by RVS Mani
The policemen were all under pressure to get closure in the intimidation case. Much later, I asked Hari Singh, were his orders from the officers inside of MHA? He hinted, ‘us se oopar’, meaning higher than the MHA officers. Which is the Home Minister. The ground under my feet slipped. But I was still not aware of the entire story, what was actually behind the attack on me?
This case took its first casualty, Sub Inspector Mallick’s promotion had been withheld. Vigilance cases had been slapped against him. For what? For failing to secure closure in my case? I agreed to sign a statement for closure of the case with ACP Hari Singh as I did not want to jeopardise the lives and careers of police officers. They would have been unnecessarily victimised, if I had remained adamant. My statement for closure of the case resulted in immediate clearance of Pankaj Singh Mallick from the Vigilance angle and he got his promotion.
But the biggest revelation came a few days later.
Suspicions strengthened
We were gathering for a meeting in the OPS room. The OPS Room is an ante room to the MHA Control Room which is under the domain of Internal Security Division. Whenever the main committee room, Room No.119, was not available, we used to convene our meetings in the OPS room. One of the participants in the meeting very casually said that the 30.12.2008 incident was designed and directed at a political level. One of the agenda was to take ‘an officer’ of the MHA, someone who would be very vulnerable as hostage, and could be traded with Ajmal Kasab. This cursory remark was most unbelievable, like something out of fiction and not fact. I was too shocked to respond.
At that time, I held back this information from my spouse, family members, colleagues and others. The Delhi Police can corroborate the facts with the relevant records in their possession if at all they have been retained. Delhi Police personnel below the ACP level have to maintain diaries as per laid-down procedure.
Till the failure to kidnap me, that is from 27.11.2008 to 30.12.2008, for 33 days, the Pakistani establishment had maintained an ambivalent position on the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. They refused to admit Kasab was a Pakistani citizen. It took another week after the ‘botched last ditch effort to kidnap an Indian official’ for Pakistan to acknowledge the Mumbai carnage. Only on 7th January 2009 did any response accepting involvement of Pakistanis was first accepted by Pakistan.
I had sensed the conspiracy. Now at last I began to understand the plot. There was some support from the Indian side for the narrative that Pakistan was not involved in the 26/11 Mumbai carnage. Also to the narrative perhaps that Kasab could not be interrogated as he had to be allowed to go free, in exchange for an Indian official, a narrative akin to the 1999 IC 814 one.
I do not want to hazard a guess on which political entity had designed the 2008 intimidation script. I also do not want to hazard any guess as to what was the reason for this. It is a fact that I had been subject to an unfortunate experience in the middle of the night, when I was out on official work. I had heard it from one of the security agencies, the reason was political. Also there was pressure on the policemen to close the case arising out of the MHA protest. However, after a decade, the question that troubles me is, had they succeeded, would the narrative have changed? We do not know. May be, a colour might have been assigned to this attack on me, like in the Samjautha Blasts.
In this context, the dossier of the Ministry of External Affairs relating to Ajmal Kasab’s nationality may be of interest to readers.
Reference to a telephone call between the then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and the then Pakistani President had got included in the dossier on 26.11.2008 handed over by Pakistan to India. To rebut Pakistan’s claim about Mukherjee (India’s President till 2017)—that he had called Zardari on 26.11.2008—this could have been easily done with electronic evidence. Mukherjee said a ‘hoax call’ report was planted in the Pak dossier. Interestingly, the MEA chose to textually rebut it. Further, what material evidentiary value did this Pak dossier serve in the investigation into the Mumbai attacks is not clear. (See page 220)
The colour saffron
FOR THE INTERNAL Security Division, 2009 was relatively a peaceful year. 2008 had been unduly clogged, with excessive pressures both foreseen and unforeseen.
In April 2008, we were busy managing the Olympic torch journey through India by coordinating the security paraphernalia. This had a personal spinoff for me. I had been a candidate for the Kailash Mansarover Yatra as a Liaison Officer. The interview for it was also scheduled in April 2008. The selection was to be done by a group of officers led by Vijay Keshav Gokhale, then Joint Secretary (China), in the Ministry of External Affairs. He was also the officer coordinating the Olympic Torch passage for the Beijing Olympics 2008. He had exposure to my personal performance in the task of coordinating the Olympics Torch passage and this helped in my selection as the Liaison Officer for the Mansarovar Yatra that year. That year, I also got medals in the Delhi State Veteran Athletics Championship in 5km walking and shot put.
It was a time when every one-and-a half months, India faced a terrorist attack in some part of the country. There was also public outcry after 26.11.2008. There was a concerted attempt to colour every one of these attacks as ‘saffron’, except that it did not succeed in the case of the 26.11.2008 Mumbai attacks.
Presumably, the government of the day also felt that they had overplayed the saffron narrative and some of the attacks were truly preempted. Hence we felt relieved that in spite of being an election year (2009) the challenges on counter-terrorism front were relatively lesser than the year before.
One thing I would like to state here. Many of my esteemed colleagues from the bureaucracy agree that no officer will knowingly place any information which is not a truth in response to a query by a Parliamentarian. This may be in response to a question, or calling attention motion, or special mention or whatsoever. But lying to any House of Parliament is attendant with grave circumstances. Noticeably, during the period when the ‘Saffron Terror’ narrative was being peddled by the government in power, there was not a single response to any question raised in Parliament in both the Houses, where a reference to Hindu Terror had been made. The responses were primarily as follows:
Pakistan/PoK-based ISI sponsored groups are/have been found responsible for——so & so terror attack.
Throughout this period, for question after question, this had been the standard response from the government.
The Agencies—the police forces, the security agencies and every institution in the security and law enforcing setup of the country—had said, ‘any dialogue with Pakistan was a farce and an exercise in futility’. However, we did have certain interest groups who were able to prevail over the then government.
Since Home Secretary Level Talks 2008 had been rendered useless, the Agencies had been sceptical about a proposed exchange visit by Judicial Committees (refer to Joint Statement at the end of HSLT 2008) from the two countries. The end result was that the Pakistani Committee visited our prisons while reciprocal Indian request was declined.
Being an election year, another new scheme was also introduced. This was known as ‘compensation for victims of terror attacks and communal riots’. It was handled by the National Integration and Human Rights Division. Naturally, the very fact that it was assigned to this Division makes it evident that it was a political largesse intended for the benefit predominantly of victims of communal violence, as it panned out later.
However, the status of investigation of all terror attacks was being monitored by the MHA on a monthly basis. Officials in the the Internal Security Division could clearly see from the documents coming to us, how slowly but surely, the information based on preliminary findings we had from the primary respondents—that is the local police—for every case was changing, changing its original ‘status’.
Cases which had been assigned to NIA had their facts turned upside down. Later on in the year, this monthly MHA monitoring and updating exercise came almost to a stand still.
I
ntelligence since 2005
In 2005, two special groups had been constituted in MHA to be led by the Internal Security Division. One was a cell to monitor the flow of funds to terrorist, FICN trafficking etc. The second was a group to monitor growth of Mosques and Madarsas on both sides of the Indo-Bangladesh and Indo-Nepal Border and flow of funds to these institutions. These groups used to meet regularly.
A very vital and important fact is that all the inputs that MHA had on this were from only Central Agencies. The bordering State governments of those times were fully aware of these activities and the MHA monitoring but were not reporting any information to the Centre.
On the Indo-Bangladesh Border, what was happening in the border districts of West Bengal was rampant radicalisation by Tablighi Jamaat and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) Bangladesh. The BSF Intelligence had done an excellent job of collecting and collating detailed information at that time. Inputs were being received from the IB too. At certain times, papers from one Joint Intelligence Committee headed by S D Pradhan and later, by H Upadhyay were also regularly corroborating these inputs and emphasising on action. But the then Left government of West Bengal turned blind eye to the growth of this fundamentalism. Also, the periodical WB Governors’ Report of the time to the Home Ministry (copy may be available in CS-VI Section) never mentioned the growth of fundamentalist groups even once. The then Governor was Gopalkrishna Gandhi.
This is very relevant now because, had the preemptive action suggested by security agencies been taken by the political establishments in power those days, may be we could have avoided incidents like in Basirhat, or the reported arms trafficking in Bardhaman etc. It was just a matter of time when such similar incidents occured in Murshidabad, Cooch Behar and Malda.
On the Indo-Nepal border also, the growth of fundamentalist organisations was very high in Bihar and certain districts of Uttar Pradesh. The flow of funds to these institutions were from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait through hawala channels and Nepal. Certain Pakistani (if I remember correctly Karachi-based call girls also being sent as honey traps to entice Indian officers) women were used as couriers. In one incident, an officer of the FCRA Division, who had gone on a routine inspection in Bihar, was attacked because he had dared to seek inspection of a NGO which was running a Madarsa. This NGO actually belonged to Mohammad Shahabuddin, now doing time in jail.
In so far as Mumbai 26/11 was concerned, it was not to be monitored in the regular forum. A special team of two officers of the level of Joint Secretary—one from the Ministry of Home Affairs (Secretariat) and another from an investigative agency— was constituted. They received the evidences collected by the State police through the State government, examined their efficacy and took it to the Home Minister. Whether the Special Secretary and Home Secretary were kept in the loop or not is not known to me. The team used men from Internal Security on a need basis. Otherwise the two officers did their job on their own.
Terror Funding
One very important achievement of the team of that time needs to be highlighted. Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is a global cooperative institutional mechanism for combating laundering of money and financing of terrorism under the aegis of the United Nations. At that time, India was attempting to get membership of this body.
The entitlement for membership required a minimum of compliance, with 6-9 out of 40 high standard benchmarks for antimoney laundering and 9 for combating terror financing, known as Recommendations and Special Recommendations. These benchmarks pertained to legal frameworks, implementation of these legal frameworks, the MIS on implementation etc. Suffice it to say here that eventually when India got the membership, it was on account of most of the recommendations pertaining to the Ministry of Home Affairs which were found compliant to these benchmarks to qualify for the membership.
The domain areas of other ministries/departments including the Department of Revenue and Department of Economic Affairs were found wanting in meeting these compliance requirements. I am given to understand that these benchmarks have now been modified. One of the salient persons to whom this success is attributable is P K Mishra, then Director (Internal Security). This gentleman was an Income Tax Service officer. Along with his exposure to counter-terrorism, he had expertise in putting the compliances requirements in place in respect of the MHA domain. In the process, in the government we had an officer who had this unique competency to really attack terror funding legally and administratively. In addition to this international membership, the MHA team also had a lot more going on in the international arena.
It is well acknowledged that finance is the life line of terrorism. It is a fact that Indian intelligence agencies and revenue agencies have busted a lot of cases of funding of terror in India.
In reply to a Rajya Sabha starred question no. 136, for answer on 07.03.2007 regarding funding routes of terrorists to questions from MPs Syed Azeez Pasha (CPM) and K E Ismail (CPI), the documents presented revealed:
According to available reports, terrorist groups in India are receiving funds from abroad mainly through hawala and informal channels. Flow of funds to terrorist groups is estimated to be of the order of several crores every year, though the exact quantum of funds being received by them is difficult to estimate.
Funding of Jehadi Groups:
Flow of funds to terrorist outfits including LeT, JeM, HuM and others is estimated to be of the order of several crores every year, though the exact quantum of funds being received by them is difficult to estimate. Of late, financing of terrorist groups has become systematic and organized. Two trends are noticeable: first, it is now institutionalized and secondly, it has acquired global dimension. The transfer system has become highly sophisticated and is also based on manipulation of formal channels.
Major sources of funding as per the then available inputs were as follows:
Direct financial assistance from ISI is estimated at Rs. 84
crore annually. Overall, the Pak establishment/ Pak ISI
isreported to be spending Rs. 300-400 crores annually to
sponsor terrorism in India.
FICN is also given to terrorists, which is mainly routed via
Nepal. Inputs suggest involvement of Pak diplomatic mission
at Kathmandu.
Reports suggest that drug money is also being used by jehadi
groups. No authentic estimates are however available on the
amount. It is also noted by agencies that the jehadi groups
in association with smugglers could also be earning money
through the drug trade. According to Defence Intelligence
Agency (DIA) estimates, at least 15% of Pak funding comes
from drug money. In Afghanistan, net opium cultivation
climbed by 64% since 2002, and total ‘export value’ to
neighbours increased by 22%. (i.e. US $ 2.3 bn. to $ 2.8 bn.)
Trafficking profits also increased from $ 1.3 bn to 2.2 bn.
Donations are also being collected by Jehadi groups directly.
Jehadi outfits also launch fund raising campaigns in Pakistan
to support their activities (The Herald, July , 2005). Mosque
collections and Zakat are also used by jehadi groups. They are
also reported to be using money earned by the sale of skins
of goats slaughtered on festivals. No estimates are available
on this source.
Pan Islamic Charity Organisations continue to offer funds.
Major such organisations are International Islamic Relief
Organisation (IIRO), Iqra Charitable Institution, Rabita al
Alam al Islami, World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY)
and Al Rashid Trust. IIRO has also set up Sanabil Al Khair
Foundation (SAKF) at Jeddah to streamline fund flows. Funds
collected by the SAKF are largely managed by Habib Bank
Ltd., located at Islamabad. Some of the other institutions
registered abroad include the
Madni Trust (UK) of the
HUJI, AL Haramain (Oregon), Global Relief Foundation
(London), Islamic Relief Worldwide (Burbank), Kashmir Relief Fund (Canada), Umma Relief International (Saudi Arabia), Servants of Suffering Humanity (South Africa) and others..according to the details available at that time of the break up of terrorist funding.
The broad estimates are as follows:
25% comes from Pakistan; 15% comes from narcotics; 10% from arms sale; 10% from FICN; 10% from zakat; 20% from donations received; and the last 10% from extortion. The Harkat ul Mujahideen has declared an increase in its annual income from Rs. 25.067 crores in 2003 to Rs. 30.26 crores in 2004, 66.3% expenditure was incurred on field operations, and balance on ‘base camps’. Expenditure on training showed an increase from Rs. 1.55 crores in 2003 to Rs. 2.2 crore in 2004 suggesting an increase in the cadre strength. This is only declared budget of HuM. The quantum of hidden budget is not available. Figures for other terrorist groups are not available. LeT gets priority in funding (60% according to some estimates). Sayed Salahuddin, Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) Supreme Commander was being paid approx. Rs. 1.7 crore per month by ISI in 2007.
Channels of funding which were identified in 2001-2007 are as follows:
Hawala routes going into Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Jaipur,
Bangalore and Kerala (Hezb e Islami module arrested May
28, 2005 in New Delhi). Dubai and Singapore are reported
to be important hawala centres. Dawood Ibrahim’s network
is also being used to send funds through this channel.
Regular banking channels (e.g. Habib Bank (Pak) which
has links with Himalayan Bank (Nepal JV). The Himalayan
Bank branches along the Indo-Nepal border are reported to