THE LATEST July 13, 2011 bomb blasts at the crowded locations of Zaveri Bazar, Opera House and Dadar Kabutarkhana in Mumbai are the 14th attack on the city in the past eighteen years since 1993.
On a rainy day, at a time when traders were heading home, the first device planted at Khau Gali, in south Mumbai’s Zaveri Bazaar (translated Jewellery Market, India’s diamond hub), known for its streetwalk eateries, exploded at 6.54 pm. The second device, planted under an umbrella at the Opera House, near Charni Road, exploded at 6.55 pm. The third device, placed on an electric pole at a Kabutarkhana bus stand in the Dadar area, exploded at 7.05 pm. A fourth bomb reportedly discovered at Santa Cruz was defused in time.
While 17 people have been killed — some blown to bits — and 131 injured, investigations based on whatever could be recovered from the rubble, CCTV footage and eyewitness accounts are still on and expected to continue. How much longer it will take to nab the guilty and punish them is also not hard to guess.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, home minister P. Chidambaram and Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, apart from the routine rhetoric, appealed to the public to remain calm. The appeal was probably in view of the date attack, July 13, being the birthday of Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor of the terrorists involved in the 26/11 attack who is on death row. The day is also observed as Kashmir Martyrs Day.
The home ministry reportedly classified the bomb blasts as a terrorist act and dispatched a National Investigation Agency (NIA) team to the bomb site.
Preliminary investigations suggest the use of seven improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the blasts, based on ammonium nitrate and other materials wrapped in tin foils, tiffin carriers. The NIA is investigating the possible involvement of Indian Mujahideen (IM) and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) in the blasts. Home minister Chidambaram, who announced that his office would be updating the people through the media every two hours, left New Delhi for Mumbai on the same night and visited the three blast sites, met the injured in the hospitals, and also interacted with the family members of the dead to console them.
Going by most statements and news reports, the pattern of the blasts suggests the involvement of Indian Mujahideen. According to the special cell of the Delhi police, the Indian Mujahideen’s favourite dates for conducting blasts are 13th or 26th of a month. The 2008 Ahmedabad bombings took place on July 26, 2008; the Delhi serial blasts occurred on September 13, 2008 and later on November 26, 2008. The German Bakery blast in Pune took place on February 13, 2010.
Speculation is also rife that the Mumbai mafia could be behind these blasts, in the light of the killing of journalist J. Dey, as well as the killing of the aide of Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Iqbal Kaskar. There is also a view that the attack could have been timed to derail the recently renewed India-Pakistan peace process.
Investigations in the Pune German Bakery blast case in 2010 had revealed that there is a link between the LeT and the Indian Mujahideen, a group morphed from the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and thus is dangerous from the point of view of luring Muslim youth into the terror fold. The network that has been established covering a number of states such as Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Gujarat, Daman and New Delhi is in itself indicative of its expanse and its ability to strike would be evidently spread over the hinterland and thus some more activities cannot be ruled out given that there are many sleeper cells that may have been created and which have not been very active over the past few months but which may surface any time. Thus the spread of the network and the level of activity would remain a key concern.
The shootout at Jama Masjid in Delhi on September 19, 2010 also created an alarm with a threat to disrupt the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. The low-level but daring attack in which two foreigners were injured indicated that the police has not been able to neutralise terror cells of the group which continues to be active in even big metros like Delhi.
What must be clearly remembered and kept in mind is that the Indian Mujahideen is a well-planned creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), cleverly named Indian Mujahideen for obvious reasons and closely associated with the LeT.
Besides, ISI’s connections with the Mumbai mafia, through Dawood Ibrahim, elaborated upon by this daily, dates back to 1993, when Ibrahim organised the first major terrorist attack on Mumbai. It is after that attack that Dawood disappeared and was settled by the ISI in Karachi, where he most likely still is.
Details of the Karachi Project, under which the creation of the Indian Mujahideen had been planned, were first revealed by a Pakistan-born American terrorist of LeT, Daood Gilani, who smartly changed his name to David Coleman Headley, when he was under interrogation of the FBI.
The Karachi Project was set up by Pakistan military’s ISI and terrorist groups like the LeT and Harkat ul Jihad-e-Islami (Huji). Giving it the name Indian Mujahideen made it very convenient for Pakistan to insinuate that India too had its own jihadi terrorists. It involves motivating and training Indian operatives to plant explosives in selected cities all over India. Former home secretary G.K. Pillai is reported to have said after the German Bakery blast in Pune: “The link between the LeT and Indian Mujahideen, as part of the project, has been established. The LeT pushed David Headley into India to recce potential targets. IM operatives went to Pakistan and viewed videos shot by him, so that they could be sent to India to carry out attacks,” he said.
Named after the Pakistani port city and crime hotbed which has turned into a sanctuary for fugitive Indian Mumbai underworld dons like Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, the joint-venture project was conceived some time after 2003. It is part of an overall strategy which, Admiral Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence, reportedly told a US Senate committee on February 3, was for Pakistan to “use militant groups as an important part of its strategic arsenal to counter India’s military and economic advantages”.
An analysis of all the attacks in Mumbai since 1993 reveals, that in origination, planning and direction, almost all these attacks bear footprints of Pakistan military’s Army dominated Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and the LeT, one of the major anti-India proxy resources created by it.
While Maharashtra chief minister stated that this was an attack on India, as indeed were the earlier attacks on 26/11 in Mumbai and the attack on Parliament, many analysts and public at large felt that the Indian government’s response was too weak/soft. This time around, the public reaction in Mumbai has been one of seething anger.
Some uncalled for statements made by the ruling party’s political leaders, while being like salt on wounds of Mumbai‘s citizens, also amount to scoring avoidable self-goals in India-Pakistan relations, providing Pakistan with yet another opportunity to level false or ridiculous allegations against India.
Worst of all is that there is no hope that there will not be a 15th or 16th or more attacks on Mumbai, the symbol of India’s socio-economic progress, because so far we still neither have a policy, nor the political will to make the adversary pay dearly for all the blood of innocent Indians spilt, so that such acts are not repeated.
Anil Bhat is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi