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.”

Praveen Swami’s not so fabulous fables

The following is a statement released by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association:

If there is one infallible indicator of what the top Indian Intelligence agencies are thinking or cooking up, it is this: Praveen Swami’s articles. Each time the security establishment wishes to push a certain angle to this bomb blast or that, Swami’s articles appear magically, faithfully reflecting the Intelligence reports. After the Batla House ‘encounter’, he launched a tirade against all those who were questioning the police account of the shootout labelling them all ‘Alices in Wonderland’. He went so far as to identify ‘precisely’ how Inspector Sharma was shot by claiming that "abdomen wound was inflicted with [Atif] Amin's weapon and the shoulder hit, by Mohammad Sajid".

And no sir, Swami’s conclusion was not based on postmortem reports of the killed, fire arm examination report or ballistic report but on this innocent fact: “the investigators believe that…” He certainly brings in a whole new meaning to ‘investigative journalism’.

Swami, however, felt no need to pen an article when the postmortem reports of Atif and Sajid revealed that they had been shot from close range and that neither of them sustained gunshot wounds in the frontal region of the body—an impossibility in the case of a genuine encounter. Was it because the police and the Home Ministry chose to remain quiet after the revelations—hoping that the storm would blow over?

Flip-flops on German Bakery Blasts

And meanwhile there was the German Bakery blast in Pune. Writing less than a week after the blasts, Swami hinted at the possible involvement of the Hindutva groups, namely Abhinav Bharat (“Hindutva Terror Probe Haunts Pune Investigation”, 19th February 2010). Indeed, this was mood in the ATS (though this was no deterrent to the large-scale illegal detention and brutal interrogation often at private premises, of scores of Muslim youth in Pune.) Even the following week, the Home Department officials were not ruling out the possibility of the involvement of the Right-wing Hindutva groups. But that was February. By March, political impatience at the probe taking such a turn was palpable. Responding to a riled Shiv Sena in the legislative assembly, Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil thundered: “I will inquire if Raghuvanshi really indicated to the media about involvement of Hindu organizations in the Pune blast and if he did, action will be taken (against him)." As if on cue, two days later, Rakesh Maria was installed as the new ATS chief. This was of course only after a few months when Vinita Kamte, widow of the slain ATS officer Ashok Kamte, made serious allegations casting aspersions on Maria’s role in responding to the then ATS chief Hemant Karkare’s call for reinforcements during 26/11.

CCTV Footage

Since its start, the probe had little to go on by way of leads except for the CCTV footage. While the Pune police commissioned experts to draw sketches of the suspects based on this footage, ATS dismissed this exercise as “anything but useful” as their source, the CCTV footage, was itself grainy. (Siasat, April 12). Where does Swami stand on this? He wrote in his 19th February piece: “All that investigators have by way of suspects are three men recorded holding brief meetings before the blast by a poor-quality closed-circuit television camera. From the videotape, it is unclear if the men had anything to do with the attack.”

Exactly a month later, Swami conveniently develops an amnesia about Abhinav Bharat and even about the poor quality of CCTV footage. What was earlier ‘unclear” and hazy has in one month segued into solid shape: in the form of top Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative Mohammad Zarar Siddi Bawa ie., Yasin Bhatkal. Suddenly imparted with enlightenment, Swami writes dramatically of how a closed circuit television camera ... “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.” The poor quality (by Swami’s own admission) and useless (by the ATS’s admission) visual evidence has morphed into precious footage of Bhatkal, “the fair, slight young man with a wispy beard” … “dressed in a loose-fitting blue shirt, a rucksack slung over his back.”

Clearly, Swami’s changing perceptions about the CCTV footage is in accord with the shifting attitude of the ATS itself. The ATS began by keeping the option of probing Abhinav Bharat open; developed cold feet, preferred to lapse into the usual Lashkar-IM litany, ‘rediscovered’ hitherto worthless footage and resurrected the IM. In an unequivocal reference to the manner in which innocent Muslim youths were arrested earlier by the ATS in its pre-Karkare days, a senior officer of the Pune Police admitted that “There have been some arrests in the Pune blast incident just as in the case of the 2006 Malegaon explosions. But we would never know whether those arrested were actually the men who triggered the blasts.” (Siasat, April 12, 2010). Rumours that the probe might be handed over to the National Investigative Agency must have also pressured the Maharashtra ATS to show ‘results’—and viola, within two weeks of taking over, Maria submitted a preliminary report to the state government identifying the hand of Bhatkal and IM in the blasts. This was of course promptly and proudly relayed by R.R. Patil to the legislative assembly (surely to the relief also of the Shiv Sena legislators). Is it a coincidence that the Pune Police Commissioner has been transferred, ostensibly for the rising crime graph a couple of days ago? It seems improbable that the running battle between the Pune police and the ATS—whose current chief Maria had thrown a tantrum following Vinita Kamte’s accusation, demanding the support of the state Home Ministry—had no role to play in this.

The Bangalore Blasts

When two crude bombs went off outside the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium ahead of the match between Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bangalore on 17th April, Karnataka Home Minister V.S. Acharya announced that the State Police were investigating the alleged involvement of the cricket betting lobby. He forcefully denied any link with the earlier blasts in the city in 2008.

But Yasin Bhatkal seems to have preoccupied Swami’s mind on 19th April for he evokes him again in connection with the stadium blasts (“Stadium Blasts herald new IM offensive”). Citing the ever cooperative ‘investigators’, he says that the ‘similarity in design’ and the manner in which some bombs failed to explode are a sure indicator of the IM hand. Beyond this, he has nothing to link Bangalore bombs to Bhatkal. But good stories can always compensate for lack of facts. His piece, “To Bangalore with Hate” on 21st April (which has charming subtitles such as Jihad at ginger plantation”), is no less crude than the two bombs at the stadium. Swami here details the biographies of SIMI activists in South India, making the link, ever so cleverly, between SIMI—and yes, IM—and the stadium blasts, without providing any evidence of their actual linkage. Life stories of these men are proof enough, he assumes.

It is quite clear that Mr. Swami has provided a (sometimes entertaining) dramatized version of the charge-sheets files by the various police departments across the country. While it may make for a good script, we do hope that Mr. Swami understands what charge-sheets are: a list of charges or allegations, which the police has still the burden to prove in a court of law--not irrefutable or established truth. Perhaps, Mr Swami fancies himself a literary genius who believes in narratives acquiring their own lives. In which case, he has manufactured a large corpus of mediocre short stories.

Courtesy: Countercurrents