuous exchange of fire.

While the statement conveyed the impression that the composite talks were on again, India’s focus was on the first of the five proposed steps, namely a meeting of NSAs Sartaj Aziz and Ajit Doval in New Delhi to discuss terrorism-related issues.

Back home, Sharif came under attack for the Ufa statement as Pakistanis saw as one-sided inasmuch as it did not mention Kashmir, which, to them, is the central issue. They refused to buy official explanations that Kashmir had come up in the Modi-Sharif meeting and that the term “outstanding issues” covered Kashmir.

The Modi government has been projecting a hawkish image for some time to impress the Hindutva constituency. After Myanmar-based Naga rebels killed 18 security personnel in an ambush in Manipur, the Indian army conducted a retaliatory raid across the border. Official spokesmen said it was a warning to all terrorists operating from foreign soil.

As the scheduled meeting of NSAs approached, Pakistan was ready with a bait set. When India sent a draft agenda with terrorism as the only item, it sent an alternative one listing topics it wanted to be discussed, including Kashmir. Basit invited Hurriyat leaders to meet Sartaj Aziz over dinner.

To prevent the Hurriyat leaders from leaving Srinagar for Delhi, the Centre ordered that they be put under house arrest. As Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, whose People’s Democratic Party rules the state in coalition with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, remonstrated, the Centre decided instead to arrest the Hurriyat leaders on arrival at Delhi airport.

With the fate of the NSA meet sealed, the two sides played out a long charade in front of television cameras with the singular aim of backing off without having to take the blame. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj demanded that Pakistan convey by midnight its acceptance of India’s advice not to meet Hurriyat leaders and limit the talks to terrorism. That gave Pakistan the opportunity to pull out saying there could be no talks on the basis of conditions.

Material which has come to light in the past week shows that the two governments spent the last month preparing dossiers the NSAs were to exchange. The meeting having fallen through, they publicised the charges against each other through the media.

After a 15-month-long journey through a convoluted path, Narendra Modi is back at the starting point, so far as relations with Pakistan are concerned. If Sharif has to take into account the Inter Service Intelligence, he has to contend with the Hindutva establishment which is watching his steps. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, August 25, 2015

Vengeance in garb of justice

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The hanging of Mumbai serial blasts convict Yakub Memon last week has brought to the fore the issue of administration of justice, with particular reference to use of the death penalty.

“Ultimately, justice has been delivered to all the victims of the 1993 Mumbai blasts,” said Bharatiya Janata Party Secretary Shrikant Sharma. Congress party spokesman PC Chacko echoed his sentiments but added “full justice” would come only when Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim, the prime accused, were punished.

“Justice according to law has been done,” said former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna, revealing an understanding of the concept of justice which was missing in the politicians’ comments. The cases relating to the blasts and those relating to the communal riots that occurred earlier were “dealt with disparately, depending on the communal inclinations of the state apparatus,” he added.

Justice Srikrishna who held a judicial inquiry into the riots had found a causative link between the two events. The Memon family had suffered extensive damage in the riots.

The justice-has-been-done refrain of the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress seeks to camouflage the cycle of violence and vengeance of the past quarter century in which the former was an active participant, along with its Hindutva ally Shiv Sena, and the latter was an ex post facto accessory.

The chain of events started with the demolition of Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadres on December 6, 1992 in the presence of BJP chief LK Advani.

Justice Srikrishna said a spontaneous peaceful protest by incensed and leaderless Muslims in Mumbai quickly degenerated into riots. He attributed part of the blame to the provocative slogans raised at celebratory rallies organised by Shiv Sena and BJP. Later, Hindu mobs, influenced by the communal propaganda of Shiv Sena leaders, including its supremo Bal Thackeray, resorted to large-scale violence. 

Sudhakarrao Naik of the Congress was the Chief Minister when the riots broke out. The blasts occurred after Sharad Pawar took over from him.

When the SS-BJP combine came to power, the government disbanded the Srikrishna Commission. BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee asked the SS Chief Minister to reinstate it.

The riots and police firings to quell them left 900 dead. Of them, 575 were Muslims and 275 Hindus. While in power neither the SS-BJP combine nor the Congress pursued the riot cases vigorously.

In the only riot case that resulted in conviction, three SS men, including Madhukar Sarpotdar, MP, were given one year’s rigorous imprisonment. Sarpotdar was immediately granted bail and died two years later without going to prison.

The 13 explosions left 257 dead and more than 700 injured. Damage to property was estimated at Rs 300 million. The prosecution said the blasts were plotted by underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and carried out by his associates including Tiger Memon.

The entire Memon family slipped out of Mumbai to Karachi, where Dawood is believed to be living under ISI protection. Tiger’s brother Yakub returned later, professing innocence, and provided the authorities with information on the roles of Dawood, Tiger and the ISI.

Members of all communities suffered in both the riots and the blasts. The media identified blast victims of one community who kept asking for justice. No riot victims of any community were paraded. Thus, in public discourse, justice became synonymous with vengeance.

In 2006, the trial court awarded the death penalty to 12 persons, including Yakub. As the case moved to higher courts, the others got relief and Yakub became the only one to be hanged.

Yakub’s final hours were marked by high drama with three Supreme Court judges sitting twice, the last time around 4am, three hours before the time set by the trial court for his hanging, to dispose of petitions filed by him or by others, including some eminent citizens, on his behalf. They really did not have to go without sleep. They could have followed the standards practice of staying the execution until the petitions were disposed of.

Unable to view the last acts of the drama as triumph of the rule of law, Anup Surendranath, Deputy Registrar (Research) at the Supreme Court quit the job to focus on the Death Penalty Research Project at the National Law University, of which he is the Director.

Why did the apex court judges feel so bound by the time-frame set by the lower court that they sacrificed sleep to honour it? There is no ready answer to the question. -- Gulf Today, August 4, 2015.

The Mujahideen story

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

The Indian Mujahideen story is getting curiouser and curiouser. Five years after its name surfaced and three years after the government banned it, the outfit remains somewhat enigmatic.

The name appeared first in e-mails which some media houses received in 2008 owning responsibility for serial blasts that had rocked Jaipur two days earlier. Across the country there were several more blasts that year, and similar e-mails followed. Investigating agencies now say the outfit came into being five years earlier.

According to Ashish Khetan, an investigative journalist with a creditable record, there is an overwhelming body of evidence in the records of official agencies to show that a group of Muslim extremists, who styled themselves as Indian Mujahideen, had bombed temples, trains and marketplaces in different places between 2003 and 2008 and that the police implicated innocent Muslims in the incidents.

Soon after the IM’s existence became known, official agencies identified its leaders as former cadres of the Students Islamic Movement of India, which had once attracted critical attention by raising the slogan “India’s liberation through Islam”. They were active in the protests against the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.

SIMI was among several organisations banned in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.

Writing in 2008, Praveen Swami, a journalist who has extensively purveyed material furnished by intelligence agencies, said SIMI’s preparations for IM activities began with two jihad training camps, one in Kerala in December 2007 and the other in Gujarat in January 2008.

In a background paper prepared for the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses in 2009, Namrata Goswami said the IM leadership was mainly traced to Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi with the code name Kasim or Al Arbi, who had sent e-mails to the media about blasts. However, officials later identified Mohammad Ahmad Zarar Siddibapa alias Yasin Bhatkal as one of its founders and the mastermind behind its bombings.

Yasin Bhatkal was arrested last August as he arrived from Pakistan via Kathmandu. After his interrogation, official agencies fed to the media more material on the IM’s origin and activities.

Swami now pushed back the IM’s formation to the period immediately after the Gujarat riots and identified a building in Mumbai as its birthplace. He summed up the mood of its founders in these words: “They were all angry, very angry, about the 2002 communal violence — and swore vengeance.”

His report also said the IM members met for the first time at Jolly Beach at Bhatkal in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, hometown of Yasin Bhatkal, and conducted experiments with explosives. “Many of the men at Jolly Beach have since been arrested and some killed,” he added, but, all the top commanders, barring Muhammad Atif Amin, whom the Delhi police killed in the controversial 2008 Batla House encounter, are still at their stations.

According to Swami’s account, in the post-Gujarat period the group mobilised small communal flare-ups in and around Bhatkal, leading to the murder of Thimmappa Naik, Bharatiya Janata Party MLA, in 2004. Local reports of the period, however, had blamed the killing on the Congress. When the BJP was in power in the state, its members staged demonstrations demanding the arrest of Naik’s killers.

The contradictions in the published material about the IM point to lack of clarity in the assessments of official agencies. Information provided by them has given the IM a larger-than-life image. Many people have voiced doubts over their accounts and some have insinuated that the IM is a phantom created by intelligence agencies.

The blasts at the famed Buddha shrine at Gaya last July and at the venue of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s Patna meeting last month are the latest bombings attributed to the IM.

Last week the IM story took a queer turn with the arrest of half a dozen Hindu youths of Bihar and Jharkhand, some of whom allegedly maintained contacts with Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence through mobile phones. A Bihar police official suggested the IM may be using Hindu youths but the National Investigation Agency said the arrests were related to terror financing and not to the Patna blasts.

Reported confessions by arrested IM operatives that they organised the 2003 Mumbai train blasts and the 2010 German Bakery blast in Pune indicate that those who were or are being prosecuted in connection with them may have had only a minor role in them, if at all.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 19, 2013.

Phantoms on terror radar

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Within an hour of the two explosions that took 16 lives in Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh, on Thursday, some news channels started scrolling headlines suggesting involvement of the elusive Indian Mujahidin. But on Monday, the state was still waiting for reliable clues, for which it has announced a reward of Rs1 million.

Going by police accounts circulated by the media, in the last six years the IM has set off more than a dozen blasts in several cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow and Varanasi — more than one in some places — killing hundreds of people.

The outfit’s name first surfaced in 2008 when two channels received emails claiming responsibility for an explosion in Jaipur. An attached video footage showed a cycle with a bag on its carrier which presumably carried explosives.

Since then investigators have treated cycle bombs and email claims as IM markers. Cycles were used in the latest Hyderabad blasts but there was no email claim.

The media has described the IM variously as a home-grown terror outfit formed by remnants of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian arm of Lashkar-e-Taiba of Pakistan which has links to the Inter-Services Intelligence.

In an article accessible at the website of the Combating Terrorism Center, set up at the US Military Academy at West Point after 9/11, journalist Praveen Swami, who has purveyed Indian intelligence data extensively, traces the origin of the IM to a gathering of young Muslims at Bhatkal on the Karnataka coast in 2004. He writes, “They swam, went for hikes in the woods, honed their archery skills, and occasionally engaged in target practice with an airgun.” The local police, he says, were unaware that these men were the “core team of the jihadist network that would soon be known as the Indian Mujahidin.”

According to another journalist fed by intelligence agencies, a dossier prepared by the Delhi police after last year’s Pune blasts and circulated to the states by the Centre, the IM’s genesis goes back to 2000; it is ubiquitous, with modules in states as far apart as Delhi and Kerala and Maharashtra and Bihar; its top leaders, Riyaz Bhatkal and his brother Iqbal Bhatkal, are in Pakistan and it has hideouts in Nepal and other places.

Vicky Nanjappa, a Bangalore-based blogger who tracks reports on IM activities, notes that each state police has a different version about its working. While there have been arrests galore, and after a couple of arrests the police claim to have cracked a particular case, the matter never seems to reach the logical end. “The conviction rate has been a zero,” he writes.

India banned the IM in June 2010. The US declared it a terrorist organisation the following year and said it had close ties with other terrorist entities like LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HUJI) and its goal was to establish a caliphate for South Asia.

While terrorism is a harsh reality, the terror hunt looks like a phantom chase. According to one report, Riyaz Bhatkal was involved in the Mumbai serial blasts of 1993 and had been on the police radar since then. According to another, the special cell of Delhi police had interrogated him after the 2010 Pune blasts and obtained from him the names of several members of IM modules. It is not clear how he got out of police custody.

At one time the investigating agencies said Riyaz Bhatkal had masterminded the blasts and Shahrukh supplied the explosives. Now they say Riyaz and Shahrukh may be different names used by the same person. Yasin Bhatkal, said to be the IM’s bomb-maker, was arrested in Kolkata in 2008 but was released a few months later as his real identity was not known.

Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju last week accused the media of dividing the people on religious lines by demonising the Muslim community by bringing up names like Indian Mujahidin after every bomb blast. He pooh-poohed reports of IM emails saying any mischief-maker can send such messages.

B. Raman, a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency, wrote on Saturday: “If there is terror, it has to be a Muslim. If he is a Muslim, he has to be from the IM. If it is the IM, it must have acted at the instance of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. That seems to be the thinking reflex of the police and the agencies.”