B.RAMAN
( Written at the request of “The Times of India”.
Carried by it on April 19,2013, at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Dont-politicise-terror/articleshow/19619767.cms
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Sixteen persons, 11 of them policemen posted on
pre-election law and order duty near the office of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in Bengaluru, are reported to have been injured on April 17, when a
motor-byke fitted with an
improvised explosive device (IED) exploded near the BJP office. Some vehicles
parked in the area were also destroyed or damaged. Some damage to window-panes
of nearby buildings has also been reported.
2. The blast is in the preliminary stages of
investigation by the local police. The
National Investigation Agency (NIA) of the Government of India has also joined
the investigation. The State and central authorities have categorised the blast
as an act of terrorism.
3.No organisation has claimed responsibility for the blast. The
motive is still to be established. The only lead the Police have so far is that the motor-byke had a fake number
plate of Tamil Nadu and was probably stolen from Hyderabad.
4.From the details available so far it can be
tentatively categorised as an act of terror of low lethality carried out with a
timed IED mounted on a motor-byke. The use of a motor-byke would indicate that
the intention of the perpetrators was not just to create a scare, but to cause
casualties.
5.While the BJP was the target of the blast, it is
not clear whether it was directed against the BJP as a political party and its
ideology or against the BJP-led Government which had been ruling the State and
its policies or the local police.
6. It would be premature to say whether the blast
was carried out by an angry individual or individuals with grievances against
the BJP or by an ideologically motivated organisation such as the Indian
Mujahideen (IM), which had operated in Bengaluru in the past.
7. The explosion coincided with the third
anniversary of the blast outside the local Chinnaswami Stadium in 2010 in which
the IM was suspected. Fasih Mehmood, an engineer from Bihar formerly working in Saudi Arabia and arrested by the
Delhi Police in May last year, was to have been interrogated by the Bengaluru
Police in connection with his suspected role in the Stadium blast.
8. The blast of April 17 has also come about seven
months after the high-profile arrests by
the Karnataka Police in September last year of 18 educated Muslim youths 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, who were interrogating them, the Muslim suspects in their
custody were self-motivated by visiting the web site of Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP)in Yemen, also known as the Ansar al-Sharia. The
Ansar-al-Sharia was suspected in the assassination of a US diplomat in Benghazi
in Libya on September 11,2012.
9. There were no subsequent details of these
Muslims allegedly in the custody of the Bengaluru Police. What did they say
during their interrogation? Was there corroboration of the allegation that they
were self-motivated by visiting the Web site of AQAP? What happened to the case
against them?
10.There were already pockets of anger in sections
of the Karnataka Muslim youth against the police and the Government due to
various reasons. This anger was reflected in the low-intensity explosions
allegedly carried out by the IM in Bengaluru in July 2008.
11. One should not be surprised if there was
aggravation of this anger as a result of the
interrogation of Fashi Mehmood and the 18 Muslim youth arrested in
September last year.
12.The anger against the Police and the perceived
unfairness of the Indian criminal justice system towards the Muslims have often
been cited by the IM as a cause for their movement against the Government and
the police in different States. The recent execution of Afzal Guru, for his
role in the attack on the Parliament in December 2001,has added to this.
13.One has been seeing reports of such anger in
Bengaluru too since the IM struck in 2008. Bengaluru, being an IT nerve centre,
has also been an important target of ISI-sponsored Pakistani jihadi
organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET).
14. While the IM reportedly has contacts with the
LET, local anger has till now been the motivating factor of its activities and
not the objectives of its Pakistani associates.
15. One has to keep in view these details in order
to understand the background to the terrorist scenario in Bengaluru. This
narrative should not be interpreted to mean that these elements must have been
responsible for the blast of April 17.
16. One has to keep an open mind as to who might
have been responsible and what could have been the motive and avoid
pre-conceived assumptions. At the same time , one has to keep in view the
background.
17. The political parties should leave it to the
police and the counter-terrorism experts to do the investigation with an open
mind. Till they come to definitive conclusions based on reliable evidence, the
temptation to exploit the blast for political purposes should be avoided.
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd),
Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi.
