With Islamist militancy, has India passed the tipping point?
The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in previous years.
A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.
For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.
But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.
It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.
And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.
“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.
Sophistication and savagery in Ahmedabad
One of the most striking things about the weekend’s bomb attacks in Gujarat was the mixture of savagery and sophistication.
Savagery because of the way a second wave of bombs were detonated at a hospital, apparently to target the crowds of concerned relatives who had gathered there. Had they been watching Contract, a recently released Bollywood film with a similar plotline?
Sophistication because of the way the coordinated attack was planned and executed without the intelligence agencies getting a sniff of it, even though dozens of people must have been involved.
It also looks as though the IP address of an American living in Mumbai was hacked to send an email just before the first blasts. Perhaps the perpetrators remembered how Daniel Pearl’s kidnappers were traced in 2002 from a email sent from a cybercafe in Karachi. This time the sender of the email will be harder to trace.
The bombers also stayed one step ahead of the police by not using mobile phones to detonate Saturday’s blast. That allowed the bombers to detonate the second set of bombs without having to worry about the mobile phone network being closed down (as police in Bangalore did on Friday). It could also will rob the police of some potentially valuable leads.
By reportedly using old, rented bicycles instead of newly bought ones, as they did in Jaipur, the bombers may also have covered their tracks more carefully.
The email from the Indian Mujahideen was professionally put together, even if its message was one of hatred. In it, the group insisted that “each and every Mujahid belongs to this very soil of India”, and mocked the “cunning ones who call themselves the ‘Intelligence Bureau’”.
I think the cast system and rich poor gap,Approx. 300million people live below the poverty level are the real problems of India. These problems will not go away by blaming others.
Lets be more analytical and less of stereotypes by blaming only a particular community and rather understand it from a macro level as to who is gaining from all these…
0.0001 % or whatever percentage of minority …nobody is going to gain whatsoever by bringing distrurbance at home …
Its time for us to be more tactical in approach and tackle this global problem of terrorism ..
as it has been said time and again that the perpetators of Terror dont cling to any community or religion but to their short term needs .
Jai Hind ….