Different degrees of terror in
India By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The bombs that exploded in the
western Indian town of Malegoan on Friday, killing
37 and injuring about 200 people, all Muslims,
appear aimed at triggering Hindu-Muslim riots. But
unlike in the past, when suspicion quickly fell on
Islamic terrorist outfits, investigating agencies
are not ruling out the involvement of Hindu
extremists.
Those who masterminded the
blasts timed the attack to have maximum impact in
terms of casualties and to inflame Muslim
sensitivities. Three bombs went off almost
simultaneously as
thousands of Muslim
worshippers gathered at mosques for Friday
prayers. Friday was Shab-e-barat (Night of
Salvation), a festival when Muslims visit
graveyards to offer night-long prayers for their
dead relatives. The brains behind the blasts also
chose the targets carefully. The bombs went off in
the Noorani Mosque in the Bada Kabristan
(graveyard) area where people had come to pray for
the dead.
They chose Malegoan as it is a
communal tinderbox. Situated 290 kilometers
northeast of Mumbai, Malegoan has a population
that is 75% Muslim. It has a history of communal
violence dating to 1963, when processions by
Hindus and Muslims resulted in clashes that
claimed eight lives. Hindu-Muslim riots flared
again in 1984 and 1992. Malegoan witnessed its
worst communal riots in October 2001, when the
town was convulsed in violence for five days.
Very little is needed to spark riots in
Malegoan. Clashes between the two communities are
common. This has resulted in the town being
designated by the government as an
"ultra-sensitive zone".
Malegoan is a
deeply polarized town. Its Hindu and Muslim
residents are highly suspicious of each other and
eager to pin the blame for blasts on each other.
According to rumors doing the rounds, witnesses
saw a man with a fake beard, suggesting that a
Hindu dressed up to appear a Muslim was behind the
attack. This has been reported by several Urdu
(the language spoken by Muslims in India)
newspapers.
Investigating agencies are
looking beyond beards, fake or otherwise, to zero
in on the brains behind the Malegoan blast, which
came two months after bombs ripped through
Mumbai's suburban trains. Police say that a
cocktail of RDX, ammonium nitrate and petroleum
hydrocarbon oil was used at Mumbai and Malegoan.
This has prompted some investigators to suggest
that the two incidents were carried out by the
same persons or by people belonging to the same
terrorist group.
As in the case of the
Mumbai blasts and dozens of other terrorist
attacks in India, suspicion has fallen on the
banned terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and
the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
Malegoan emerged on the Lashkar radar in
2001, when after riots in the town the LeT website
carried photographs of mosques and copies of the
Koran allegedly destroyed in Malegoan "by Hindu
militants".
In the years since, the LeT
and SIMI are said to have built a huge network in
Malegoan and other communal strife-prone towns in
Maharashtra, the state where Malegoan is located.
Malegoan is now a SIMI stronghold. A section of
its youth has been active in transporting
explosives and planting bombs. This May,
intelligence agencies found a massive consignment
of RDX, AK-47s, grenades and ammunition in
Malegoan and several youths from this town were
taken into custody in connection with a huge
consignment of arms found in Aurangabad.
There is ample reason, therefore, to
believe that Islamist terrorist groups active in
Malegoan set off the bombs last Friday. Some
Malegoan residents have dismissed this possibility
on the grounds that Muslims would not attack other
Muslims. But this is a specious argument,
especially in the context of sectarian terrorist
violence in Pakistan and Iraq, for instance.
The Malegoan blasts, some analysts
maintain, are part of a series of blasts carried
out by Islamist terrorists to rip apart India's
social fabric. According to their argument, having
failed to incite communal violence by targeting
Hindus and their places of worship, Islamist
terrorists are now targeting Muslims to achieve
the same end.
But since Muslims were the
target of attack, police are not ruling out the
possibility of Hindu extremist organizations being
involved. Police are saying that the Malegoan
blasts might fit into another pattern of violence
that has emerged in Maharashtra - that of blasts
at mosques targeting the Muslim community in
communally sensitive towns in the state. In
November 2003, a crude bomb was flung at the
entrance of a mosque in Parbhani, just after
Friday prayers had ended. Thirty-five people were
injured and one killed in the blast. A year later,
crude bombs were thrown outside mosques in Jalna
and Purna.
In April, four people were
killed and 11 injured when a bomb they were
building accidentally went off in a house in
Nanded. The four were activists of the Bajrang
Dal, a Hindu right-wing extremist organization
that is part of a family of Hindu organizations
called the Sangh Parivar.
Several other
Bajrang Dal activists were arrested thereafter.
Questioning of these activists revealed the
involvement of Bajrang Dal activists in the bomb
attacks at Parbhani, Purna and Jalna. The house
where the bombs were being manufactured belonged
to a sympathizer of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), the body that provides the Sangh
Parivar with its ideological direction.
Bajrang Dal activists have routinely
participated in violence targeting India's
religious minorities - Muslims and Christians. In
1999, Bajrang Dal activists burned to death
Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two
sons. They were at the forefront of the mobs that
butchered and burned Muslims during the riots in
Gujarat in 2002. Although the Bajrang Dal has used
mass violence to terrorize people and communities,
the organization does not figure in the list of
terrorist outfits proscribed in India.
The
bomb in the Nanded explosion that killed Bajrang
Dal activists this year was rudimentary -
potassium chlorate and sulfur explosive with a
sulfuric-acid vial used as a detonator. It was
similar to the ones used in Purna and Jalna.
The bombs in the Malegoan blast were far
more sophisticated and deadly. If the blasts at
Malegoan are found to be the work of the Bajrang
Dal, it represents a giant leap in the
organization's bomb-making capacity. In the past,
the strength of the Bajrang Dal lay in its
capacity to bring thousands of its activists on to
the streets to engage in vandalism, to loot and
kill and terrorize minorities. If it was the
Bajrang Dal that masterminded the Malegoan bombs,
it means that its capacity has now grown to
include setting off deadly bombs.
In 2002,
when the Prevention of Terrorism Act was enacted,
the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) coalition
government, while designating such organizations
as SIMI as terrorist, refrained from banning the
Bajrang Dal. That was not surprising, as the BJP
and the Bajrang Dal are fraternal organizations of
the Sangh Parivar.
But even the supposedly
secular Congress Party-led coalition that came to
power in 2004 did not ban the Bajrang Dal,
although there is solid reason for doing so. If
the SIMI is engaging in subversive activity, so is
the Bajrang Dal, as it has struck at India's
founding principles of secularism, pluralism and
respect for minority rights.
The question
is whether the Congress-led coalition government
in Maharashtra will proscribe the Bajrang Dal if
its hand is indeed detected in the Malegoan
blasts. In recent years, the Congress has made its
moves keeping in mind how any step will resonate
among Muslims, who constitute its vote banks.
The coalition is desperately seeking to
undermine the Hindu right-wing Shiv Sena and is
therefore wooing the Hindu vote. It is likely
therefore to refrain from cracking down on the
Bajrang Dal, as that would give its political
rival, the Shiv Sena, an agenda to mobilize and a
new lease on life. At the same time, it is
reluctant to crack down on Islamist extremist
outfits for fear of losing the Muslim vote.
Over the past three years, Maharashtra has
suffered at least 20 terrorist attacks. Both Hindu
and Islamist extremist outfits have elaborate
networks there. Urban Maharashtra is prone to
communal violence, making the job of triggering
riots easier. Unless the government acts against
all forms of religious extremism, more attacks
will follow.
Sudha Ramachandran
is an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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