Hit and miss with Indian terror
attacks By Ajai Sahni
Terrorist attacks on soft targets have
been occurring with sickening regularity across
India (outside of Jammu and Kashmir and the
northeast), at intervals of about two to three
months over the past few years, and last weekend's
twin bombing in Hyderabad falls squarely into this
pattern.
On Saturday evening, 43 people
were killed and dozens injured in blasts at a
laser show and an eatery in the Kothi locality in
Hyderabad.
Reacting
on television shortly after, federal Home
Secretary Madhukar Gupta, with suitable gravitas,
informed the nation: "It is a terrorist strike"
(the ignorant public was, perhaps, at risk of
mistaking it for a humanitarian strike). Lest the
profundity of this observation be lost on national
audiences, Gupta, for good measure, trotted out
his own practiced cliche for all such occasions:
"It is a dastardly act," he intoned.
Such
attacks, however, are progressively becoming
iconic manifestations of utterly senseless
violence. This is terrorism without strategy,
purpose or direction. The succession of attacks
over the past five years across India have secured
no recognizable tactical or strategic terrorist
objective and, once the media storm after each
incident dies out, they leave little trace of
impact on the administrative order, policing, or
the lives of common people.
Apart from the
tragic consequences for the direct victims of
terrorism and their families (and they are, by
definition, merely incidental to the terrorist
objective), these attacks leave little trace, and
literally weeks - indeed, often days or hours -
after the incident, the target areas return to a
forgetful, if perverse, "normalcy", as do local
and national authorities. In terms of structural
impact on national or local politics, governance
and public intercourse, the consequences of the
succession of incidents over the past years have
been negligible.
This factor has been the
more pronounced as a result of the fact that after
the December 2001 attack on India's Parliament,
there has been no significant Islamist terrorist
attack on a strategic target. Despite all the
clamor about "intelligence" and "security"
failures, the fact is, Pakistan-backed Islamist
terrorist groupings - principally the
Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen - the Bangladesh-based
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and their Indian
collaborators, such as the Students Islamic
Movement of India, have failed to strike at
anything but the softest of soft targets outside
Jammu and Kashmir.
Moreover, those killed
have, with rare exception, been the poor - and
their lives have little value for India's elite,
except when elections come around and the
political parties are compelled, briefly, to
solicit their votes.
Nevertheless, each
terrorist attack provides the occasion for
posturing and creating a little storm of
uninformed "analysis" in the national media
teacup, as well as for a continuous sequence of
motivated leaks from intelligence and
investigative agencies.
Hence central
agencies leak the information that, since March,
they have known that 8 kilograms of military-grade
explosives (RDX) were delivered to a HUJI
operative in Hyderabad, but that "for its own
reasons, the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh
did not allow the kinds of aggressive - and
unpopular - policing that the Central Bureau of
Investigation and city police felt were necessary
to secure the city".
It does not appear to
be relevant to this critique that it was not
military-grade RDX but locally available
industrial explosives that are known to have been
used in last weekend's twin blasts; nor is it
clear what kind of "aggressive policing" would be
required, either to find a little packet of 8
kilograms of RDX or to secure every potential soft
target in a city of 6.25 million. It is useful, in
this context, to note, however, that at least six
modules or cells of Pakistan-backed terrorists
have been located and neutralized in Hyderabad
since 2004, the last of these on April 1. Indeed,
the very fact that Islamist terrorists have failed
to target strategic locations, and have been
forced to limit their attacks to the softest of
locations, would suggest that policing and
intelligence have been reasonably successful.
As for "securing the city", that is,
simply stated, an impossible task under existing
conditions. For one, attacks are overwhelmingly no
longer orchestrated by networks and cells
established within the target city, and have
progressively been transformed into synchronized
multi-group operations coordinated by handlers
most likely in Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Individual members of these groups are
simply directed by handlers to make evanescent and
anonymous contact with members of other groups to
provide specific materials and services:
explosives, detonators, safe haven, bomb-making
expertise and local support, and most disappear
without trace long before the attack. It is only
the low-grade cadres or mercenary elements charged
with the "delivery" of the explosive devices to
target areas who are occasionally recognized by
witnesses and eventually arrested, but they have
no idea of the broader participation in, and
location or execution of, the larger conspiracy.
Significantly, the planning and preparation
components are ordinarily outside the (urban)
target areas, in India's vast and virtually
unpoliced greater areas of large cities and rural
hinterland.
It is useful to reiterate that
India's cities cannot be "secured" if its
hinterlands remain entirely "unsecured", and India
is a thoroughly under-policed country. It has an
average police-to-population ratio of 122 officers
per 100,000 civilians. Most Western countries have
ratios ranging between 250 and 500 per 100,000,
and the United Nations recommends a minimum norm
of 222 per 100,000. Andhra Pradesh, the state of
which Hyderabad is the capital, has a ratio of
just 98 per 100,000, and is also tackling (fairly
effectively) a raging Maoist insurgency.
Deficiencies of capacity are also endemic
in the intelligence agencies. While disaggregated
data are unavailable, it is useful to recall that
previous reports have called for a tremendous
augmentation of capacities, including manpower, a
massive upgrading of technical, imaging, signal,
electronic counter-intelligence and economic
intelligence capabilities, and a systemwide reform
of conventional human-intelligence (HUMINT)
gathering.
Most of these recommendations
remain unimplemented, beyond a few symbolic
changes. One recommendation calls for a
"multi-agency setup" to confront the challenges of
terrorism, and this was, at least formally,
implemented through the creation of two new wings
under the Intelligence Bureau: the Multi-Agency
Center (MAC) and the Joint Task Force on
Intelligence (JTFI).
MAC was charged with
collecting and coordinating terrorism-related
information from across the country; the JTFI is
responsible for passing on this information to the
state governments. Regrettably, both MAC and JTFI
remain understaffed, under-equipped and
ineffective, with even basic issues relating to
their administration unsettled. Their principal
objective, the creation of a national terrorism
database, has made little progress.
Augmenting HUMINT capacities has also
lagged far behind requirements. In 2001, the
Girish Saxena Committee recommended at least an
additional 3,000 cadres in the Intelligence
Bureau. According to available information, until
now, just 800 additional posts have been
sanctioned, though the requirements would have
expanded dramatically over the intervening years.
As with the larger administrative apparatus in
India, there has been a long, slow process of
deterioration in the country's intelligence and
policing capabilities - perhaps not in absolute
terms, but certainly in terms of capacities
lagging well behind the magnitude and pace of
emerging challenges.
The specifics of the
twin blasts in Hyderabad are yet to be determined
- and given the recent operating methods of
Islamist terrorist groupings, it is possible that,
as with investigations into earlier blasts,
inquiries will hit a dead end.
Crucially,
however, if India is to devise effective
counter-terrorism policies, strategies and
tactics, the country's leaders and intelligence
and enforcement agencies will have to go beyond
the current incident-led patterns of response and
analysis, and address the gaping capacity deficits
that afflict every aspect of security and
intelligence administration, policing, and
law-and-order management in the country.
A
strategy to exert pressure and impose costs on the
external sponsors and supporters of terrorism, and
capacities to implement such a strategy, are also
necessary. If India is to secure its cities, its
hinterlands cannot be abandoned to lawlessness,
and its hostile neighbors to a policy of hopeful
supplication.
Ajai Sahni is
editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review and
executive director of the Institute for Conflict
Management.
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