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Terror stalks India's Silicon
City
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The gunning down of a top Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-trained militant and
four of his associates in Bangalore last weekend has
reaffirmed fears that India's Silicon City is emerging
the favorite haven for terrorists and other fugitives
from the law.
In a pre-dawn operation, police
shot dead Imam Ali, the prime accused in the 1993 bomb
blast in the Chennai headquarters of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu militant organization.
Fourteen people were killed in that blast. Imam was
arrested subsequently but escaped from police custody
six months ago with the help of his associates, who
attacked a police convoy that was escorting him to a
court in the Madurai district in Tamil Nadu.
On
the run since then, Imam Ali, who carried a reward of
US$10,000 on his head, arrived in Bangalore two months
ago with his gang members. They rented a house in a
middle-class residential layout in the city’s suburbs.
It is believed that Imam Ali was an explosives expert
and received training from the ISI and the Hizb
ul-Mujahideen, which is active in India-controlled
Kasmir.
Bangalore, capital of the southern
Indian state of Karnataka, apart from being the nation's
IT capital, is known for its salubrious climate, gardens
and laid-back lifestyle, and was for several decades
looked upon as a pensioners’ paradise. The mushrooming
of engineering colleges in the city in the 1980s
resulted in students from all over the country pouring
in, altering its linguistic composition and speeding up
its pace of life. But even as Bangalore was busy
throughout the 1990s building its reputation as a
Silicon City, it seems that it has simultaneously been
attracting fugitives from the law.
The
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had a formidable
network operating in Bangalore from the late 1980s. When
a nationwide manhunt was launched to nab the killers of
former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperambadur,
near Chennai, it was to Bangalore that that the
assassins fled. Sivarasan, the mastermind of the
assassination, and his accomplice Subha, were in hiding
in a rented house in Konanakunte, a suburb in Bangalore,
and when cornered by commandos the duo committed suicide
by swallowing cyanide tablets. Several LTTE operatives
were arrested in Bangalore at that time.
The
crackdown on the LTTE that followed the assassination
revealed that outside Tamil Nadu, Bangalore was a key
part of the LTTE network. Injured Tigers came to its
hospitals for treatment, and Bangalore-based Tamils are
known to have provided the Tigers help in transporting
ammunition and other supplies.
Militants from
India’s northeast, too, are known to have taken refuge
in Bangalore. Some members of the Assamese militant
outfit, United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), were
arrested in Bangalore a decade ago.
Activists of
the banned Deendar Anjuman, a Muslim extremist
organization that is believed to have carried out a
series of bomb blasts at churches in south India, were
arrested in Bangalore last year. An ISI operative,
Rasheed Malbari, who was involved in a shoot-out, was
arrested in the city. Members of the Harkat-ul Ansar, a
Pakistan-based militant organization active in Kashmir,
too, are said to have taken refuge in Bangalore.
Activists of the banned ultra-left Peoples' War Group
frequently take shelter in the homes of sympathizers in
Bangalore.
It is not just activists of militant
and extremist organizations that view Bangalore as a
safe hideout. Criminals and underworld dons have also
taken shelter here to escape police dragnets.
A
senior police officer in Bangalore told Asia Times
Online that what has emerged in the media of Bangalore's
links with the terrorist/criminal underworld is "just
the tip of the iceberg". "For every Imam Ali who is
identified and eliminated, there are at least 20 others
we don’t yet know about," he admits. The few who are
arrested or killed figure in the media, but a large
number of those in hiding here manage to go unnoticed.
The numbers that are taking shelter in Bangalore, he
says, are "significant and growing".
Bangalore’s
transformation from a pensioner’s paradise to Silicon
City and now to a terrorist hideout has been rapid. The
cosmopolitan and multi-lingual composition of its
population is believed to be one reason why fugitives
from other parts of India are attracted to it. Their
presence, despite their different ethnic/linguistic
identities from the local Kannadiga, goes unnoticed
because they are able to "dissolve" in the diverse
population.
Mumbai was for long the favorite
hideout for extremists and fugitives as its large,
floating and cosmopolitan population provided them with
the anonymity they wanted. That changed after the 1993
serial bomb blasts when the Mumbai police cracked down
on the terrorist-underworld network. With the heat
turned on in Mumbai, several criminals shifted to
Bangalore.
"Bangalore’s linguistically diverse
student population in particular provides excellent
cover for the younger terrorists and criminals," says an
intelligence officer. "There are so many Kashmiri
students studying here, for instance, that even a wanted
Kashmiri militant can lead a quiet existence here."
Houses with low rentals are easily available in
Bangalore’s suburbs. A background check on the
antecedents of a tenant is not mandatory under the law
in the city, nor do owners bother to verify the
identities of the persons who occupy their houses.
The infrastructure for gathering intelligence on
terrorist groups in Bangalore is said to be almost
non-functional. In a report in the Bangalore-based
English daily, Deccan Herald, Rakesh Prakash writes that
Karnataka’s Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) had no idea
either of the presence of Imam Ali and his associates in
the city or of the commando operation in which they were
killed. "So pathetic is the network of the ATS that the
news about the successful operation was learnt only
after the television channels flashed it on Sunday
morning."
The ATS was set up in June 1993 to
gather intelligence about terrorist/extremist groups
operating in the city. It has achieved little, say
critics. Top cops in Bangalore, though, deny that the
city has become a safe haven for terrorists and
underworld elements. After all, they point out, wasn’t
it in Bangalore that they were caught or killed, so how
could it be safe? Soon after the successful operation on
Sunday, Police Commissioner H T Sangliana listed those
who had been nabbed or gunned down by the local police.
That, he said, had demolished any hopes that criminals
or terrorists might have had of finding a safe hideout
in the city.
However, most of these successful
operations against terrorists and gangsters were
possible because of input and assistance from police in
neighboring states. Tamil Nadu police, assisted by the
Karnataka police, executed the commando operation that
eliminated Imam Ali. It was the Andhra Pradesh police
who pinned down the whereabouts of Chinni Sudarshan, a
Naxalite, who was gunned down on the outskirts of
Bangalore last year. And the killing of three associates
of the notorious gangster, Chhota Rajan, was possible
because of input from Mumbai police.
"The
implications of terrorists being able to live in
Bangalore undetected are serious. Bangalore is home to
several scientific and defense facilities that could be
targeted by terrorists," points out the intelligence
officer. While Bangalore has escaped being targeted by
terrorists so far, should this happen the situation
could prove explosive. Despite its cosmopolitan culture,
Hindu-Muslim riots have broken out in the recent past
over minor issues.
The news that a top
ISI-trained militant, among the most wanted in the
country, had taken refuge in Bangalore for two months
seems to have finally woken up the local administration.
The Karnataka government has decided to raise a
crack team of commandos to deal with emergencies
involving terrorists. It is considering making it
mandatory for house owners to ascertain the identities
of their tenants before renting their houses and to
provide authorities with relevant information about the
tenants.
But these are minor measures, and
unless the government acts immediately to adopt more
comprehensive measures to improve intelligence gathering
and to ensure better coordination between various arms
of administration, Bangalore could just oust Mumbai as
India’s gangsters’ paradise.
(©2002 Asia Times
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