B.RAMAN
A group of about 1500 Muslims staged an ugly
demonstration outside the US Consulate-General in Chennai on the evening of
September 14,2012, in protest against a derogatory film on Islam and its Holy
Prophet produced by an unidentified
person in the US.
2.A video clip from the film with Arabic sub-titles
uploaded on to the Internet has led to a series of anti-US demonstrations by
Muslims in some countries of the world, with the demonstrations taking violent
form in some places. During a demonstration outside the US Consulate in
Benghazi in Libya on September 11,2012, a small group of heavily armed Muslims
launched a commando-style attack on the Consulate resulting in the death of the
US Ambassador to Libya and three other US officials.
3. The involvement of the Ansar al-Sharia
(Supporters of the Sharia), an affiliate of Al Qaeda, is suspected in the
Benghazi attack. The Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen,
is also called Ansar al-Sharia. One does not know as yet whether the Ansar
suspected in the Benghazi attack is the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda or whether it
is a different organisation of Libyan roots.
4. The Bengaluru Police are presently interrogating
18 educated Muslim youths arrested in Bengaluru, Hubli, Hyderabad and
Maharashtra on charges of conspiring to assassinate a number of Hindu
personalities believed sympathetic to the Hindutva movement. According to the
Bengaluru Police, the Muslim suspects in their custody were self-motivated by
visiting the web site of AQAP in Yemen, also known as the Ansar al-Sharia.
5. Muslim fundamentalist organisations in Pakistan
and West Asia , including the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organisation of the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), responsible for the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai,
had called for world-wide anti-US protest rallies against the film by Muslims
after the Friday prayers on September 14.Media reports indicate that there was
some response to this call in Jammu & Kashmir. Surprisingly and
disquietingly, some Muslims of Chennai appear to have responded to this call
after the Friday prayers in a local mosque.
6. To quote from the report carried by “The Hindu”
on the protest rally in Chennai: “ A protest against controversial American
film Innocence of Muslims turned violent on Friday when the US
Consulate-General on Anna Salai here was attacked by hundreds of protesters who
breached police security cordon with ease. A crowd of 1500 people from the
Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam (TNMMK) and a few other Muslim outfits
targeted the mission. They pelted it with stones, burnt the American flag and
pictures of President Barack Obama and damaged CCTV cameras, a police booth and
instructions boards for visitors…. A large group raising anti-US slogans
marched from outside New College in Royapettah towards the Consulate. Consulate
security personnel shut the doors to bar their entry. Iron railings and
paintings on the building’s compound wall were ruined. A small group tried to
scale the Consulate’s wall on Cathedral Road and damaged the doors and glass
panels of the security chamber.”
7. “The Hindu” has further reported as follows: “
The State Intelligence had communicated a specific input on the possibility of
an attack on the US Consulate in Chennai. However, the attack on the Consulate
caught the police unawares as it was planned and well-organised with the
protesters deviating from the original route to reach the target and having
come armed with stones. Preliminary investigation revealed that a sizeable
number of protesters came from the Tambaram side to join the main group of TMMK
agitators. After burning a couple of US flags, they ran towards the Consulate
raising slogans and stoned the building. They were joined by a few more youths
from the Thousand Lights area.”
8. The details of what happened in Chennai
disturbingly resemble what happened in the Azad Maidan in Mumbai last month and
what took place in Benghazi on September 11.While a large number of Muslims
were peacefully demonstrating or holding a meeting, small groups of violent
Muslim youth entered the scene and tried to indulge in violence. While in Mumbai
and Chennai, the Muslim youth who indulged in violence were armed only with
stones, in Benghazi they carried rifles and rocket-propelled grenades resulting
in fatalities.
9. South India has had a history of Islamic
radicalism. A founding father of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)
was from Kerala. During the 1990s, a jihadi terrorist organisation called Al
Umma was very active in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It carried out a number of acts
of terrorism in Tamil Nadu, including the serial blasts in Coimbatore in
February,1998, coinciding with a visit of Shri L.K.Advani, the BJP leader, to
that town. The Tamil Nadu Police managed to arrest the leaders of the
organisation and prosecute them. It has become dormant as a terrorist
organisation, but it is believed that some of those presently associated with
the TNMMK were originally associated with Al Umma when it was active.
10. Ten years ago, the Tamil Nadu Police discovered
an attempt by a Saudi Arabia based cadre of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) to float
a new jihadi organisation in Tamil Nadu called the Muslim Self-Defence Force. It
did not make much progress. It was reported that the investigations made by the
Police in North India brought out that at least one training/motivational camp of the Indian Mujahideen was held in
Kerala.
11. After the recent anti-Muslim violence in the
Rakhine State of Myanmar and our Assam, an organisation based in Hyderabad ,
Andhra Pradesh, came to notice for disseminating exaggerated accounts of the
violence with the help of morphed images. The recent exodus of a large number
of our citizens from the North-East working and living in Bengaluru, Chennai
and Hyderabad followed dissemination of motivated rumours warning of
retaliatory attacks on people from the North-East. The people and cells behind
this conspiracy have not yet been identified, arrested and prosecuted. And
then, we had the arrest of 18 Muslim suspects with ideological vibrations for
AQAP of Yemen.
12. The chain of developments outlined above
indicate a web of Islamic radicalism in the South the full ramifications of
which seem to have defied detection by the police and the central intelligence
agencies. The well-organised and ugly protests outside the US Consulate in
Chennai draw attention to the need to unravel and neutralise this web before it
gets out of control and embarks on a path of AQAP style jihadi terrorism.(
15-9-12)
(The writer
is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi,
and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate
of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com Twitter @SORBONNE75)
