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India-Pakistan
Rahul Gandhi is right on Indian jihadists
2013-11-09
[The Hindu] ... From placed in durance vile
Don't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out!
Mumbai resident Sadiq Israr Sheikh's testimony to police, we know some on SIMI's radical fringes were craving for direct action. Born in 1978 to working class parents from the north Indian town of Azamgarh, Sheikh had grown up in Mumbai's Cheetah Camp housing project. In 1996, he began attending SIMI gatherings -- polite tea-and-biscuits affairs that he would eventually storm out of, frustrated by endless discussion.

Late in 2001, he ran into a distant relative, Salim Islahi, the son of a Jamaat-e-Islami
...The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independent branch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
-linked holy man who was himself expelled from the organization for his extremism. Islahi, later controversially killed by police, allegedly arranged for Sheikh to travel to Pakistain for training in September 2001.

His story wasn't uncommon: other SIMI friends like computer engineer Abdul Subhan Qureshi made the journey to the Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
's camps at about the same time.

From 2002, when this core leadership returned to India, it found fertile ground: Gujarat
...where rioting seems to be a traditional passtime...
persuaded younger recruits that India's claims to secularism and democracy were a sham. SIMI's wellsprings gave birth to small jihadist cells across India. Peedical Abdul Shibly and Yahya Kamakutty, highly successful computer professionals, are alleged to have prepared to carry out attacks in Bangalore. Feroze Ghaswala, another alleged Indian Mujahideen
A locally recruited auxilliary of Pakistain's Lashkar-e-Taiba, designed to give a domestic patina to Pakistain's terror war against its bigger neighbor...
recruit, told police he volunteered for joining jihad training after witnessing the mass burial of 40 Gujarat riot victims. Kerala men trained in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmire with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Zabiuddin Ansari, from Maharashtra's Aurangabad, famously ended up in the 26/11 control room.

From the investigations of the Patna and Bodh Gaya bombings, we know the recruitment continues, often carried out by old SIMI cadre, drawing on an anger which every new communal confrontation fuels. "You have provoked the Mujahideen to massacre you and your five-and-a-half crore multitude of pathetic infidels," read the bitter Indian Mujahideen manifesto released after the 2008 serial bombings in New Delhi, "who tortured us in the post-Godhra riots asking 'where is your Allah'?"

"Here He Is"

'Purely Indian'

It is interesting that the Indian Mujahideen never dropped its national identification from the name. In the 2007 manifesto, it said this: "We are not any foreign mujahideen nor we have any attachment with neighbouring countries. We are purely Indian." In a later manifesto, the group called itself "the home-grown jihadi militia of Islam." Recently tossed in the slammer
Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages!
Indian Mujahideen operative Ahmed Siddibapa, also known as Yasin Bhatkal, is reported to have told the National Investigations Agency that he refused to train in Pakistain for these reasons.

The India of an Indian jihad shouldn't surprise us. From the work of chronicler Zain al-Din Maabari, we know self-described jihadis waged war against Portugese colonial forces more than 200 years ago.

The eminent historian, Ayesha Jalal, has shown the notion of jihad was an important ideological theme through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Following the 2008 bombings in Delhi, the Indian Mujahideen actually invoked this heritage: "We have carried out this attack in the memory of two most eminent Mujahids of India: Sayyed Ahmed Shaheed and Shah Ismail Shaheed, who had raised the glorious banner of Jihad against the disbelievers in this very city of Delhi."

Like all other modern ideologies, Islamism offers believers a road map for action. It has been a fringe tendency, drawing far fewer supporters among Indian Musselmens than the Congress, the Left and perhaps even the BJP -- but its durability points to deep tears in our social fabric.

Investigations of the Patna and Bodh Gaya blasts have shown the obvious: even as police and intelligence services have registered important successes in the battle against jihadist terrorism, the fractures in our society have enabled recruits to be drawn from a new generation. Pakistain's intelligence services and their jihadist proxies will exploit the dysfunctions in our polity, until India's political life addresses them.

For years now, it has suited a wide spectrum of Indian political opinion to simply deny this problem exists. The forces behind the silence are remarkably wide -- among them, Hindu nationalists, unwilling to acknowledge their role in giving birth to jihadist terror; opportunists trying to cash in on Musselmen fears; ideologues sympathetic to Islamists.

Mr. Gandhi's intervention, inchoate and fumbling, won't solve the problem. It does, though, open the door to the truth-telling that is a precondition for healing. For that, India ought to be grateful.
Posted by:Fred

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