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No respite from jihadis
By
Kanchan Lakshman
Thirty-eight persons, including
17 security force (SF) personnel, have been killed in
three separate terrorist strikes in a span of just three
days over the past week in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
These high-intensity attacks come against the backdrop
of a "soft approach" adopted by the new coalition
government headed by Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed
Sayeed. Evidently, the decision not to implement the
Prevention of Terrorism Act 2002, the proposal to merge
the Special Operations Group (SOG) into the J&K
police, and the release of some terrorists and
secessionist leaders has substantially emboldened the
terrorist groupings.
At least 13 persons were
killed and 45 others injured, eight of them seriously,
when two fidayeen (suicide terrorists)
simultaneously attacked two shrines - Raghunath and
Panjbakhtar temples - in the heart of Jammu city on the
evening of November 24. A six-hour gun battle ended with
a total of 13 dead. Violence recommenced briefly around
the Panjbakhtar temple the next morning when a third
terrorist, presumed to be part of the same squad was
engaged and neutralized by the by SFs. J&K Director
General of Police A K Suri indicated that the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) was responsible for this attack,
the second in eight months on the Raghunath temple - the
most important Hindu shrine in the Jammu region. This
information was derived from a telephone call received
by Suri at his residence in which a "Pakistani LeT
cadre" said, "We have done it and now it is your turn."
Earlier, in its first suicide attack in 2002 in
Srinagar, a LeT squad killed six and injured nine SF
personnel at a central reserve police force camp on
November 22. Both the terrorists in this attack were
killed in retaliatory firing. This was also the first
major terrorist attack after the new coalition
government took office on November 2. An unidentified
LeT spokesperson reportedly claimed that the incident
was part of the group's "Operation Badar", which has
been launched in the holy month of Ramadan.
Incidentally, LeT chief Professor Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed
was released from house arrest on November 19 in Lahore,
Pakistan. Earlier, the military regime had released
Sayeed from prison on October 31 after five months in
detention, and had immediately placed him under house
arrest.
In the third major incident last week,
19 persons - including nine SF personnel, three women
and two children - were killed in a blast at Lower Munda
in south Kashmir on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway
on November 23. According to official sources, one of
the vehicles in a convoy carrying SF personnel and their
family members to Jammu from Srinagar hit a landmine,
six kilometers short of the Jawahar tunnel.
The
terrorist strikes are not restricted to the state of
J&K. In what appears to be a series of attacks on
places of worship, a woman was killed and approximately
20 people were injured in an explosion near the Sai Baba
temple in the Dilsukhnagar area in Hyderabad, the
capital city of the southern Indian state of Andhra
Pradesh on the night of November 21. The blast occurred
three hours after United States Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill had left the city after a two-day visit. The
south India "commander" of the LeT, Syed Aziz alias
Khalil alias Imran, one of the two prime accused in the
November 21 bomb blast, was killed in an encounter near
Rekurthi village on the outskirts of Karimnagar town, on
November 24. Earlier, Mohammad Azam, the other accused
who allegedly triggered the Hyderabad blast, was killed
in an encounter in the Parvatipuram area on the
outskirts of Hyderabad on November 22.
The
Hyderabad attack appears to be part of a concerted
campaign by Pakistan to extend terrorism into other
theaters across India and to project the notion that
minorities in India are resorting to "indigenous
uprisings" to protest their supposed "persecution in
Hindu India". Exactly two months prior to the Raghunath
and Panjbakhtar temples incidents, 32 persons were
killed, on September 24, when two LeT terrorists
launched an attack at the Akshardham temple in the
western Indian state of Gujarat. Part of an old
terrorist stratagem, recent attacks on places of worship
are conspicuously designed to create religious tensions
in the highly polarized post-Godhra scenario prevailing
in parts of the country, and also as a result of the
impending December Legislative Assembly elections in
Gujarat.
There has been no systematic
de-escalation in the levels of terrorist violence in
J&K since the pre-election spurt - indeed, the
beginning of the year - and monthly variations would
largely be attributable to operational inefficiencies,
extraordinary international pressure on Pakistan for
brief periods of time, or other transient factors.
Ninety-eight civilians and 104 SF personnel have been
killed (until November 24) since the completion of the
electoral process in the state on October 9.
One-hundred-twenty-two civilians and 123 SF personnel
have been killed during the months of October and
November alone.
While trends in violence remain
unchanged, a more disturbing development is the
deliberate lowering of guard by the new coalition
government in the state, which has obstructed ongoing
counter-terrorism operations, and which has already
enlarged a number of terrorists on bail, including,
prominently, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)
"commander" Nazir Ahmad Sheikh and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
"commander" Mohammad Ayub, as well as former terrorist
and current secessionist Yasin Malik, chairman of the
JKLF.
The state government has announced its
decision to hold talks on the Kashmir issue "without any
pre-conditions" with a mix of groups actively pursuing
the agenda of violence. All these "initiatives" are
purported to be part of the "healing touch" that the
Mufti Mohammad Sayeed regime wishes to administer in the
violence-riven state. How a refusal to impose the
criminal law of the land, and the creation of conditions
that enhance the ease of operations for terrorist
groups, is going to "heal" the wounds inflicted on the
people of J&K remains unclear.
What is
clear, however, is the fact that over 33,000 people have
lost their lives to terrorism in the state of J&K
over the past 13 years, and that the intensity of
violence shows no signs of decline; that the
Pakistan-backed terrorist agenda shows a remarkable
continuity, with no signs of dilution in the post
September 11 phase; that the Indian political leadership
has still to define a consistent counter-terrorism
strategy that goes beyond populist sloganeering; and
that, consequently, the terrorists are going to continue
to kill with a distressing frequency in the foreseeable
future.
Kanchan Lakshman, research
associate, Institute for Conflict Management, a
non-profit society set up in 1997 in New Delhi committed
to the evaluation and resolution of problems of internal
security in South Asia.
Published with
permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review of
the South Asia Terrorism
Portal.
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