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Mumbai
blasts: Target - the Indian
economy
By B Raman
Two
explosions in quick succession in Mumbai on Monday are
estimated to have killed about 48 civilians and injured
well over 100.
One of these explosions took place
near the Gateway of India in the vicinity of the Taj
Hotel, a five-star hotel that attracts many affluent
foreign tourists from the world of business, from the
West as well as the Persian Gulf region. Many
middle-class families of the Gulf who cannot afford a
vacation in the West and hence prefer to come to India
also often prefer to stay in this hotel. The second
explosion took place in the Zaveri Bazaar, an area with
a concentration of jewelers, many of them Gujaratis.
Initial reports indicate that the explosives
were probably concealed in hired taxis and detonated
through timers. The explosives do not appear to have
been of high quality. The devastating impact seems to
have been achieved by using a large quantity of material
commonly available, such as ammonium nitrate, which has
in the past been used in many of the explosions in
different parts of the world in which the al-Qaeda of
Osama bin Laden or members of his International Islamic
Front (IIF) were found involved or suspected.
While explosives experts of the government of
India are reported to be examining the possibility of
the use of high-quality and difficult-to-detect
explosives, the likelihood of their use is remote. For
explosions in public places where the terrorists do not
have to pass through security checks,
difficult-to-detect high-quality explosives are not
necessary. One could achieve the desired effect by using
material of everyday use, which would not attract the
suspicion of the security agencies. This has been the
typical modus operandi of jihadi terrorists ever
since the New York World Trade Center explosion of
February 1993.
This has been the fifth terrorist
strike in Mumbai in recent months. The main targets
appear to have been chosen for their economic
significance - such as means of transport, areas of
prosperous economic activity or a very well-known hotel.
Like New York in the United States, Mumbai in
India has been a tempting target for jihadi terrorists
since 1993. It is the economic and financial capital of
India. It is the base of India's offshore oil industry.
It is the one city in India that comes nearest to a
Western city in its role as the engine of India's
industrialization and modernization. It provides a
vision of what the rest of India could be in years to
come if the modernization and globalization policies of
the government continue to make progress. It is the home
of India's largest share market. It is a major
contributor of the tax revenue of the government. Many
multinational companies prefer to locate their corporate
headquarters in Mumbai.
Though Mumbai is not
India, many foreign investors tend to look at India
through the prism of Mumbai. If internal security in
Mumbai is good, they look at internal security in India
as a whole as satisfactory. If it is bad in Mumbai, they
tend to look on security of life and property in the
rest of the country as worrisome, even if this is not
necessarily so.
Mumbai is also a city of
strategic significance for India. It was the initial
nerve center of India's nuclear establishment. Though
other nerve centers have since come up, Mumbai's
importance is undiminished.
In view of these
factors, weakening the Indian economy by destabilizing
Mumbai has remained an important objective of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 1992. In the
early 1990s, the ISI asked some of the Sikh terrorists
of Punjab trained by it to join the Mumbai Flying Club
and crash a trainer plane on the offshore oil
installations. They did not do so, since they did not
believe in suicide terrorism.
The ISI
subsequently approached Dawood Ibrahim, the leader of a
mafia gang, who was then based in Dubai in the United
Arab Emirates, for assistance. By taking advantage of
the anger among some sections of the Muslim youth of
Mumbai over the destruction of the Babri masjid
in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, and the subsequent communal
riots in which many Muslims were allegedly killed, he
recruited a number of angry Muslims, had them trained in
Pakistan in the use of explosives and used them for
carrying out the explosions of March 1993 in Mumbai in
which more than 200 civilians were killed.
The
targets chosen were of economic significance, such as
the Mumbai Stock Exchange building, the office of an
airline, a hotel near the airport, etc. The explosives,
believed supplied by Pakistan, were kept in vehicles and
were detonated through chemical timers of US origin.
After examination, US forensic-science experts had
confirmed that the timers used came from a stock issued
by the United States to Pakistan in the 1980s for use in
Afghanistan during the war against the invading Soviet
army.
After these explosions, Dawood Ibrahim
himself and some of the perpetrators escaped to the
Pakistani port city of Karachi, where they are now
living, even as reported by the Pakistani media. Dawood
Ibrahim had played an important role in the past in
Pakistan's clandestine procurement of nuclear and
missile technology from abroad, and in gratitude for
this Pakistan has given him and his associates Pakistani
passports under different names and allowed them to
operate from Karachi. In response to India's repeated
requests for their arrest and extradition, Islamabad has
repeatedly taken the stand that they were not in
Pakistan.
The arrests and prosecution of many of
the others involved in the Mumbai blasts of 1993 brought
down the activities of jihadi terrorist elements in
Mumbai, but there were tell-tale indicators that the
jihadis trained by the ISI had not given up their
objective of making Mumbai an important base for their
activities.
Mumbai has been the gateway not only
of India, but also of international terrorists and mafia
members. Reports received in 1989 indicated that Carlos
the Jackal (Ilich Ramirez Sanchez), now in prison in
Paris, used to come to Mumbai and Bangkok from Damascus,
his then sanctuary, for his vacations without his
arrival or presence being detected by the local police.
Over the years, Mumbai has become the operational ground
of some of the most notorious mafia groups of the
region, the most infamous of them being the group led by
Dawood Ibrahim. The Dawood Ibrahim group has penetrated
into some sections of the local economic activity, such
as that of Mumbai's flourishing film industry. Inquiries
and investigations after the Mumbai blasts of 1993
brought out the links and influence in the political
circles of not only Mumbai but also other parts of
India, which Dawood and other mafia leaders had managed
to develop with their money power.
The 1993
Mumbai blasts brought out the ominous linkages that had
started developing between the mafia leaders, many of
them Muslims, and the jihadi terrorists. It was reported
in 1999 that terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(HUM), a founding member of bin Laden's IIF, who had
hijacked an aircraft of Indian Airlines from Kathmandu,
Nepal, to Kandahar, Afghanistan, had allegedly made
their plans for their operation from hideouts in Mumbai
before moving on to Kathmandu.
For the past two
years there have been reports that the Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LET), one of the Pakistani components of the IIF, which
has been responsible for the majority of the terrorist
incidents in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) since 1999,
had burrowed into Mumbai by taking advantage of the
conducive atmosphere in sections of the local Muslim
community, particularly the youth, because of their
anger over the Babri masjid issue and the
large-scale killing of Muslims in Gujarat last year
after the massacre of a number of Hindu pilgrims by some
Muslims of Godhra, Gujarat, while they were traveling by
train.
Among the local accomplices of the LET in
Mumbai were allegedly cadres of the banned Students'
Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). One or two of its
cadres had gone to Pakistan for training in the 1980s,
long before the Babri masjid was destroyed, and
some others from its ranks had been trained in J&K
by the terrorist organizations operating there, such as
the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM).
The LET, like the
other Pakistani components of the IIF, is a pan-Islamic
organization that advocates the revival of the Islamic
caliphate system and claims to be fighting for an
Islamic caliphate in the Indian subcontinent. It has its
headquarters in Pakistan, but also has an active
coordination center in Saudi Arabia, which coordinates
its activities in Mumbai, southern India and the eastern
province of Sri Lanka. The links of many of the jihadi
terrorists arrested in recent months in Mumbai,
Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and in Tamil Nadu were
reportedly traced to this coordination center in Saudi
Arabia. Even though the LET has recently emerged as the
standard-bearer of al-Qaeda and the IIF, the Saudi
authorities have not acted against it. No action has
been taken against LET activities in the other countries
of the Gulf, either.
The Mumbai blasts on
Monday, which came in the wake of four other blasts with
fewer casualties, would show that the security agencies
have so far not been able to identify and neutralize all
the sleeper agents of the LET, who have burrowed into
not only Mumbai, but also Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
Many undetected networks continue to operate, and
Monday's blasts are strong evidence of this.
While the continuing anger over the Babri
masjid issue and the killing of a large number of
Muslims in Gujarat last year would have definitely
helped in motivating some of the local Muslim youth to
help the LET, it would be incorrect to see the blasts
merely as an act of reprisal for the Gujarat riots. They
have to be seen as part of the larger plan drawn up by
the ISI in 1992 to weaken the Indian economy by
destabilizing Mumbai.
B Raman is
additional secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat,
government of India, and currently director, Institute
for Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the
National Security Advisory Board of the government of
India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He
was also head of the counter-terrorism division of the
Research & Analysis Wing, India's external
intelligence agency, from 1988 to August
1994.
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