News reports, mainly in the Kerala media, reporting arrests on May 28 by the Indian Coast Guard of a group of 11 Somali nationals, allegedly pirates, in the Lakshadweep Islands, drew fleeting attention towards a part of the world otherwise almost totally off the radar screens in this country. Somalia has been in a state of total internal flux ever since the Central government of the country, never fully in command even at the best of times, finally collapsed in 1991, abandoning the field to a bewildering spaghetti of tribal factions, warlords, criminals and jihadi fighters of various inclinations and persuasions all in a state of perpetual internecine conflict. Foreign intervention in the form of Ethiopian troops (latest being in 2006) and African Union peacekeepers since 2007 to maintain some semblance of sanity have all failed, and now the internal scene is dominated by jihadi groups and pirates, sometimes in temporary alliances, at violent odds at other times. The country is in a state of total anarchy, with the strife showing no signs of abating.
Not surprisingly, therefore, organised international crime has exploited the power vacuum and taken strong roots in Somalia over the past two decades. Pirate "fleets" preying on commercial shipping in the Arabian Sea and along the East African littoral around the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, are now being reported from around the Seychelles, Reunion Island and, according to some reports, even Mauritius, earning these waters the sobriquet of "Pirate Alley".
The main maritime trade routes linking India with Europe and beyond through the Suez Canal traverse these regions, and increasingly pirate activity is obviously a matter of concern for India’s commercial and strategic interests. It is in these contexts that the recent arrest of Somali intruders (or infiltrators) in India’s island territories in the Arabian Sea is a disturbing indicator of a new range of threat which could be gathering in these relatively remote and unfrequented regions of India’s western maritime borders. However, it may be appropriate to mention here in passing that by an utterly strange paradox, World Bank trade briefs indicate that India is Somalia’s largest trading partner, where the ports of Berbera and Mogadishu constitute the most important destinations for high-volume dhow cargo from India’s west coast, since these ports cannot receive or handle container traffic.
For India, the potential impact of Somali piracy is multiplied by the more serious "double hazard" factor of jihadi terrorism as well, because Somalia also constitutes the home base for the Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, more widely known as Al-Shabaab ("The Youth"), the Somali version of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. Al-Shabaab is the spiritual and temporal heir of the Islamic Courts Union, an earlier jihadi organisation associated with the twin bombings in 1998 of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-e-Salaam in Kenya and Tanzania respectively. Al-Shabaab has appropriated the mantle of propagating radical fundamentalism in the countries of East Africa, and received official affiliation with Al Qaeda with whom it shares common objectives. As the successor organisation, Al-Shabaab carried out twin bomb blasts in July 2010 in Uganda’s capital city of Kampala targeting television spectators watching the finals of World Cup soccer.
For Indian planners it would be prudent to anticipate a Pakistan connection superimposed on the entire Somali situation because the opportunities for exploitation against India are simply too tempting to pass up. Pakistani "command groups" are reportedly guiding the activities of some of the Somali pirate fleets which could be focused against the fairly substantial Indian commercial functional linkages with Al-Shabaab.
In fact, some reports seem to indicate that this may already be in progress if accounts regarding the remains of two allegedly Indian jihadis recovered amongst those of seven foreign terrorists (including three Pakistanis and two Somalis) killed in a car-bomb accident on August 23 in southern Mogadishu have any factual basis. The activities of Al-Shabaab have the potential to generate intense violence in East Africa with every possibility of its spillover to India if a "Somali corridor" to the Lakshadweep Islands is ever established.
India’s island territories, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal (572 islands, of which 36 are inhabited), and the Lakshadweep Islands in the Arabian Sea (12 atolls of which two are inhabited) are essentially mini-archipelagos offering almost ideal conditions for surreptitious entry and concealed residence by illegals, undesirables and down right criminal entities (pirates, narcotics smugglers, gun runners and terrorists of various entities). These territories require special surveillance and security because of their relative isolation.
By all accounts, initial reports about the intruders in the Lakshadweep Islands came from local fishermen operating out of Kaveratti Island, recalling Kargil a decade earlier where Pakistani infiltration were similarly reported by local shepherds. It might be interesting to examine in this context whether the lessons learnt from intelligence and surveillance failures at Kargil in 1999, and Mumbai 26/11 (2008) have been implemented.
The new cross-border threat through the Arabian Sea highlights the vulnerability of the Lakshadweep Islands as a potential target for radicalisation. India has to establish its defence perimeters across the Arabian Sea by establishing a presence in the East African littoral region through strong security agreements and intelligence-sharing relationships with East African countries, particularly those like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda which have already been targeted by Al-Shabaab.
India launched Operation Cactus in November 1988 as a quick-response tri-service joint operation to rescue the tiny island nation of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean from a takeover by fighters of the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam. The lessons of that operation have acquired fresh relevance in the context of the recent incidents on the Lakshadweep Islands. They must not be lost sight of.
Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a
former member of Parliament