The Hindu : Gujarat riot victims look to the Lashkar-e-Taiba

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 16, 2003

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Gujarat riot victims look to the Lashkar-e-Taiba

By Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI AUG. 15. As India celebrated its Independence Day, a small group of young men from Gujarat may have been clocking in for one more day's training at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistan, preparing for revenge against a republic they believe failed them.

Police and Intelligence Bureau officials have found evidence that at least five — and perhaps up to 40 — Muslim residents of Gujarat have made their way to Pakistan for explosives and arms training. One trainee, Munir Ahmad, was killed during summer Army operations to clear terrorists from the Hil Kaka heights near Surankote in Poonch district. Ahmad, who was undergoing preliminary training on Hil Kaka before heading to Pakistan, worked at a confectionery store in suburban Ahmedabad before volunteering to join the Lashkar. The five still-unidentified men who travelled with him to Poonch escaped the fighting, and are thought to have made their way to Pakistan.

Investigations of the Lashkar's Gujarat links began with the discovery of satellite phone sets during the course of Army operations in Hil Kaka in May and June. Several calls had been made to Gujarat from these sets, some soon after the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar. The Intelligence Bureau responded by launching a major telephone surveillance operation. The operation zeroed in on Latif Pathan, a resident of Bhainch village close to Poonch town. Pathan operated a Gujarat-registered truck transporting goods from that State to Jammu.

Pathan, it turned out, had been in Godhra during the communal pogrom in Gujarat, and participated in a meeting where local clerics called for creating an armed self-defence force. He agreed to use his contacts in Poonch to arrange for training a batch of six volunteers. The group was brought to the terrorist-infested Malhan-Phagla area near Surankote. There, Lashkar sympathiser Haji Sadiq Ahmad handed over the young men to the outfit's local commander, Zubair Kana. Kana, a Pakistan national, has been active in Malhan-Phagla for at least seven years.

For the Lashkar, the recruits were a windfall. During the riots, the organisation had put up images of riot victims on its website, and called for a jehad to avenge the carnage.

The tragedy was used to raise funds in West Asia. Recruitment of Muslims from outside the State helps the Lashkar persuade Jammu and Kashmir residents that they have no future in India.

The outfit has also used its armed might to buy political and ideological support within Poonch. The recent interrogation of arrested terrorist Naim Khan, originally a resident of Lahore in Pakistan, revealed that some local legislators were paying the organisation protection money regularly.

Both Latif Pathan and Haji Sadiq Ahmad have been arrested and handed over to the Gujarat Police, but a clear picture of their recruits' background has yet to emerge.

Sources said Munir Ahmad had a history of involvement with the Ahl-e-Hadis, an ultra-conservative Islamic sect. Although the Ahl-e-Hadis has no formal political objectives, members of the sect from Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra have joined the Lashkar in the past. Nisar Ahmad Ansar, wanted by the Maharashtra Police for a series of recent bombings of buses and a train in Mumbai, regularly visited Ahl-e-Hadis seminaries and mosques in Maharashtra.

No one knows what the scale of Lashkar recruitment might be, but intelligence sources told The Hindu that upwards of 40 young Muslim men have left their homes for undisclosed locations in the months after the violence. Soon after the riots, the former Punjab Director-General of Police, K.P.S. Gill, then an adviser to the Gujarat Government, had warned of "retaliatory terrorism". It is possible that some of the new recruits have been involved in several recent bombings in Ahmedabad. Most of these bombings have been executed with low-grade explosives, but their fabrication, experts say, needs some degree of expertise.

Young residents of riot-hit areas have for long provided cadre for the all-India operations of Islamist terrorist groups and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

In the autumn of 2000, three residents of Jalgaon, Maharashtra, died in an encounter in Doda district while undergoing arms training with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. Sheikh Asif Supdu, Sheikh Khalid Iqbal and Mohammad Hanif were killed in an October 2000 encounter.

Four others who left the training after being found medically unfit, were later arrested for their alleged role in bombing offices of Hindu fundamentalist organisations in Nagpur.

Dozens of recruits drawn from the large pool of young people drawn to Islamist organisations have been arrested in recent years.

It would, perhaps, be simplistic to draw a direct link between pan-India Islamist terrorism and riots, for many of the individuals involved have not been directly affected by communal pogroms.

Nonetheless, it bears mention that that first Islamist vigilante group in India, the Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen, was born as a direct consequence of the 1985 communal riots in Bhiwandi.

Its founders, Azam Ghauri, Abdul Karim `Tunda' and Ansari turned to terrorism only after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and organised a series of train bombings to mark its first anniversary.

Fifteen years on, Ghauri is dead and Ansari in jail, while Tunda runs a major Lashkar operation from Pakistan.

But, as the experience of the Ahmedabad Lashkar shows, the flow of recruits to the Islamic Right continues apace, helped not a little by the activities of those who claim to be authentic Indian patriots.

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