B.RAMAN
In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada.329 civilians---270 of them Canadian nationals, 27 British nationals, 22 Indian nationals and 10 other foreign nationals---- were killed. The majority of the Canadian and British nationals killed were of Indian origin. The 22 Indians killed included 20 members of the crew. The flight was operating on the Montréal-London-Delhi-Bombay route. It was blown up in midair by a bomb in Irish airspace.
2.The report of the John Major Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which was set up only in 1984, allowed the terrorist attack to take place.We have been carrying relevant extracts from the report on the web site of the South Asia Analysis Group (SAAG) at www.southasiaanalysis.org.
3.The terms of reference of the Commission were restricted to finding out whether intelligence relating to the plans of the Sikh extremists based in Canada to blow up a flight of the Air India originating from a Canadian airport existed, if so, whether the disaster could have been prevented and why it was not prevented. The Commission's enquiry did not cover the role of Pakistan in assisting the Babbar Khalsa in organising acts of terrorism against Indian targets. This was not in its terms of reference. After the explosion, Parmar fled to Pakistan, where he was given sanctuary by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He operated from Pakistan against India till 1992 ----- for seven years --- and crossed over into India from Pakistan in 1992 following Western pressure on Pakistan to have him arrested and handed over to India for investigation and trial. He was killed in an encounter by the Punjab Police in 1992. The role of Pakistan in giving shelter to the main conspirator in the plot which blew up the Kanishka and continuing to help him and sponsor his acts of terrorism was also not gone into by the Major Commission. It was not in its terms of reference either.
4. When the Kanishka aircraft was blown up, Gen.Zia-ul-Haq was in power in Pakistan and was playing an active role in assisting the Central Intelligence Agency of the US in its operations against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In gratitude for this assistance, many transgressions of Pakistan were overlooked by the Western Governments. One of these transgressions was its assistance to the Babbar Khalsa which blew up the Kanishka and not extending mutual legal assistance to India in the investigation of the case. The second transgression was its clandestine acquisition of a military nuclear capability with the collusion of China.
5. Mrs.Benazir Bhutto came to power with the reluctant approval of the Pakistani Army and the ISI, then headed by Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul, following the elections held after the death of Zia in a plane crash in August,1988. After assuming office, she started exercising pressure on the ISI to stop playing what she used to call the Sikh card against India. There was pressure on the ISI from the Western Governments too.
6. The ISI asked the Government of Mr.Nawaz Sharif, which was then in power in Punjab as the Chief Minister, to take over the responsibility for assisting the Khalistani terrorists, including Parmar, and for funding and training them. The Nawaz Government readily agreed to this and asked the Special Branch of the Punjab Police to take over from the ISI the responsibility for assisting the Khalistani terrorists. It appointed Brig.Imtiaz, who headed the political division of the ISI under Zia, as adviser to the SB to supervise this project. He had been removed from the ISI by Benazir, who intensely disliked him.
7. What happened in Pakistan after the Kanishka disaster is now being repeated after the terrorist strikes of 26/11 in Mumbai carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) with the prior knowledge and possibly tacit if not open approval of the ISI. One hundred and sixty-six persons, including 25 foreigners of different nationalities, were killed. Till the Kanishka disaster of June 1985, the repeated warnings of the Indian intelligence and security agencies about the emergence of the Babbar Khalsa as an international terrorist organisation were not treated seriously by their Western counterparts.
8. The Major Commission report clearly brings out that there was a considerable flow of intelligence and warnings from the Government of India about the plans of the Babbar Khalsa branch in Canada to blow up an Air India plane originating from Canada. There were also similar warnings and requests for physical security enhancements from Air India to Candian security offcials responsible for aviation security. The Major Commission report indicates that these warnings and intelligence, which had emanated from the Government of India and Air India, were not seriously acted upon by the Canadian authorities. The reports from the Government of India were attributed by them to the Indian tendency to "cry wolf". Air India's warnings were attributed to its alleged desire to obtain security enhancements without paying for it. The result: 329 innocent civilians perished. The disaster could have been easily prevented and their lives saved, if the warnings from the Govt. of India and Air India had been acted upon.
9. This could not be done because of the tendency of the Canadian authorities to view any intelligence warning emanating from India with a prejudiced mind through the prism of Inda's disputes with Pakistan. This prejudiced mindset is not unique to the Canadian authorities. It is shared by the authorities of other Western Governments too. Have they learnt any lessons from the Kanishka disaster?
10. No. The same prejudiced mind was seen between 9/11 and the London explosions of July,2005, in their tendency to dismiss Indian warnings of the emergence of the LET as an international terrorist organisation on par with Al Qaeda. They started paying serious attention to the LET only after the London explosions of 2005 and then after the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai.Just as they were looking at the Indian warnings regarding the Babbar Khalsa through the India-Pakistan prism, they continue to view even today the Indian warnings regarding the LET through the India-Pakistan prism.
11. In the actions taken by them after the Kanishka disaster, they made a distinction between the role of the Babbar Khalsa in indulging in terrorism and the role of the ISI in assisting it. Post-1985, they acted against the Babbar Khalsa as a terrorist organisation and co-operated with India in monitoring its activities, but they refrained from acting against the ISI. After the Kanishka explosion, it took about 10 years for the Babbar Khalsa to be brought under control. During this period, many more innocent civilians perished at its hands .
12.History has been repeating itself since 26/11. The Western Governments are now taking seriously the threat posed by the LET to them, but, at the same time, they are refraining from acting against the ISI without whose support the LET cannot survive for long. Unless there is simultaneous action against the LET and the ISI, the threat from the LET will continue for a long time.
13.After 26/11, the ISI is behaving exactly as it behaved after the Kanishka disaster. Because of the Western pressure and the close monitoring of the activities of the LET, it has asked the Special Branch of the Punjab Police to take over the responsibility for keeping the LET and its political wing the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD) alive and active and for funding their activities. The Punjab Government of Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif, the brother of Mr. Nawaz, is going along with this.
14. The "Dawn" of Karachi reported on June 16,2010, that according to the supplementary budget for 2009-10 recently submitted to the Punjab Provincial Assembly for post-facto approval, the Government of Mr.Shabaz Sharif gave a grant of Rs79 million to the Markaz-i-Taiba, the headquarters of the JED and the LET at Muridke in Punjab. In addition,another sum of Rs3 million was given as grants to the schools run by the JUD in different districts of Punjab.Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan, who has been accused by his critics of having contacts with the Sunni extremist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which is playing a leading role in the Punjabi Taliban, has admitted to having given the money to the JUD.
15. One does not see any sign that the West is moving to act against the continued nursing of the LET by the ISI, either directly, if possible, or through the Punjab Police. Unless this is stopped, disasters of the Kanishka and Mumbai kind will be repeated.The prejudiced view of Indian intelligence warnings and assesssments brought out in the Major Commission report continues even today 25 years after the Kanishka disaster---not only in Canada, but also in other Western countries. So long as they are not able to rid themselves of this prejudiced mindset, threats of mass casualty terrorism planned and carried out from Pakistani territory or with the assistance of its ISI will continue to confront not only India, but also the West. (20-6-10)
( 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)
Saturday, June 19, 2010
KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (5)
B.RAMAN
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the fifth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)
The central unanswered question that Canadians, and especially the
families of the victims of the bombing of Flight 182, have hoped a Public Inquiry
might reveal is whether the Government and its institutions had information
prior to the bombing that could have allowed the authorities to prevent it.
The answer is complex. There is no evidence that the Government was aware in
advance of the details of the events of June 22, 1985. That is the basis for the oftrepeated statement that there was no knowledge of any “specifi c threat” against
Flight 182.
To pose the issue in this form is, however, to miss the point. In 1985, “specifi c
threat” was a technical term tied to emergency protocols put into place when
the authorities received a call-in threat that identifi ed a target, in circumstances
where there was not enough time to conduct a proper investigation or
assessment of the threat. This sort of “specifi c threat” justifi ed emergency
measures because of the magnitude of potential consequences even if it wasn’t
possible to assess the likelihood of their occurrence.
It is one thing to say that, had there been such a “specifi c threat,” detailing a time,place and method of a planned attack on Flight 182, emergency measures would
have been implemented to hunt down the bomb. It is entirely something else
to suggest that, in the absence of such a detailed, precise and “specifi c” threat,
nothing further could or should have been done to prevent the bombing.
The claim that there was no “specifi c threat” to the June 22, 1985 departure of
Flight 182 is accurate only in a limited and literal sense. No one source provided
detailed information to any one agency in one place and at one time about
the plan to blow up Flight 182 on June 23, 1985. On the other hand, various
agencies of government had extremely important pieces of information that,
taken together, would have led a competent analyst to conclude that Flight 182
was in danger of being bombed by known Sikh extremists.
Prior to the bombing, CSIS, the RCMP, the Department of External Aff airs, local
police forces and Transport Canada were collectively in possession of the
following information about Sikh extremism and threats to Indian interests:
• A plot to bomb one and possibly two Air India planes was allegedly
being hatched by Sikh extremists in British Columbia in the fall
of 1984;
• In the fall of 1984, Ajaib Singh Bagri was allegedly nominated to a
committee planning the hijacking of an Air India plane;
• Talwinder Singh Parmar’s group, the Babbar Khalsa, was reportedly
working on a “highly secret project” in the spring of 1985, and
Parmar had been assessed as the greatest threat in Canada to
Indian diplomatic missions and personnel;
• In early June, Parmar and associates conducted experiments in the
woods involving a loud explosion;
• During a June 12, 1985 meeting, a prominent Sikh extremist stated
– in response to questions about the lack of attacks on Indian
offi cials - that something big would happen in two weeks; and
• In late May and early June, Air India warned that sabotage attempts
against Air India planes were likely to be made by Sikh extremists
using time-delayed devices in registered baggage, that special
vigilance was warranted on items like transistor radios, and
that police should oversee the loading of registered luggage
onto airplanes.
James Bartleman, who at the time he gave his evidence was Lieutenant Governor
of Ontario, and in 1985 was Director General (DG) of the Intelligence Analysis and
Security Bureau at External Aff airs, testifi ed that shortly prior to the bombing, he saw, as part of the material he received electronically from CSE on a daily basis,
information that indicated that Flight 182 would be targeted. He was not able to
assess the reliability of the information but thought it important to ensure that
the authorities were aware of the information and were dealing with it. When he
brought the information to the attention of an RCMP offi cial who was attending
a security meeting in the building, he was met with a hostile reception and an
indication that the RCMP was aware of the matter and had it in hand. On June
23, 1985, when he was informed of the bombing, he thought immediately that
this was the materialization of the threat, and that the authorities had been
unable to prevent it.
Counsel from the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Government and all
its agencies, approached Bartleman’s evidence as though it was the only prebombing
indication of the danger to Air India Flight 182. In an entirely misguided
approach, Bartleman was aggressively cross-examined and witnesses were
called to attempt to call into question the details of his evidence.
Intelligence specialists often observe that an item of information, although
apparently insignifi cant in itself, may in fact be the missing piece to a puzzle
that helps a foreign or hostile group or agency see a pattern or draw conclusions
that have profound intelligence value. This “mosaic eff ect” metaphor is typically
used by intelligence agencies, sometimes excessively, to describe the potentially
dangerous consequences that can result from the disclosure of their own
information and to justify the need for secrecy. It is an equally apt description of
how gathering and sharing information can help an agency’s own intelligence
eff ort.
The essence of good intelligence analysis is that it pulls together disparate
facts and information from diverse sources to assemble a pattern in which one
can have confi dence. Once enough information has been assembled, even
seemingly insignifi cant new additions can lead to new insights and deeper
understanding.
However startling and important Bartleman’s testimony may be, it is not, as
the blistering assault on his credibility by some Government witnesses and the
Attorney General of Canada’s submissions would imply, the only evidence that
suggests that the Government had enough knowledge of the threat to Flight
182 to warrant a diff erent security response.
Even without the document that Bartleman described, there was more than
enough disparate pieces of information that, had they been assembled in one
place, would have not only pointed to the nature of the threat, but would have
provided corroboration for the seriousness of that threat, thereby highlighting
the need to implement measures aimed specifi cally at responding to the
possibility of sabotage by means of explosive devices concealed in checked
baggage. Bartleman’s evidence is best understood as simply one more piece in the
mosaic.
In 1985, the institutional arrangements in place and the prevailing practices
of Canadian information-gathering agencies were wholly defi cient in terms of
allowing the mosaic of the threat of Sikh extremism to be pieced together so as
to make visible the pattern that clearly pointed to the high risk of a bombing of
The consequence of these defi cient arrangements was that CSIS, the government
agency that was given the primary responsibility for threat assessment, did
not have suffi cient access to facts about the threat of Sikh extremism. Lacking
good access to sources of its own within the Sikh community, CSIS was heavily
dependant on other agencies, both foreign and domestic, for the information it
needed to understand the threat.
CSIS had an abundance of threat information from the Indian government about the situation in India and about what was going on in the Sikh community in Canada, but it was unable to corroborate it.Without corroborating information, however, the large volume of information from the Government of India gave the impression that it was “crying wolf.” ( To be continued)
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the fifth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)
The central unanswered question that Canadians, and especially the
families of the victims of the bombing of Flight 182, have hoped a Public Inquiry
might reveal is whether the Government and its institutions had information
prior to the bombing that could have allowed the authorities to prevent it.
The answer is complex. There is no evidence that the Government was aware in
advance of the details of the events of June 22, 1985. That is the basis for the oftrepeated statement that there was no knowledge of any “specifi c threat” against
Flight 182.
To pose the issue in this form is, however, to miss the point. In 1985, “specifi c
threat” was a technical term tied to emergency protocols put into place when
the authorities received a call-in threat that identifi ed a target, in circumstances
where there was not enough time to conduct a proper investigation or
assessment of the threat. This sort of “specifi c threat” justifi ed emergency
measures because of the magnitude of potential consequences even if it wasn’t
possible to assess the likelihood of their occurrence.
It is one thing to say that, had there been such a “specifi c threat,” detailing a time,place and method of a planned attack on Flight 182, emergency measures would
have been implemented to hunt down the bomb. It is entirely something else
to suggest that, in the absence of such a detailed, precise and “specifi c” threat,
nothing further could or should have been done to prevent the bombing.
The claim that there was no “specifi c threat” to the June 22, 1985 departure of
Flight 182 is accurate only in a limited and literal sense. No one source provided
detailed information to any one agency in one place and at one time about
the plan to blow up Flight 182 on June 23, 1985. On the other hand, various
agencies of government had extremely important pieces of information that,
taken together, would have led a competent analyst to conclude that Flight 182
was in danger of being bombed by known Sikh extremists.
Prior to the bombing, CSIS, the RCMP, the Department of External Aff airs, local
police forces and Transport Canada were collectively in possession of the
following information about Sikh extremism and threats to Indian interests:
• A plot to bomb one and possibly two Air India planes was allegedly
being hatched by Sikh extremists in British Columbia in the fall
of 1984;
• In the fall of 1984, Ajaib Singh Bagri was allegedly nominated to a
committee planning the hijacking of an Air India plane;
• Talwinder Singh Parmar’s group, the Babbar Khalsa, was reportedly
working on a “highly secret project” in the spring of 1985, and
Parmar had been assessed as the greatest threat in Canada to
Indian diplomatic missions and personnel;
• In early June, Parmar and associates conducted experiments in the
woods involving a loud explosion;
• During a June 12, 1985 meeting, a prominent Sikh extremist stated
– in response to questions about the lack of attacks on Indian
offi cials - that something big would happen in two weeks; and
• In late May and early June, Air India warned that sabotage attempts
against Air India planes were likely to be made by Sikh extremists
using time-delayed devices in registered baggage, that special
vigilance was warranted on items like transistor radios, and
that police should oversee the loading of registered luggage
onto airplanes.
James Bartleman, who at the time he gave his evidence was Lieutenant Governor
of Ontario, and in 1985 was Director General (DG) of the Intelligence Analysis and
Security Bureau at External Aff airs, testifi ed that shortly prior to the bombing, he saw, as part of the material he received electronically from CSE on a daily basis,
information that indicated that Flight 182 would be targeted. He was not able to
assess the reliability of the information but thought it important to ensure that
the authorities were aware of the information and were dealing with it. When he
brought the information to the attention of an RCMP offi cial who was attending
a security meeting in the building, he was met with a hostile reception and an
indication that the RCMP was aware of the matter and had it in hand. On June
23, 1985, when he was informed of the bombing, he thought immediately that
this was the materialization of the threat, and that the authorities had been
unable to prevent it.
Counsel from the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Government and all
its agencies, approached Bartleman’s evidence as though it was the only prebombing
indication of the danger to Air India Flight 182. In an entirely misguided
approach, Bartleman was aggressively cross-examined and witnesses were
called to attempt to call into question the details of his evidence.
Intelligence specialists often observe that an item of information, although
apparently insignifi cant in itself, may in fact be the missing piece to a puzzle
that helps a foreign or hostile group or agency see a pattern or draw conclusions
that have profound intelligence value. This “mosaic eff ect” metaphor is typically
used by intelligence agencies, sometimes excessively, to describe the potentially
dangerous consequences that can result from the disclosure of their own
information and to justify the need for secrecy. It is an equally apt description of
how gathering and sharing information can help an agency’s own intelligence
eff ort.
The essence of good intelligence analysis is that it pulls together disparate
facts and information from diverse sources to assemble a pattern in which one
can have confi dence. Once enough information has been assembled, even
seemingly insignifi cant new additions can lead to new insights and deeper
understanding.
However startling and important Bartleman’s testimony may be, it is not, as
the blistering assault on his credibility by some Government witnesses and the
Attorney General of Canada’s submissions would imply, the only evidence that
suggests that the Government had enough knowledge of the threat to Flight
182 to warrant a diff erent security response.
Even without the document that Bartleman described, there was more than
enough disparate pieces of information that, had they been assembled in one
place, would have not only pointed to the nature of the threat, but would have
provided corroboration for the seriousness of that threat, thereby highlighting
the need to implement measures aimed specifi cally at responding to the
possibility of sabotage by means of explosive devices concealed in checked
baggage. Bartleman’s evidence is best understood as simply one more piece in the
mosaic.
In 1985, the institutional arrangements in place and the prevailing practices
of Canadian information-gathering agencies were wholly defi cient in terms of
allowing the mosaic of the threat of Sikh extremism to be pieced together so as
to make visible the pattern that clearly pointed to the high risk of a bombing of
The consequence of these defi cient arrangements was that CSIS, the government
agency that was given the primary responsibility for threat assessment, did
not have suffi cient access to facts about the threat of Sikh extremism. Lacking
good access to sources of its own within the Sikh community, CSIS was heavily
dependant on other agencies, both foreign and domestic, for the information it
needed to understand the threat.
CSIS had an abundance of threat information from the Indian government about the situation in India and about what was going on in the Sikh community in Canada, but it was unable to corroborate it.Without corroborating information, however, the large volume of information from the Government of India gave the impression that it was “crying wolf.” ( To be continued)
KANISHKA DISASTER--SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (4)
B.RAMAN
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the fourth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)
Even the most important achievement of the surveillance, hearing the explosion
in the woods, was marred by the misinterpretation by the surveillants of what
they actually heard. The surveillants thought they heard a shotgun blast, when
in fact they heard an explosion intended to test the detonation system for the
bombs Parmar was building. Instead of leading to a realization that Parmar was
planning to blow something up, the surveillants’ belief that they heard a gunshot
supported the mistaken conclusion by the CSIS BC Region that the primary
danger from Parmar and the Babbar Khalsa was a possible assassination attempt
or armed assault.
But even this misinterpreted information, which at the very
least appears to demonstrate that Parmar and his group posed a serious threat
to commit a terrorist act, never made it into the formal CSIS threat assessment
process. Likewise, a number of other signifi cant pieces of threat information in
various hands were also never reported, further compromising the ability of the
CSIS HQ threat assessment process to put together the pieces of the puzzle in
time to raise an eff ective response to the threat that was to crystallize into the
terrorist attack on Flight 182.
The fate of the electronic surveillance on Parmar, fi nally approved in March 1985,
was no less problematic, and arguably constituted an even more serious failure
because of its consequences for the subsequent investigation of the bombing.
In this case too, resource issues were important. While listening devices can
record conversations, it takes human resources to transcribe, to translate if
necessary, and, ultimately, to analyze and interpret them. Each of these steps
proved problematic.
In order to safeguard security, CSIS, like the RCMP Security
Service before it, adopted stringent security qualifi cations for its translators,
including lengthy periods of Canadian residency as well as Citizenship.
As prudent as this may have seemed in the abstract, in practice it meant that
there was only a very small pool of potential translators available for recruitment.
In BC Region it meant that there were no Punjabi translators available at all.
To cope with this problem, the tapes of the Parmar intercepts were shipped to
Ottawa, where they were added to the workload of the already overburdened
Punjabi translator at CSIS Headquarters. Delays were inevitable and a serious
backlog ensued.
Shipping the tapes across the country meant that there was no meaningful
possibility for the BC investigators to interact with the translator, who was
essentially left to her own devices to extract, translate and summarize what
was related on the tapes. Although a Punjabi translator for the BC Region was
eventually recruited and began work on June 8, 1985, a signifi cant backlog of
translation work in BC remained throughout the pre-bombing period. There still
seems to have been little interaction with the investigators on the ground and
there remains some doubt as to how many, if any, of the “transcripts” that were
produced were in fact reviewed by the investigators.
The transcripts were prepared by a transcriber who reviewed and summarized
what she thought relevant in the English language content, adding material
from the Punjabi content based on the translators’ notes. The eff ectiveness of
this disjointed process became further impaired by the vacation schedules of
the transcriber and one of the investigators. One of the investigators was off
duty in the two weeks leading up to the bombing and the transcriber was away
just prior to, and for a week after, the bombing. Because the intercept tapes
were erased shortly after they were processed, there was no opportunity to go
back to the actual tapes for further analysis or to remedy any defi ciencies in the
transcription and translation process. Whatever information was not recorded
in the transcription notes was lost permanently.
As discussed elsewhere , disputes remain as to the actual content
of the tapes that were reviewed and of those that were caught in the backlog, as
well as about the adequacy and comprehensiveness of the review and analysis.
What is beyond doubt is that no material from the Parmar intercepts made its
way into the CSIS, or any other, threat assessment process in April – May or June
of 1985. ( To be continued)
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the fourth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)
Even the most important achievement of the surveillance, hearing the explosion
in the woods, was marred by the misinterpretation by the surveillants of what
they actually heard. The surveillants thought they heard a shotgun blast, when
in fact they heard an explosion intended to test the detonation system for the
bombs Parmar was building. Instead of leading to a realization that Parmar was
planning to blow something up, the surveillants’ belief that they heard a gunshot
supported the mistaken conclusion by the CSIS BC Region that the primary
danger from Parmar and the Babbar Khalsa was a possible assassination attempt
or armed assault.
But even this misinterpreted information, which at the very
least appears to demonstrate that Parmar and his group posed a serious threat
to commit a terrorist act, never made it into the formal CSIS threat assessment
process. Likewise, a number of other signifi cant pieces of threat information in
various hands were also never reported, further compromising the ability of the
CSIS HQ threat assessment process to put together the pieces of the puzzle in
time to raise an eff ective response to the threat that was to crystallize into the
terrorist attack on Flight 182.
The fate of the electronic surveillance on Parmar, fi nally approved in March 1985,
was no less problematic, and arguably constituted an even more serious failure
because of its consequences for the subsequent investigation of the bombing.
In this case too, resource issues were important. While listening devices can
record conversations, it takes human resources to transcribe, to translate if
necessary, and, ultimately, to analyze and interpret them. Each of these steps
proved problematic.
In order to safeguard security, CSIS, like the RCMP Security
Service before it, adopted stringent security qualifi cations for its translators,
including lengthy periods of Canadian residency as well as Citizenship.
As prudent as this may have seemed in the abstract, in practice it meant that
there was only a very small pool of potential translators available for recruitment.
In BC Region it meant that there were no Punjabi translators available at all.
To cope with this problem, the tapes of the Parmar intercepts were shipped to
Ottawa, where they were added to the workload of the already overburdened
Punjabi translator at CSIS Headquarters. Delays were inevitable and a serious
backlog ensued.
Shipping the tapes across the country meant that there was no meaningful
possibility for the BC investigators to interact with the translator, who was
essentially left to her own devices to extract, translate and summarize what
was related on the tapes. Although a Punjabi translator for the BC Region was
eventually recruited and began work on June 8, 1985, a signifi cant backlog of
translation work in BC remained throughout the pre-bombing period. There still
seems to have been little interaction with the investigators on the ground and
there remains some doubt as to how many, if any, of the “transcripts” that were
produced were in fact reviewed by the investigators.
The transcripts were prepared by a transcriber who reviewed and summarized
what she thought relevant in the English language content, adding material
from the Punjabi content based on the translators’ notes. The eff ectiveness of
this disjointed process became further impaired by the vacation schedules of
the transcriber and one of the investigators. One of the investigators was off
duty in the two weeks leading up to the bombing and the transcriber was away
just prior to, and for a week after, the bombing. Because the intercept tapes
were erased shortly after they were processed, there was no opportunity to go
back to the actual tapes for further analysis or to remedy any defi ciencies in the
transcription and translation process. Whatever information was not recorded
in the transcription notes was lost permanently.
As discussed elsewhere , disputes remain as to the actual content
of the tapes that were reviewed and of those that were caught in the backlog, as
well as about the adequacy and comprehensiveness of the review and analysis.
What is beyond doubt is that no material from the Parmar intercepts made its
way into the CSIS, or any other, threat assessment process in April – May or June
of 1985. ( To be continued)
KANISHKA DISASTER: SALIENT POINTS FROM MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (2)
B.RAMAN
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the second instalment of relevant extracts from the report)
Despite its awareness of the threat and of the identity of the potential
protagonists who might carry it out, CSIS appears to have obtained little
important new information of its own about the Sikh extremist threat or about
the Babbar Khalsa or about Parmar from the fall of 1984 through to March of
1985. The major reason for this gap lay in the state of the warrant approvals
process that had been put in place by the CSIS Act in June 1984.
On the ground, CSIS BC investigators were aware of the urgent nature of the
threat from Sikh extremism and of the inadequacy of their information resources
to deal with it. They simply had no information sources of their own and had
been totally unsuccessful in recruiting sources within a Sikh community that
was somewhat insular and vulnerable to intimidation by the extremists. They
soon concluded that they needed surveillance and electronic intercepts in order
to be able to understand and respond to the increasing threat.
The institutional response to the request to approve a warrant to intercept
Parmar’s communications demonstrates a fi xation with form over substance
and, despite protestations to the contrary at the time – and subsequently,
suggests a lack of appreciation of the reality of the threat.
The civilianization of CSIS was in part a reaction to RCMP Security Service
excesses in its investigation of the Front de Libération du Québec (the “FLQ”)
and extremist Quebec Separatists. Under the RCMP Security Service, while
electronic intercepts had required approval, the process was informal, simply
requiring a request to the Solicitor General, the Minister responsible for the
RCMP (and later also for CSIS). With the creation of CSIS, as one of the means to
protect civil liberties from unjustifi able intrusion by or on behalf of government,
a new system of judicial supervision of certain intelligence operations was
instituted, including a requirement for judicial approval for intercepting private
communications. This new protocol was to apply prospectively but also was
intended to cover existing intercepts that had been approved by the Minister.
There was an explicit requirement that existing intercepts had to be reviewed
internally and approved by the Solicitor General and then by a judge of the
Federal Court, all within 6 months of the coming into force of the CSIS Act, i.e. by
January 1985.
When added to the considerable stresses and strains that accompanied
the rushed transition to CSIS from the RCMP Security Service, it was entirely
foreseeable that this warrant conversion process would be the source of added
pressure and potential misadventure. The foreseeability of the problems that
might be caused by the requirement to devote considerable resources to the
conversion process should have called for added care and attention to ensure
that the process would be capable of meeting new needs that would arise and
not just of preserving existing arrangements. Instead, the response of CSIS was
to prioritize existing warrants and to defer new applications, with the exception
of only those deemed most urgent. As CSIS understandably would want to avoid
disrupting existing investigations, in theory, this process could be considered a
sensible policy; in practice, its eff ectiveness depended on the Service’s ability to
respect the new needs that were more urgent.
The evidence before the Commission indicates that, despite the priority
afforded to the warrant conversion process, it was possible to secure a warrant
in an extremely short timeline to respond to a perceived urgent priority, as
occurred in an area other than the threat of Sikh extremism. The protracted wait
for the processing of the Parmar warrant application either demonstrates an
unthinking application of the concept of priority of existing warrants or, more
likely, refl ects the lack of appreciation of the true urgency of the threat of Sikh
extremism.
Despite certifi cation by the existing chain of command in BC as well as by the
Headquarters counterterrorism hierarchy, and despite increasingly pointed
memoranda from the front lines in BC, the application for the Parmar warrant
lay dormant for months while the conversion process went forward. Then, after
proceeding through multiple steps in the complicated, and still in fl ux, approval
process, it was further delayed for an additional month by what turned out to
be an irrelevant issue raised by the Minister’s Offi ce. Although the fi nal steps
leading up to the submission of the warrant to, and approval by, the Federal
Court proceeded relatively quickly, the total time from the request for a warrant
to the date of approval was over fi ve months. This lengthy delay was entirely
disproportionate to the heightened threat and the demonstrated lack of
intelligence sources available to respond to it.
The subsequent course of the BC investigation confi rms the theme of inadequate
resourcing and indicates that execution on the ground was not suffi cient for the
seriousness of the threat being dealt with. Eventually the BC investigators did get
approval both for electronic intercepts and for physical surveillance coverage on
Parmar. As will be seen, the story of neither eff ort is particularly edifying. ( To be continued)
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the second instalment of relevant extracts from the report)
Despite its awareness of the threat and of the identity of the potential
protagonists who might carry it out, CSIS appears to have obtained little
important new information of its own about the Sikh extremist threat or about
the Babbar Khalsa or about Parmar from the fall of 1984 through to March of
1985. The major reason for this gap lay in the state of the warrant approvals
process that had been put in place by the CSIS Act in June 1984.
On the ground, CSIS BC investigators were aware of the urgent nature of the
threat from Sikh extremism and of the inadequacy of their information resources
to deal with it. They simply had no information sources of their own and had
been totally unsuccessful in recruiting sources within a Sikh community that
was somewhat insular and vulnerable to intimidation by the extremists. They
soon concluded that they needed surveillance and electronic intercepts in order
to be able to understand and respond to the increasing threat.
The institutional response to the request to approve a warrant to intercept
Parmar’s communications demonstrates a fi xation with form over substance
and, despite protestations to the contrary at the time – and subsequently,
suggests a lack of appreciation of the reality of the threat.
The civilianization of CSIS was in part a reaction to RCMP Security Service
excesses in its investigation of the Front de Libération du Québec (the “FLQ”)
and extremist Quebec Separatists. Under the RCMP Security Service, while
electronic intercepts had required approval, the process was informal, simply
requiring a request to the Solicitor General, the Minister responsible for the
RCMP (and later also for CSIS). With the creation of CSIS, as one of the means to
protect civil liberties from unjustifi able intrusion by or on behalf of government,
a new system of judicial supervision of certain intelligence operations was
instituted, including a requirement for judicial approval for intercepting private
communications. This new protocol was to apply prospectively but also was
intended to cover existing intercepts that had been approved by the Minister.
There was an explicit requirement that existing intercepts had to be reviewed
internally and approved by the Solicitor General and then by a judge of the
Federal Court, all within 6 months of the coming into force of the CSIS Act, i.e. by
January 1985.
When added to the considerable stresses and strains that accompanied
the rushed transition to CSIS from the RCMP Security Service, it was entirely
foreseeable that this warrant conversion process would be the source of added
pressure and potential misadventure. The foreseeability of the problems that
might be caused by the requirement to devote considerable resources to the
conversion process should have called for added care and attention to ensure
that the process would be capable of meeting new needs that would arise and
not just of preserving existing arrangements. Instead, the response of CSIS was
to prioritize existing warrants and to defer new applications, with the exception
of only those deemed most urgent. As CSIS understandably would want to avoid
disrupting existing investigations, in theory, this process could be considered a
sensible policy; in practice, its eff ectiveness depended on the Service’s ability to
respect the new needs that were more urgent.
The evidence before the Commission indicates that, despite the priority
afforded to the warrant conversion process, it was possible to secure a warrant
in an extremely short timeline to respond to a perceived urgent priority, as
occurred in an area other than the threat of Sikh extremism. The protracted wait
for the processing of the Parmar warrant application either demonstrates an
unthinking application of the concept of priority of existing warrants or, more
likely, refl ects the lack of appreciation of the true urgency of the threat of Sikh
extremism.
Despite certifi cation by the existing chain of command in BC as well as by the
Headquarters counterterrorism hierarchy, and despite increasingly pointed
memoranda from the front lines in BC, the application for the Parmar warrant
lay dormant for months while the conversion process went forward. Then, after
proceeding through multiple steps in the complicated, and still in fl ux, approval
process, it was further delayed for an additional month by what turned out to
be an irrelevant issue raised by the Minister’s Offi ce. Although the fi nal steps
leading up to the submission of the warrant to, and approval by, the Federal
Court proceeded relatively quickly, the total time from the request for a warrant
to the date of approval was over fi ve months. This lengthy delay was entirely
disproportionate to the heightened threat and the demonstrated lack of
intelligence sources available to respond to it.
The subsequent course of the BC investigation confi rms the theme of inadequate
resourcing and indicates that execution on the ground was not suffi cient for the
seriousness of the threat being dealt with. Eventually the BC investigators did get
approval both for electronic intercepts and for physical surveillance coverage on
Parmar. As will be seen, the story of neither eff ort is particularly edifying. ( To be continued)
KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF THE MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT
B.RAMAN
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.We will be carrying from today relevant extracts from the report)
The Air India Flight 182 tragedy was the result of a cascading series of
failures. The failures were widely distributed across the agencies and institutions
whose mandate it was to protect the safety and security of Canadians. There
were structural failures and operational failures; policy failures, communications
failures and human errors. Each contributed to, but none was the sole cause
for, Sikh terrorists being able to place a bomb in the checked baggage loaded
aboard Flight 182 without being detected. Some failures came to light almost
immediately, but a number have lain undetected, or at least unacknowledged,
for decades and have only come to light during the currency of this Commission
of Inquiry.
The first question posed by the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry is whether
Canadian institutions adequately understood and assessed the threat posed by
Sikh extremism.
All of the institutions and agencies were theoretically aware of the potential
threat to safety and security posed by terrorism in general. A few had some
knowledge of the dangers of its Sikh extremism version in particular. Several
were nominally aware of the threat of sabotage to passenger aircraft by means
of timed explosive devices in checked baggage, and one agency was even
aware of information indicating that Air India might be targeted by this method
in June 1985. As a practical matter however, none of the institutions or agencies
was adequately prepared for the events of June 22/23, 1985.
Indeed it is impossible to draw any conclusion other than that, almost without
exception, the agencies and institutions did not take the threat seriously, and
that the few individuals within these institutions who did, were faced with
insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to deal with the threat.
There are a number of plausible ways to break down the failures that allowed
the bombing of Flight 182 to occur. Each of the agencies and institutions that
should have had a role in preventing terrorist attacks displayed structural flaws
that impaired their performance.
CSIS only came into being as an independent civilian agency in 1984. Before
that, the national security intelligence was under the purview of the Security
Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The circumstances surrounding
the birth of CSIS had a deep and detrimental impact on its ability to detect the
particular security threat posed by Sikh extremism and on its ability to provide
useful advice to the agencies and institutions charged with protecting Canadian
lives and property.
Although the notion that intelligence should be handled by a civilian agency
rather than the police had been widely discussed and debated in Canada for
over a decade, the CSIS Act, which brought about this transformation, was
passed hurriedly as the last legislative act of the outgoing Liberal government
in June of 1984. It was then left to be implemented in a very short time frame
by a new Progressive Conservative administration with limited accumulated
experience in the area of national security. The result was an uneven transition,
marred by scarce resources and by bruised feelings: both at the RCMP, which
felt wronged by the removal of its intelligence mandate, and at CSIS, which felt
poorly supported in its new role.
While intelligence officers were aware of the existence of the phenomenon of
Sikh extremism, the rise in the intensity, fervour and potential danger of this
phenomenon was the result of events in the Indian sub-continent that took
place in the same time frame as the transition from the Security Service to CSIS.
These events included the occupation and fortification of the Golden Temple
in Amritsar, Sikhism’s central shrine, by armed Sikh separatists, the subsequent
bloody storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian army, and the resulting
massacres and intercommunal violence in the State of Punjab, all of which
culminated in the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her
own Sikh bodyguards. This chain of events led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment
within the Sikh diaspora, including the Sikh community in Canada.
Even in a relatively stable institutional environment, keeping up with the rapidly
changing landscape of Sikh extremism in Canada would no doubt have proved
challenging. The impact of the transition from the RCMP Security Service to CSIS
made a difficult situation that much worse.
Although CSIS personnel were dedicated and hardworking, the institutional
context was poorly geared toward dealing with terrorism in general – and with
a terrorist threat arising from Sikh extremism in particular. Canadian intelligence
gathering was stuck in a Cold War paradigm in which the primary threat to
national security was assessed as emanating from espionage by hostile foreign
governments. Most resources were allocated to counter-espionage, with
comparatively few resources devoted to counter-terrorism.
Of the resources devoted to counter-terrorism, most were concentrated on the
risks posed by Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish interests in Canada.
Even at the so-called “Sikh Desk” at CSIS headquarters, (which was a sub-unit
of the “Western Europe and Pacific Rim” unit of the Counterterrorism unit) the
arguably inadequate official complement, consisting of a unit head and four
analyst positions, was in fact only partially staffed. Only the unit head and
two analyst positions were actually filled, and that even smaller number was
further reduced by the fact that, for the better part of the year leading up to the
bombing of Flight 182, one of the incumbents was away on French language
training. In the Regions, staffing was equally thin. In BC Region, where the most
militant and most obviously dangerous elements of Sikh extremism in Canada
were to be found, two investigators were responsible for the entire investigation
of Sikh terrorism.
CSIS personnel assigned to this investigation received no additional training;
investigators and analysts were expected to learn on the job. CSIS appears
to have uncovered little, if any, information on its own, with most of
its information coming from the Government of India through the Indian High
Commission. The full extent of CSIS’s knowledge in the summer of 1984 was that
Talwinder Singh Parmar had been released from prison in Germany following a
failed extradition attempt on murder charges by the Government of India, and
had returned to Canada, where he was launching a public campaign of fiery
rhetoric and communal intimidation to radicalize gurdwaras (Sikh temples)
and to take over their direction and their revenues. CSIS was unable to provide
confirmation of its existence in Canada, let alone the actual size of the extremist
Babbar Khalsa movement that Parmar claimed to lead, and even referred to it as
the “Barbara Khalsa group.” By the fall of 1984, CSIS had pieced together enough
information to be able to identify Parmar as the most dangerous Sikh in Canada
and to opine that his associate Ajaib Singh Bagri could be manipulated to carry
out a terrorist attack. ( To be continued)
( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.We will be carrying from today relevant extracts from the report)
The Air India Flight 182 tragedy was the result of a cascading series of
failures. The failures were widely distributed across the agencies and institutions
whose mandate it was to protect the safety and security of Canadians. There
were structural failures and operational failures; policy failures, communications
failures and human errors. Each contributed to, but none was the sole cause
for, Sikh terrorists being able to place a bomb in the checked baggage loaded
aboard Flight 182 without being detected. Some failures came to light almost
immediately, but a number have lain undetected, or at least unacknowledged,
for decades and have only come to light during the currency of this Commission
of Inquiry.
The first question posed by the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry is whether
Canadian institutions adequately understood and assessed the threat posed by
Sikh extremism.
All of the institutions and agencies were theoretically aware of the potential
threat to safety and security posed by terrorism in general. A few had some
knowledge of the dangers of its Sikh extremism version in particular. Several
were nominally aware of the threat of sabotage to passenger aircraft by means
of timed explosive devices in checked baggage, and one agency was even
aware of information indicating that Air India might be targeted by this method
in June 1985. As a practical matter however, none of the institutions or agencies
was adequately prepared for the events of June 22/23, 1985.
Indeed it is impossible to draw any conclusion other than that, almost without
exception, the agencies and institutions did not take the threat seriously, and
that the few individuals within these institutions who did, were faced with
insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to deal with the threat.
There are a number of plausible ways to break down the failures that allowed
the bombing of Flight 182 to occur. Each of the agencies and institutions that
should have had a role in preventing terrorist attacks displayed structural flaws
that impaired their performance.
CSIS only came into being as an independent civilian agency in 1984. Before
that, the national security intelligence was under the purview of the Security
Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The circumstances surrounding
the birth of CSIS had a deep and detrimental impact on its ability to detect the
particular security threat posed by Sikh extremism and on its ability to provide
useful advice to the agencies and institutions charged with protecting Canadian
lives and property.
Although the notion that intelligence should be handled by a civilian agency
rather than the police had been widely discussed and debated in Canada for
over a decade, the CSIS Act, which brought about this transformation, was
passed hurriedly as the last legislative act of the outgoing Liberal government
in June of 1984. It was then left to be implemented in a very short time frame
by a new Progressive Conservative administration with limited accumulated
experience in the area of national security. The result was an uneven transition,
marred by scarce resources and by bruised feelings: both at the RCMP, which
felt wronged by the removal of its intelligence mandate, and at CSIS, which felt
poorly supported in its new role.
While intelligence officers were aware of the existence of the phenomenon of
Sikh extremism, the rise in the intensity, fervour and potential danger of this
phenomenon was the result of events in the Indian sub-continent that took
place in the same time frame as the transition from the Security Service to CSIS.
These events included the occupation and fortification of the Golden Temple
in Amritsar, Sikhism’s central shrine, by armed Sikh separatists, the subsequent
bloody storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian army, and the resulting
massacres and intercommunal violence in the State of Punjab, all of which
culminated in the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her
own Sikh bodyguards. This chain of events led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment
within the Sikh diaspora, including the Sikh community in Canada.
Even in a relatively stable institutional environment, keeping up with the rapidly
changing landscape of Sikh extremism in Canada would no doubt have proved
challenging. The impact of the transition from the RCMP Security Service to CSIS
made a difficult situation that much worse.
Although CSIS personnel were dedicated and hardworking, the institutional
context was poorly geared toward dealing with terrorism in general – and with
a terrorist threat arising from Sikh extremism in particular. Canadian intelligence
gathering was stuck in a Cold War paradigm in which the primary threat to
national security was assessed as emanating from espionage by hostile foreign
governments. Most resources were allocated to counter-espionage, with
comparatively few resources devoted to counter-terrorism.
Of the resources devoted to counter-terrorism, most were concentrated on the
risks posed by Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish interests in Canada.
Even at the so-called “Sikh Desk” at CSIS headquarters, (which was a sub-unit
of the “Western Europe and Pacific Rim” unit of the Counterterrorism unit) the
arguably inadequate official complement, consisting of a unit head and four
analyst positions, was in fact only partially staffed. Only the unit head and
two analyst positions were actually filled, and that even smaller number was
further reduced by the fact that, for the better part of the year leading up to the
bombing of Flight 182, one of the incumbents was away on French language
training. In the Regions, staffing was equally thin. In BC Region, where the most
militant and most obviously dangerous elements of Sikh extremism in Canada
were to be found, two investigators were responsible for the entire investigation
of Sikh terrorism.
CSIS personnel assigned to this investigation received no additional training;
investigators and analysts were expected to learn on the job. CSIS appears
to have uncovered little, if any, information on its own, with most of
its information coming from the Government of India through the Indian High
Commission. The full extent of CSIS’s knowledge in the summer of 1984 was that
Talwinder Singh Parmar had been released from prison in Germany following a
failed extradition attempt on murder charges by the Government of India, and
had returned to Canada, where he was launching a public campaign of fiery
rhetoric and communal intimidation to radicalize gurdwaras (Sikh temples)
and to take over their direction and their revenues. CSIS was unable to provide
confirmation of its existence in Canada, let alone the actual size of the extremist
Babbar Khalsa movement that Parmar claimed to lead, and even referred to it as
the “Barbara Khalsa group.” By the fall of 1984, CSIS had pieced together enough
information to be able to identify Parmar as the most dangerous Sikh in Canada
and to opine that his associate Ajaib Singh Bagri could be manipulated to carry
out a terrorist attack. ( To be continued)
Friday, June 18, 2010
CHINESE ALERT IN XINJIANG
B.RAMAN
The Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC) has notified plans for protest meetings and demonstrations in different cities of the world having an Uighur presence to mark the first anniversary of the outbreak of anti-Beijing violence in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which falls on July 5,2010.
2. Coinciding with the WUC announcement, the authorities in Xinjiang have notified the local people through a Government-run web site of stepped-up security measures, which will be in force from June 20 to July 20. These measures include increased police deployment and patrols in Urumqi and checking of vehicles for concealed weapons and explosive material.
3. It has been reported that about 1000 additional police personnel from other provinces will be moved to Urumqi for deployment during this period. Uighur sources have also claimed that rural students from the interior areas studying in Urumqi have been asked to return to their villages for a month and that restrictions are being imposed on visits of foreign tourists to the capital during this period. Anti-riot exercises have already been held by the local police in different parts of the city.
4. The plans for the induction of about 1000 additional police personnel were made before the recent outbreak of Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan, which necessitated the airlift of over 600 Chinese residents, the majority of them Uighurs, from that country to Urumqi. The Chinese are reportedly concerned over the likelihood of the infiltration of elements belonging to the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) into Urumqi by taking advantage of this air-lift. In view of this, it is possible that the Chinese may induct more police reinforcements from other provinces.
5. The Chinese have been unnerved by the success of 20 Uighurs---many of them Christians--- in escaping from Urumqi to Cambodia allegedly via Vietnam towards the end of last year and seeking political asylum from the local office of the UN High Commission For Refugees. The Cambodian authorities had them arrested and deported to China before the UNHCR could intervene. It was alleged that these refugees were helped to flee from Xinjiang by a Macau-based Christian organization called the Macau Interfaith Network headed by Rev.Marcus Ramsey. This organization has allegedly been helping Christians wanting to flee from North Korea and China.
6. The Network, which was reportedly founded by another organization called the Full Gospel Church, seeks to promote inter-faith dialogue in China,Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Central Asia and to help the Christians in these countries. It has been holding inter-faith discussions in Macau, Chiangmai and Vientiane.
7. The interest taken by Christian organizations in the developments in Xinjiang has added to Beijing’s concerns. It is not known how many Christians are there in Xinjiang, but many of them seem to support the WUC. (19-6-10)
( 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 )
The Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC) has notified plans for protest meetings and demonstrations in different cities of the world having an Uighur presence to mark the first anniversary of the outbreak of anti-Beijing violence in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, which falls on July 5,2010.
2. Coinciding with the WUC announcement, the authorities in Xinjiang have notified the local people through a Government-run web site of stepped-up security measures, which will be in force from June 20 to July 20. These measures include increased police deployment and patrols in Urumqi and checking of vehicles for concealed weapons and explosive material.
3. It has been reported that about 1000 additional police personnel from other provinces will be moved to Urumqi for deployment during this period. Uighur sources have also claimed that rural students from the interior areas studying in Urumqi have been asked to return to their villages for a month and that restrictions are being imposed on visits of foreign tourists to the capital during this period. Anti-riot exercises have already been held by the local police in different parts of the city.
4. The plans for the induction of about 1000 additional police personnel were made before the recent outbreak of Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan, which necessitated the airlift of over 600 Chinese residents, the majority of them Uighurs, from that country to Urumqi. The Chinese are reportedly concerned over the likelihood of the infiltration of elements belonging to the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) into Urumqi by taking advantage of this air-lift. In view of this, it is possible that the Chinese may induct more police reinforcements from other provinces.
5. The Chinese have been unnerved by the success of 20 Uighurs---many of them Christians--- in escaping from Urumqi to Cambodia allegedly via Vietnam towards the end of last year and seeking political asylum from the local office of the UN High Commission For Refugees. The Cambodian authorities had them arrested and deported to China before the UNHCR could intervene. It was alleged that these refugees were helped to flee from Xinjiang by a Macau-based Christian organization called the Macau Interfaith Network headed by Rev.Marcus Ramsey. This organization has allegedly been helping Christians wanting to flee from North Korea and China.
6. The Network, which was reportedly founded by another organization called the Full Gospel Church, seeks to promote inter-faith dialogue in China,Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Central Asia and to help the Christians in these countries. It has been holding inter-faith discussions in Macau, Chiangmai and Vientiane.
7. The interest taken by Christian organizations in the developments in Xinjiang has added to Beijing’s concerns. It is not known how many Christians are there in Xinjiang, but many of them seem to support the WUC. (19-6-10)
( 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 )
Thursday, June 17, 2010
ANTI-MUSLIM REPRISAL TERRORISM---AN UPDATE
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 659
B.RAMAN
( This may kindly be read in continuation of my earlier article of October 24,2008, on the same subject, which is available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2892.html . The earlier article is annexed for easy reference )
Rediff.com has reported as follows: "The long-pending investigations into the three-year-old Mecca Masjid blast case on Thursday (June 17,2010) moved forward with the Central Bureau of Investigation producing two suspects RSS pracharak Devender Gupta and his accomplice Lokesh Sharma in a special CBI court in Hyderabad. 14th additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate remanded the two to the judicial custody till June 30. A CBI team brought the two from Ajmer jail on a prisoner transit warrant......Devender Gupta and Lokesh Sharma, prime accused in bomb blast in Ajmer Dargah, were in Ajmer jail for the last one and a half months. CBI sources said that they will seek the custody of Gupta and Sharma to question them about their role in the bomb blast in Mecca Masjid on May 18, 2007. 15 people were killed in the blast during Friday congregation and subsequent police firing. CBI says that it was on the look out for two more suspects Sandeep Dange and Ramachandra Kalasangar alias Ramji. "
2. The investigation is still on-going and the final charge-sheet against the accused----all members of the Hindu community--- is still to be filed. The investigation made so far points in the direction of suspected targeted attacks on Muslims and their places of worship by some individual elements in the Hindu community as acts of retaliation for jihadi terrorism in different parts of India.
3.The fact that some of the arrested Hindu suspects had alleged links with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and other allied organisations has given rise to fresh allegations regarding Hindu terrorism. Prominent office-bearers of the RSS have done well to dissociate their organisation from the alleged acts of terrorism of the arrested individuals and express their support for the investigation against them to move forward vigorously.
4. Retaliation by a State against a State sponsoring acts of terrorism through surrogate terrorist organisations and against terrorist organisations which let themselves be used by a State are permitted under many UN resolutions against State-sponsorship of terrorism against another State. Such acts by a State are categorised as amounting to indirect aggression. There are instances of States retaliating against another State or in the territory of another State in order to make the sponsorship of terrorism by a State or acts of terrorism by an organisation from the territory of another State prohibitively costly.
5.The US air strikes in Libya in 1986 were an act of State retaliation for the terrorist attack on some US soldiers in a West Berlin discotheque by suspected terrorists allegedly sponsored by Libya. The US Cruise missile attacks on suspected Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan in 1998 were acts of State retaliation against a terrorist organisation for its suspected involvement in the explosions of August 1998 outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. There have been such acts of retaliation by Israel too.
6. While such acts of selective retaliation against another State and terrorist organisations in their foreign hide-outs can be justified depending on the circumstances which led to the retaliation, no law----domestic or international---permits an act of retaliation by a State or organisation or individuals in one's own territory against one's own co-citizens.
7.There has been no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but it is agreed by terrorism analysts that the indiscriminate killing of civilians by using an explosive device in a public place is an act of terrorism. Thus, the members of the Hindu community who have been arrested and are presently under investigation have indulged in acts of terrorism against Muslims if the facts alleged against them are proved in a court of law.
8. Calculations of what we call vote bank politics ---- electoral dividend or the lack of it---- should not be allowed to come in the way of the thorough investigation of the charges against the arrested persons There are two kinds of violence under the law----- violence in the heat of the moment in exercise of the right of self-defence and pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence. There is no excuse under the law for pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence-----whether they amount to terrorism or not.
9. Any perception that the investigation against the arrested Hindus is not being done as vigorously as the investigation against Muslims suspected of terrorism would weaken our case against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and provide an excuse to organisations such as the Indian Mujahideen (IM) for indulging in more acts of terrorism. The statement disseminated by the IM before its blasts in Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, alleged that the Indian criminal justice system is unfair to the Muslims. Any perception of a lack of thoroughness in the investigation against the arrested Hindus would add substance to this allegation of the IM.
10. It is in the interest of the RSS and allied organisations to strongly support such a thorough investigation and make it abundantly clear that they do not support acts of retaliation in our territory against our co-citizens. ( 18-6-10)
( 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 )
ANNEXURE
Paper no. 2892 24-Oct.-2008
Anti-Muslim Reprisal Terrorism? - International Terrorism Monitor--Paper No. 460
by B. Raman
"Some sections of the Muslim community suspected that this attack ----like the other attacks targeting members of their community--- must have been the responsibility of Hindu extremist elements. There was no basis for their suspicions, but they persist. The only way of removing their suspicions is through a thorough investigation and the definitive identification of all those involved. The many missing links in the investigation of this strike as well as in the terrorist attack on the Mumbai suburban trains should be a cause for concern. Targeted attacks on innocent Muslims by Al Qaeda and other jihadi organizations is nothing new. Such attacks take place often in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, in those countries, the attacks on Muslim civilians are generally due to one of two factors. Either the targeted Muslims belonged to a rival sect (Sunni vs Shia or Deobandi vs Barelvi) or rival organization or were perceived as collaborators of the Government and hence apostates. None of these factors applied in the case of the Muslims----Indians and Pakistanis--- who were traveling by the Samjotha Express. The conventional wisdom was that the Muslims were now being deliberately targeted by the jihadi organizations in order to provoke them against the Government and the Hindus. I do not subscribe to this wisdom. It is important to keep an open mind while investigating these targeted attacks on Indian Muslims and one should not jump to the conclusion that the LET or the HUJI must have been involved. We owe it to our Muslims, most of whom have kept away from Al Qaeda and other pan-Islamic organizations, to see that these cases of targeted attacks on Muslims are thoroughly investigated instead of coming to a facile conclusion that jihadi organizations must be behind them."
-----My comments on the terrorist strike in the Samjotha Express in my book "Terrorism---Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" published in June, 2008, by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com)
"While there are grounds for suspecting that the blast of Delhi and those of Agartala might have been carried out by the IM ( Indian Mujahideen) and its associates from the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Delhi and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Bangladesh in Agartala, the blasts in Modasa and Malegaon seem to stand apart. Though the Gujarat Police are reported to have detained some members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) during their investigation of the Modasa blast, the Modasa and Malegaon blasts do not carry any unique signature. More evidence will be required before one could analyse as to who might have been responsible. "----From my article of October 2, 2008, titled "Mushrooming Terrorism: Now Agartala" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2866.html
-----------------------------
In the last three years, we have had at least seven terrorist strikes in different parts of the country in which the perpetrators seemed to have targeted innocent Muslim civilians. Those seemed to be not indiscriminate attacks on all civilians, but targeted attacks on Muslims. There were two such incidents in Malegaon in Maharashtra and one each in New Delhi, Hyderabad, in the Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, in the Samjotha Express to Pakistan and in Modasa in Gujarat.
2. On the basis of the available reports, I had myself stated after five of these strikes---- but not after the Malegaon and Modasa incidents of September 29,2008--- that they seemed to have been carried out by terrorists belonging to jihadi terrorist organisations. I had also referred to instances of jihadi terrorists deliberately targeting innocent Muslims in many countries in pursuit of their agenda.
3. Some months after the Ajmer Sharif incident, a young Muslim officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) had met me privately and expressed his doubts as to whether Muslims would have been involved in these incidents. He strongly believed that no Muslim however extremist he might be and to whichever jihadi organisation he belonged would have planted a bomb in or near the Ajmer Sharif.
4. I did not feel convinced, but felt somewhat troubled by what he said. I felt that as a senior (though now retired) officer of the IPS, I owed it to him and other young Muslim officers of the IPS to take note of what he said and re-open my mind. It was in pursuance of this that I made the above-mentioned observations in my book.
5. Who carried out the pre-September 29, 2008, terrorist strikes, which seemed to have mainly targeted innocent Muslims? Where they the acts of the usual jihadi organisations or are they the precursor to acts of reprisal terrorism against members of the Muslim community by some irrational elements in the Hindu community? These questions, which were already being raised by sections of the public----Muslims as well as non-Muslims--- even before September 29, have re-surfaced following the publication or dissemination by some sections of the media of reports claiming that the Anti-Terrorism Cell (ATS) of the Mumbai Police have detained three Hindus in connection with their investigation into the recent Malegon blasts. The ATS itself has neither officially denied nor confirmed these reports.
6. The matter is in the initial stages of the investigation. To instill confidence in our Muslim community, the ATS should see that the investigation against these Hindus and any others associated with them is carried out thoroughly irrespective of their organisational affiliation. Religion is not a mitigating factor in deciding on the culpability of a person suspected of involvement in a criminal act. If they are proved to have participated in the acts of terrorism in Malegain and Modesa, the fact that they are Hindus would not make them any the less criminal or terrorist.
7. Indian criminal laws----the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Evidence Act and the Criminal Procedure Code--- do not talk of the majority or the minorities or even of Indian citizens or foreigners. Their provisions apply to anyone who commits an offence in Indian territory---whether he or she is an Indian national or a foreigner, whatever be his or her religion, language or ethnicity. The arrested persons must be investigated and proceeded against without worrying about their background or organisational affiliation.
8. Do these arrests strengthen the case for a ban on the Bajrang Dal or any other organisation to which they might have belonged? Or do they at least call for a characterisation of such orgainsations----even if they be of Hindus---as terrorist organisations? To characterise an organisation as a terrorist organisation and to take legal action against it ----and not merely against its members---- two types of evidence are required. Firstly, that its constitution or manifesto advocates the resort to violence amounting to terrorism for achieving its objective. Secondly, that it has been involved in repeated acts of pre-meditated violence which amount to terrorism. One has to wait and see whether such evidence surfaces during the investigation.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
B.RAMAN
( This may kindly be read in continuation of my earlier article of October 24,2008, on the same subject, which is available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2892.html . The earlier article is annexed for easy reference )
Rediff.com has reported as follows: "The long-pending investigations into the three-year-old Mecca Masjid blast case on Thursday (June 17,2010) moved forward with the Central Bureau of Investigation producing two suspects RSS pracharak Devender Gupta and his accomplice Lokesh Sharma in a special CBI court in Hyderabad. 14th additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate remanded the two to the judicial custody till June 30. A CBI team brought the two from Ajmer jail on a prisoner transit warrant......Devender Gupta and Lokesh Sharma, prime accused in bomb blast in Ajmer Dargah, were in Ajmer jail for the last one and a half months. CBI sources said that they will seek the custody of Gupta and Sharma to question them about their role in the bomb blast in Mecca Masjid on May 18, 2007. 15 people were killed in the blast during Friday congregation and subsequent police firing. CBI says that it was on the look out for two more suspects Sandeep Dange and Ramachandra Kalasangar alias Ramji. "
2. The investigation is still on-going and the final charge-sheet against the accused----all members of the Hindu community--- is still to be filed. The investigation made so far points in the direction of suspected targeted attacks on Muslims and their places of worship by some individual elements in the Hindu community as acts of retaliation for jihadi terrorism in different parts of India.
3.The fact that some of the arrested Hindu suspects had alleged links with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and other allied organisations has given rise to fresh allegations regarding Hindu terrorism. Prominent office-bearers of the RSS have done well to dissociate their organisation from the alleged acts of terrorism of the arrested individuals and express their support for the investigation against them to move forward vigorously.
4. Retaliation by a State against a State sponsoring acts of terrorism through surrogate terrorist organisations and against terrorist organisations which let themselves be used by a State are permitted under many UN resolutions against State-sponsorship of terrorism against another State. Such acts by a State are categorised as amounting to indirect aggression. There are instances of States retaliating against another State or in the territory of another State in order to make the sponsorship of terrorism by a State or acts of terrorism by an organisation from the territory of another State prohibitively costly.
5.The US air strikes in Libya in 1986 were an act of State retaliation for the terrorist attack on some US soldiers in a West Berlin discotheque by suspected terrorists allegedly sponsored by Libya. The US Cruise missile attacks on suspected Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan in 1998 were acts of State retaliation against a terrorist organisation for its suspected involvement in the explosions of August 1998 outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. There have been such acts of retaliation by Israel too.
6. While such acts of selective retaliation against another State and terrorist organisations in their foreign hide-outs can be justified depending on the circumstances which led to the retaliation, no law----domestic or international---permits an act of retaliation by a State or organisation or individuals in one's own territory against one's own co-citizens.
7.There has been no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but it is agreed by terrorism analysts that the indiscriminate killing of civilians by using an explosive device in a public place is an act of terrorism. Thus, the members of the Hindu community who have been arrested and are presently under investigation have indulged in acts of terrorism against Muslims if the facts alleged against them are proved in a court of law.
8. Calculations of what we call vote bank politics ---- electoral dividend or the lack of it---- should not be allowed to come in the way of the thorough investigation of the charges against the arrested persons There are two kinds of violence under the law----- violence in the heat of the moment in exercise of the right of self-defence and pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence. There is no excuse under the law for pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence-----whether they amount to terrorism or not.
9. Any perception that the investigation against the arrested Hindus is not being done as vigorously as the investigation against Muslims suspected of terrorism would weaken our case against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and provide an excuse to organisations such as the Indian Mujahideen (IM) for indulging in more acts of terrorism. The statement disseminated by the IM before its blasts in Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, alleged that the Indian criminal justice system is unfair to the Muslims. Any perception of a lack of thoroughness in the investigation against the arrested Hindus would add substance to this allegation of the IM.
10. It is in the interest of the RSS and allied organisations to strongly support such a thorough investigation and make it abundantly clear that they do not support acts of retaliation in our territory against our co-citizens. ( 18-6-10)
( 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 )
ANNEXURE
Paper no. 2892 24-Oct.-2008
Anti-Muslim Reprisal Terrorism? - International Terrorism Monitor--Paper No. 460
by B. Raman
"Some sections of the Muslim community suspected that this attack ----like the other attacks targeting members of their community--- must have been the responsibility of Hindu extremist elements. There was no basis for their suspicions, but they persist. The only way of removing their suspicions is through a thorough investigation and the definitive identification of all those involved. The many missing links in the investigation of this strike as well as in the terrorist attack on the Mumbai suburban trains should be a cause for concern. Targeted attacks on innocent Muslims by Al Qaeda and other jihadi organizations is nothing new. Such attacks take place often in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, in those countries, the attacks on Muslim civilians are generally due to one of two factors. Either the targeted Muslims belonged to a rival sect (Sunni vs Shia or Deobandi vs Barelvi) or rival organization or were perceived as collaborators of the Government and hence apostates. None of these factors applied in the case of the Muslims----Indians and Pakistanis--- who were traveling by the Samjotha Express. The conventional wisdom was that the Muslims were now being deliberately targeted by the jihadi organizations in order to provoke them against the Government and the Hindus. I do not subscribe to this wisdom. It is important to keep an open mind while investigating these targeted attacks on Indian Muslims and one should not jump to the conclusion that the LET or the HUJI must have been involved. We owe it to our Muslims, most of whom have kept away from Al Qaeda and other pan-Islamic organizations, to see that these cases of targeted attacks on Muslims are thoroughly investigated instead of coming to a facile conclusion that jihadi organizations must be behind them."
-----My comments on the terrorist strike in the Samjotha Express in my book "Terrorism---Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" published in June, 2008, by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com)
"While there are grounds for suspecting that the blast of Delhi and those of Agartala might have been carried out by the IM ( Indian Mujahideen) and its associates from the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Delhi and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Bangladesh in Agartala, the blasts in Modasa and Malegaon seem to stand apart. Though the Gujarat Police are reported to have detained some members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) during their investigation of the Modasa blast, the Modasa and Malegaon blasts do not carry any unique signature. More evidence will be required before one could analyse as to who might have been responsible. "----From my article of October 2, 2008, titled "Mushrooming Terrorism: Now Agartala" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2866.html
-----------------------------
In the last three years, we have had at least seven terrorist strikes in different parts of the country in which the perpetrators seemed to have targeted innocent Muslim civilians. Those seemed to be not indiscriminate attacks on all civilians, but targeted attacks on Muslims. There were two such incidents in Malegaon in Maharashtra and one each in New Delhi, Hyderabad, in the Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, in the Samjotha Express to Pakistan and in Modasa in Gujarat.
2. On the basis of the available reports, I had myself stated after five of these strikes---- but not after the Malegaon and Modasa incidents of September 29,2008--- that they seemed to have been carried out by terrorists belonging to jihadi terrorist organisations. I had also referred to instances of jihadi terrorists deliberately targeting innocent Muslims in many countries in pursuit of their agenda.
3. Some months after the Ajmer Sharif incident, a young Muslim officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) had met me privately and expressed his doubts as to whether Muslims would have been involved in these incidents. He strongly believed that no Muslim however extremist he might be and to whichever jihadi organisation he belonged would have planted a bomb in or near the Ajmer Sharif.
4. I did not feel convinced, but felt somewhat troubled by what he said. I felt that as a senior (though now retired) officer of the IPS, I owed it to him and other young Muslim officers of the IPS to take note of what he said and re-open my mind. It was in pursuance of this that I made the above-mentioned observations in my book.
5. Who carried out the pre-September 29, 2008, terrorist strikes, which seemed to have mainly targeted innocent Muslims? Where they the acts of the usual jihadi organisations or are they the precursor to acts of reprisal terrorism against members of the Muslim community by some irrational elements in the Hindu community? These questions, which were already being raised by sections of the public----Muslims as well as non-Muslims--- even before September 29, have re-surfaced following the publication or dissemination by some sections of the media of reports claiming that the Anti-Terrorism Cell (ATS) of the Mumbai Police have detained three Hindus in connection with their investigation into the recent Malegon blasts. The ATS itself has neither officially denied nor confirmed these reports.
6. The matter is in the initial stages of the investigation. To instill confidence in our Muslim community, the ATS should see that the investigation against these Hindus and any others associated with them is carried out thoroughly irrespective of their organisational affiliation. Religion is not a mitigating factor in deciding on the culpability of a person suspected of involvement in a criminal act. If they are proved to have participated in the acts of terrorism in Malegain and Modesa, the fact that they are Hindus would not make them any the less criminal or terrorist.
7. Indian criminal laws----the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Evidence Act and the Criminal Procedure Code--- do not talk of the majority or the minorities or even of Indian citizens or foreigners. Their provisions apply to anyone who commits an offence in Indian territory---whether he or she is an Indian national or a foreigner, whatever be his or her religion, language or ethnicity. The arrested persons must be investigated and proceeded against without worrying about their background or organisational affiliation.
8. Do these arrests strengthen the case for a ban on the Bajrang Dal or any other organisation to which they might have belonged? Or do they at least call for a characterisation of such orgainsations----even if they be of Hindus---as terrorist organisations? To characterise an organisation as a terrorist organisation and to take legal action against it ----and not merely against its members---- two types of evidence are required. Firstly, that its constitution or manifesto advocates the resort to violence amounting to terrorism for achieving its objective. Secondly, that it has been involved in repeated acts of pre-meditated violence which amount to terrorism. One has to wait and see whether such evidence surfaces during the investigation.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
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