Another Blast From The Past

With each blast being reduced to a day on the calendar, has the Home Ministry proved capable only of condemning the blasts, asks HARINDER BAWEJA

THIS STORY has been written before and will no doubt be written again. Experts will pen their thoughts and TV channels will go on overdrive. It happened last year in November when bombs exploded in Faizabad, Varanasi and Lucknow. The same exercise was played out in May this year after 80 innocents were killed in the Jaipur serial blasts. Once again, after bombs exploded in quick succession in Bangalore on one day and in Ahmedabad the next, the focus on terror is back.

The same set of questions is being asked: Who did it? Who’s responsible? Is the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ a front organisation? Is the ISI behind the attacks or are the

groups homegrown? Is it the HUJI or the Lashkar-e-Tayba or the Jaish-e- Mohammad? Should POTA have been revoked? Is a Federal Investigating Agency (FIA) the answer to the terror attacks that have been taking place once every four months for at least the last four years?

Lip service Home Minister Shivraj Patil visits Civil Hospital — one of the blast sites in Ahmedabad

Pause a moment. These questions are relevant only after another set of questions have been answered. What was done between blasts in Uttar Pradesh in November and the Jaipur explosions this May to diminish the likelihood of another terrorist attack? What did Home Minister Shivraj Patil and his team do after Jaipur, apart from having a heated exchange of words with Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje? Are the ‘top secret’ notes of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) no better than ‘weather reports’, to use Raje’s words? Are the IB and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) equipped to get actionable intelligence, or do they and the state police organisations need to be augmented? Says Ajai Sahni, Executive Director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, “In all the discussions on ‘red alerts’ and ‘coordination committees’ and ‘beefing up responses’, this critical variable never comes up for discussion — because the answer would be an embarrassing, indeed, humiliating ‘nothing whatsoever’.”

He is not off the mark. The stark reality is simply that terror attacks in India in recent years — be they the serial blasts in Mumbai, the explosions in Hyderabad or the latest ones in Ahmedabad — stand out not for their sophistication, but for their simplicity. In all of these, locally procured combustible materials like ammonium nitrate have been used to package bombs in pressure cookers or tiffin boxes (see box). Unlike the Mumbai blasts of 1993, when RDX was shipped in by underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, all recent attacks have been carried out by local or ‘homegrown’ militants. Says Vikram Sood, former director, RAW, “The Centre should be looking at the larger picture. Beef up the security apparatus and then look at the political causes. Arresting suspects only to add to numbers will have the same effect as the Americans killing local Afghans in an aerial bombardment.”

Let’s look at the security apparatus. It was only in August 2007 that the Home Ministry even included the police-population ratio in its report to Parliament. Says Sahni, “After reeling under terrorism for at least two decades, the home minister for the first time demonstrated awareness of the fact that the country was severely under-policed and had meagre intelligence cover to deal with terrorism. The reality is, India’s entire justice system, from the thana to the Supreme Court, appears to be in a state of terminal sickness. This, and not the minutiae of the latest terrorist attack, is the critical issue confronting the country.”

So, what is the police-population ratio? As against the West, where it varies between 250 and 500 police personnel per 100,000 people, India has an abysmal 126 policemen for the same number. Internationally, a peacetime ratio of at least 222 per 100,000 is recommended. Crucially, the present ratios are worked out against sanctioned posts; in many cases, these date back to the 1980s. Add to this the 20 percent deficit against sanctioned posts across the country and to this, in turn, the fact that the Intelligence Bureau too is short-staffed, and the picture becomes alarming. Sources reveal that the IB has 3,500 field personnel involved in intelligence gathering for a country with a population of over a billion; as Sahni points out, “only a fraction of these are focused on counter-terrorism”.

THE PROBLEM is well-known but successive governments have merely pushed files. Says a senior Home Ministry official, “Various recommendations are already on the table but the politicians are simply not paying attention. The tendency is to just firefight and fall into slumber till the next attack.” How else can one explain why, for instance, the comprehensive review of security and intelligence after the Kargil war in 1999 was never implemented?

Take another example. In 2001, the Girish Saxena Committee gave a report on the country’s intelligence apparatus. The report recommended an overhaul of technical,

Tense moment Bomb squad defusing one of the explosives found at Ahmedabad

imaging, signal and, electronic counter-intelligence capabilities, recommendations accepted by a Group of Ministers (GoM). But, in the seven years since they gave the report their stamp of approval, it has never been implemented beyond a few symbolic changes. Among other suggestions it made was a proposal for the immediate recruitment of an additional 3,000 cadres to the IB but, by 2008, only 1,400 additional posts have been sanctioned. Points out Sahni, “The IB needs to add another 50,000 men. Today, everyone is crying for an FIA but why cry about an agency when the pre-emptives are not in place?”

The pre-emptives were paid considerable attention by the Saxena Committee. It had called for a Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) and a Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI) to be set up under the IB. The MAC was to collect and coordinate terrorism-related information and the JTFI was to share the information with state governments. Both are functional but are under-staffed and under-equipped.

These and other crucial loopholes are definitely being taken advantage of by terror groups who are cocky enough to send out emails to the media and the police, like the Indian Mujahideen did minutes before the Ahmedabad blasts. They are also feeding into the ‘grievance quotient’ that helps terror groups find recruits. Speaking of the Indian Mujahideen email, former additional secretary, RAW, B. Raman says, “The message was not only a warning of their intention to act, but also an explanation of why Indian Muslims had decided to act. Its main point was that the criminal justice system treated Muslims severely, but was lenient to Hindus. The language used was typically Indian, the context and arguments used were typical of Indian Muslims and the issues raised were those which have been agitating sections of Indian Muslims such as the Babri Masjid demolition, the lack of action against Hindu police officers of Mumbai found guilty of excesses by the Sri Krishna Commission, the severe penalties awarded to Muslims who retaliated in 1993, and the Gujarat riots.”

All this points only in one direction — right back to where we started. This story has been written before and will no doubt be written again, unless the government wakes up to addressing the two stark realities of intelligence gathering — how to plug the internal security apparatus and how to address the grievance quotient politically.