[Reader-list] The rebirth of the Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI

[Pawan Durani]

Everyone ? Who all consists of everyone ? Pls enlighten

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Javed <javedmasoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Pawan
> If you remember, some weeks ago, everyone on this list agreed that
> whatever Praveen Swami says is not to be trusted. So, kindly do not
> forward any of Swami's write-ups here.
>
> Thanks
>
> Javed
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article402892.ece
>>
>> Saturday's bombings in Bangalore are a grim reminder that the jihadist
>> movement is far from spent.
>>
>> Less than an hour before police surrounded the Indian Mujahideen
>> bomb-factory hidden away on the fringes of the Bhadra forests in
>> Chikmagalur, Mohammad Zarar Siddi Bawa had slipped away on a bus bound
>> for Mangalore — the first step in a journey that would take him to the
>> safety of a Lashkar-e-Taiba safehouse in Karachi.
>>
>> Inside the house, officers involved in the October, 2008, raid found
>> evidence of Bawa's work: laboratory equipment used to test and prepare
>> chemicals, precision tools, and five complete improvised explosive
>> devices. Even as investigators across India set about filing paperwork
>> declaring Bawa a fugitive, few believed they would ever be able to lay
>> eyes on him again.
>>
>> But in February, a closed-circuit television camera placed over the
>> cashier's counter at the Germany Bakery in Pune recorded evidence that
>> Bawa had returned to India — just minutes before an improvised
>> explosive device ripped through the popular restaurant killing
>> seventeen people, and injuring at least sixty.
>>
>> Dressed in a loose-fitting blue shirt, a rucksack slung over his back,
>> the fair, slight young man with a wispy beard has been identified by
>> police sources in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka as “Yasin
>> Bhatkal” — the man who made the bombs which ripped apart ten Indian
>> towns and cities between 2005 and 2008. Witnesses at the restaurant
>> also identified Bawa from photographs, noting that he was wearing
>> trousers rolled up above his ankles — a style favoured by some
>> neo-fundamentalists.
>>
>> Bawa is emerging as the key suspect in Saturday's bombings outside the
>> M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore — a grim reminder that the
>> jihadist offensive that began after the 2002 communal violence in
>> India is very far from spent.
>>
>> The obscure jihadist
>>
>> Little is known about just what led Bawa to join the jihadist
>> movement. Educated at Bhatkal's well-respected Anjuman
>> Hami-e-Muslimeen school, 32-year-old Bawa left for Pune as a teenager.
>> He was later introduced to other members of the Indian Mujahideen as
>> an engineer, but police in Pune have found no documentation suggesting
>> he ever studied in the city.
>>
>> Instead, Bawa spent much of his time with a childhood friend living in
>> Pune, Unani medicine practitioner-turned-Islamist proselytiser Iqbal
>> Ismail Shahbandri. Like his brother Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri — now the
>> Indian Mujahideen's top military commander — Ismail Shahbandri had
>> become an ideological mentor to many young Islamists in Pune and
>> Mumbai, many of them highly-educated professionals.
>>
>> The Shahbandari brothers' parents, like many members of the Bhatkal
>> elite, had relocated to Mumbai in search of new economic
>> opportunities. Ismail Shahbandri, their father, set up leather-tanning
>> factory in Mumbai's Kurla area in the mid-1970s. Riyaz Shahbandri went
>> on to obtain a civil engineering degree from Mumbai's Saboo Siddiqui
>> Engineering College and, in 2002, was married to Nasuha Ismail, the
>> daughter of an electronics store owner in Bhatkal's Dubai Market.
>>
>> Shafiq Ahmad, Nasuha's brother, had drawn Riyaz Shahbandri into the
>> Students Islamic Movement of India. He first met his Indian Mujahideen
>> co-founders Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Sadiq Israr Sheikh, in the months
>> before his marriage. Later, Riyaz Shahbandri made contact with
>> ganglord-turned-jihadist Amir Raza Khan. In the wake of the communal
>> violence that ripped Gujarat apart in 2002, the men set about
>> funnelling recruits to Lashkar camps in Pakistan.
>>
>> Early in the summer of 2004, investigators say, the core members of
>> the network that was later to call itself the Indian Mujahideen met at
>> Bhatkal's beachfront to discuss their plans. Iqbal Shahbandri and
>> Bhatkal-based cleric Shabbir Gangoli are alleged to have held
>> ideological classes; the group also took time out to practice shooting
>> with airguns. Bawa had overall charge of arrangements — a task that
>> illustrated his status as the Bhatkal brothers' most trusted
>> lieutenant.
>>
>> Bhatkal, police investigators say, became the centre of the Indian
>> Mujahideen's operations. From their safehouses in Vitthalamakki and
>> Hakkalamane, bombs were despatched to operational cells dispersed
>> across the country, feeding the most sustained jihadist offensive
>> India has ever seen.
>>
>> Communal war
>>
>> Like so many of his peers in the Indian Mujahideen, Bawa emerged from
>> a fraught communal landscape. Bhatkal's Nawayath Muslims, made
>> prosperous by hundreds of years of trade across the Indian Ocean,
>> emerged as the region's dominant land-owning community. Early in the
>> twentieth century, inspired by call of Aligarh reformer Syed Ahmed
>> Khan, Bhatkal notables led a campaign to bring modern education for
>> the community. The Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen school where Bawa studied
>> was one product of their efforts, which eventually spawned
>> highly-regarded institutions that now cater to over several thousand
>> students.
>>
>> Organisations like the Anjuman helped the Navayath Muslims capitalise
>> on the new opportunities for work and business with opened up in the
>> United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia during the 1970s. But this
>> wealth, in turn, engendered resentments which laid the ground for an
>> communal conflict. In the years after the Emergency, the Jana Sangh
>> and its affiliates began to capitalise on resentments Bhatkal's Hindus
>> felt about the prosperity and political power of the Navayaths. The
>> campaign paid off in 1983, when the Hindu right-wing succeeded in
>> dethroning legislator S.M. Yahya, who had served as a state minister
>> between 1972 and 1982.
>>
>> Both communities entered into a competitive communal confrontation,
>> which involved the ostentatious display of piety and power. The
>> Tablighi Jamaat, a neo-fundamentalist organisation which calls on
>> followers to live life in a style claimed to be modelled on that of
>> the Prophet Mohammad, drew a growing mass of followers. Hindutva
>> groups like the Karavalli Hindu Samiti, too, staged ever-larger
>> religious displays to demonstrate their clout.
>>
>> Early in 1993, Bhatkal was hit by communal riots which claimed
>> seventeen lives and left dozens injured. The violence, which began
>> after Hindutva groups claimed stones had been thrown at a Ram Navami
>> procession, and lasted nine months. Later, in April 1996, two Muslims
>> were murdered in retaliation for the assassination of Bharatiya Janata
>> Party legislator U. Chittaranjan — a crime that investigators now say
>> may have been linked to the Bhatkal brothers. More violence broke out
>> in 2004, after the assassination of BJP leader Thimmappa Naik.
>>
>> Iqbal Shahbandri and his recruits were, in key senses, rebels against
>> a traditional political order that appeared to have failed to defend
>> Muslim rights and interests. Inside the Indian Mujahideen safehouses
>> raided in October, 2008, police found no evidence that traditional
>> theological literature or the writings of the Tablighi Jamaat had
>> influenced the group. Instead, they found pro-Taliban videos and
>> speeches by Zakir Naik — a popular but controversial Mumbai-based
>> televangelist who has, among other things, defends Al-Qaeda chief
>> Osama bin-Laden.
>>
>> “If he is fighting the enemies of Islam”, Naik said in one speech, “I
>> am for him. If he is terrorising America the terrorist—the biggest
>> terrorist — I am with him.” “Every Muslim” Naik concluded, “should be
>> a terrorist. The thing is, if he is terrorising a terrorist, he is
>> following Islam”. Naik has never been found to be involved in
>> violence, but his words have fired the imagination of a diverse
>> jihadists — among them, Glasgow suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed, 2006
>> Mumbai train-bombing accused Feroze Deshmukh, and New York taxi driver
>> Najibullah Zazi, who faces trial for planning to attack the city's
>> Grand Central Railway Station.
>>
>> Language like this spoke to concerns of the young people who were
>> drawn to separate jihadist cells that began to spring up across India
>> after the 2002 violence, mirroring the growth of the Indian
>> Mujahideen. SIMI leader Safdar Nagori set up a group that included the
>> Bangalore information-technology professionals Peedical Abdul Shibli
>> and Yahya Kamakutty; in Kerala Tadiyantavide Nasir, Abdul Sattar, and
>> Abdul Jabbar set up a separate organisation that is alleged to have
>> bombed Bangalore in 2008
>>
>> Storms of hate
>>
>> Well-entrenched in the political system, Bhatkal's Muslim leadership
>> has been hostile to radical Islamism. Efforts by Islamist political
>> groups to establish a presence there have, for the most part, been
>> unsuccessful. But authorities acknowledge Bhatkal, like much of the
>> Dakshina Kannada region, remains communally fraught. Small-scale
>> confrontations are routine. Earlier this month, the Karavalli Hindu
>> Samiti even staged demonstrations in support of the Sanatana Sanstha,
>> the Hindutva group police in Goa say was responsible for terrorist
>> bombings carried out last year.
>>
>> Pakistan's intelligence services and transnational jihadist groups
>> like the Lashkar nurtured and fed India's jihadist movement — but its
>> birth was the outcome of an ugly communal contestation that remains
>> unresolved. Even as India's police and intelligence services work to
>> dismantle the jihadist project, politicians need to find means to
>> still the storms of hate which sustain it.
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