by RVS Mani
be providing funds to terrorists in Nepal.
Personal visits (cash):
Pak High Commission (e.g. Sheikh Abdul Aziz (APHC-G)
was arrested (February 17, 2004 in New Delhi) when he
came out of the Pak High Commission (PHC) with 94,000 Dirhams and Rs. 1 lakh in FICN).
The Credit/debit cards issued by Muslim Commercial Bank, which has a tie up with international financial/commercial companies such as ‘Master/Visa have also come to adverse notice.
Prominent illustrative examples of the period are: An instance of the Pak mission in Delhi providing cash for militancy was witnessed in the arrest of Ms Anjum Zamruda Habib of the Muslim Khawateen Markaz who was apprehended (February 6, 2003) after she had received Rs. 3.3 lakhs from the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi and was carrying the cash on her person with instructions to pass on the money to terrorist outfits.
Mujib Nabi Ahmed, a Pak resident agent was arrested from Jamnagar, Gujarat on February 28, 2003 while communicating sensitive defence related information about Army units located at Pune and Ahmed Nagar from a Cyber Café at Jamnagar through e-mail. A note pad recovered from him contained detail account of payments amounting to Rs. 1,58,000/- received through hawala from the Karachi based Pakistan Intelligence Operative (PIO), Lt. Col. Omar between May, 2002 and February, 2003.
Masood Akhtar, A Pak resident agent arrested from Hissar by Haryana Police on March 26, 2003 admitted to have been receiving payments from his handlers in Pakistan through a Mumbai operated Hawala channel.
One Altaf Hussain Mir, a resident of Srinagar, was taken into custody on April 5, 2003 after a sum of Rs. 93 laks was recovered from him. Mir was working as the financial point man for Saiful Islam (late Chief of the J&K division of the HM). A diary found in Mir’s possession revealed the occurrence of financial transactions on behalf of the HM, to the tune of Rs. 3.5 crores.
In the course of Army operations (April 2003) in the Hill Kaka area of J&K, diaries were recovered that showed the receipt of nearly Rs. 67 lakhs by the slain militants from as many as 18 terrorist tanzeems.
On the 10.05.2003, a Hizbul Mujahideen militant namely Ghulam Mohiudden Bhat, was arrested by Delhi Police with Rs. 6.5 Lakhs along with a Chinese pistol and 16 live cartridges etc.
May 13, 2003: Zafar Umar Khan, son of Mohd. Sadique Khan, resident of Poonch (J&K) was arrested by Delhi Police when in addition to arms and ammunition Rs. 4 lakhs hawala money was recovered.
On Aug. 8, 2003 Mohd. Masood @ Mustafa, a UDC in Pak Embassy, Kathmandu was caught red handed by Nepal Police trying to sell fake Indian currency worth Rs. 45,000/-. He was arrested, detained and a FIR was lodged against him. In Aug 28, 2003, one Noor Mohammad Tantray @ Peer Baba@ Gulzar Ahmed Bhat@ Ulwais along with his associates was apprehended by Delhi Police along with Rs. 85, 000/- and grenade launcher, grenade shells, hand grenades, electronic detonators etc. Further investigation led to the recovery of Rs. 19.20 Lakhs.
Decembver 7, 2003: Tarif Hussain son of Bashir Hussain, resident of district Rajouri and Tanzeem Ahmed of Thana Mandi, Rajouri, 2 militants of Hiz-bul-Mujahiddin (HM) were apprehended in Delhi. On search 2 AK 56 rifles with 120 rounds, 4.3 kg of RDX amongst others, 15 lakhs hawala money were recovered.
On January 22nd, 2004 Ayaz Ahmed Shah @ Iqbal belonging to a Pak based terrorist organization was arrested by Delhi Police with 3.5 Kgs explosive and Rs. 3 lakhs was recovered from him Sheikh Abdul Aziz (APHC-G) was arrested on February 17, 2004 in New Delhi, when he came out of the Pak High Commission (PHC) with 94,000 Dirhams and Rs. 1 lakh in FICN.
March 28, 2004: Irshad Ahmed Malik, son of Mohammed Amin Malik of district Doda (J&K) was arrested in Delhi when in addition to arms and ammunition Rs. 2.75 lakhs hawala money was recovered.
On March 5, 2005 Hamid Hussain @ Abu Faisal and Mohammad Sariq were apprehended by Delhi Police with Rs. 2.5 Lakhs Indian currency and Singapore Dollars 10,000 along with one satellite phone, one pistol, live cartridges, hand grenades etc.
On March 25, 2005 Mohammad Ishaq Ittoo was arrested by Delhi Police with Rs. 2.5 lakhs of hawala money, 5.5 Kgs of RDX, and two electronic detonators.
On August 26 2005, Aslam Wani of Srinagar was arrested by Delhi Police with Rs. 62.96 lakhs of hawala money alongwith 5 Kgs. of RDX, 10 electronic detonators etc.
On November 11, 2005 Tariq Ahmed Dar, main conspirator, coordinator and financier of Le T was arrested by Delhi Police. He is involved in the Delhi blasts of that took place at Sarojini Nagar, Paharganj and Govindpuri on October 29, 2005. He had received Rs. 4.86 Lakhs from abroad for executing the blasts.
On February 3, 2006, Nasir Safi Mir, was arrested by Delhi Police with large quantity of explosives, detonator, ABCD timer, arms and ammunitions etc. Rs. 55 Lakhs was transferred to India through money exchange companies through hawala channels for terrorist purpose.
On May 8, 2006, two Le T militants, Firoz Abdul Latif Ghaswala and Mohammad Ali Chippa were arrested by Delhi Police along with 4 Kgs of RDX, 4 detonators and cash of Rs. Fifty thousand.
On July 10, 2006, Azaj Hussain Khwaja was apprehended by Delhi Police with Rs. 49 Lakhs hawala money and 2.050 Kgs of RDX.
Habib Bank
In these extracts of replies to Parliamentary questions et al, the role of Habib Bank Limited in terror funding is clear. Habib Bank Limited has a very interesting personal anecdote. There was a proposal from the Reserve Bank of India, received through the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance, for grant of permission to opening of branches of Habib Bank Limited in India.
Normally, it is well within the domain of RBI or Department of Financial Services. It was a single file proposal meaning, the Department had referred the entire file to us instead of just shooting a letter to MHA seeking our responses. The final concluding note was signed by Arun Ramanathan, the then Secretary of the Department and marked to his counterpart, the then Home Secretary .
I do not remember the date on which the proposal was received. From the Home Secretary’s office, in the laid-down format, the file in its downward journey landed on my desk. No sooner had it landed on my desk, I started getting calls for expediting a favourable response from officers in the Department of Financial Services.
An officer, introducing himself as belonging to the office of one Mr Verma, a Joint Secretary, in the Department of Financial Services, started calling me on my landline. When I checked with my counterpart in the Department of Financial Services, he said there are many such wheelerdealers who misuse the names of officers in their Department.
Notwithstanding, I myself had adequate inputs regarding the adversarial activities of the Habib Bank Limited. I also got some additional inputs from our Agencies, recorded all these adverse records and put these up to my seniors for consideration. The result was predictable. But the aftermath was even more. Habib Bank was denied permission to open branches in India.
The whispering rooms
INDIA IS A country where things unsaid speak volumes. Though not on any official document, one gets to hear things as an MHA official. Actually, it is not as if just one person gets to know, many in the ministries and government get to know what is happening, at any given point in time. Of course, there were the usual office gossips about transfers, punishments etc. Apart from this there were rumours of a more serious nature.
There were some whispers shared in the periodical meetings of the Special Economic Intelligence Cell that the highest office in the country was not happy about the MHA’s role in stopping Habib Bank.
I have already said earlier that in November 2007, the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate visited India. They had come to assess the level of preparedness and systems in place in India to face and counter terror attacks. Their mandate was derived from several of the resolutions passed in the United Nations Security Council.
Their report was generally appreciative of the Indian infrastructure and systems in place. Note: This was just a year before the 26/11 attacks. They did in their re
port recommend certain steps. But these were in the form of reinforcements and higher level of iteration. The relevance of my discussing this report is to share the fact that in India, the framework and infrastructure were in place and had been acknowledged by the United Nations more than a year before 26/11. The human resources were there too. However, in 2008, terror attacks continued to happen. Why? Let me tell you another story.
The D Gang’s long arm
A senior Indian Foreign Service Officer, H S Puri, was to take up appointment as the Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in 2009. While doing his preparatory work, he had identified that the United States as well the United Nations were attempting to include Dawood Ibrahim in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 List. This would have proscribed the man’s cross-country travels, cross-country money transaction, cross-country movement of arms etc.
At first, this officer sought written information from the R&AW and MHA on Dawood. Ministry of Home Affairs is not the repository of information and hence we requested our agencies and CBI to collect and collate whatever information was available on Dawood. While the agencies are intelligence gathering agencies, what was required to buttress the case in the United Nations was more of evidentiary nature.
Only CBI could give such information of evidentiary nature, the backup evidence was all with them. But no response to Puri’s query came forth from the CBI, India’s premier investigative agency in 2009, when P Chidambaram was Home Minister.
Puri later convened a meeting in his chamber. I attended the meeting in which officers of MHA agencies as well as Ministry of External Affairs territorial divisions were present. However, no one ever came from the CBI. CBI, which always claimed to have mountain of evidence against Dawood, was clearly desisting from sharing this information with the nation’s nominated Permanent Representative to the UN.
Whispers. I repeat whispers led to the information that some political quarters were against providing any hardcore evidence against Dawood, to the UN.
At that time, I did not believe this as truth. I also do not know whether the CBI later shared this evidence with the Permanent Representative. As is the laid-down procedure, MHA kept on writing to CBI, as they say in government parlance, we kept sending CBI ‘reminders’. Much later, I was to realise that the CBI was amenable to accommodating political narratives.
Opportunity Costs
Reginald Revans was a great management thinker. He started his career as a nuclear scientist. He was perturbed by the results of research and hence started asking questions. This process of asking questions became the theme of the theory propounded by him. Revans became an organisational thinker and one of his greatest book is titled, Action Learning. In 1994, I had the opportunity of meeting him at his residence in Altrincham in Lancashire county in the UK. He gave me a signed copy of his book. It is a treasure I still hold dear. But more importantly, his ideology is more relevant.
The very essence of his thinking is, every participant should ask the right questions for any organisation to be a learning, developing and enriching organisation. This inculcated in me the urge to raise questions. If not before anyone else, to myself and thus increase my own knowledge.
In this process two things that keep agitating me: while after every unfortunate terror attack the casualties are counted in numbers—of deaths, injuries, security forces killed etc.—no one has ever assessed the loss of assets, both hard and soft.
At the start of my career I cut my teeth in the Industry Ministry. Those days it was called the Department of Industrial Development. Hence, I am curious to know how terrorist disturbances affect industrial activity as well as productivity and what is its overall impact on the Indian economy? Once when I was reading the story of a survivor of the Mumbai train attacks, I learnt that prior to the attack, the survivor was a biotechnologist working on frontier areas of research. But the attack crippled him. Unfortunately, it may be a personal loss, yet it should also be appreciated that it is indeed a loss of critical human resource to the nation.
In this context, movement of a consignment between Delhi to Mumbai in my days in the Industry Ministry could take any time between 20 to 30 days. Hence the Udyog Bhavan was flooded with gifting liaison officers of various companies chasing files, so that their paperwork for movement of imported capital goods, or export consignments are seamlessly transported. Loss to industrial activity and cascading loss to economy and tax net on account of law and order disturbances are never factored in, in our accounting process for terrorism.
These are only an opportunity cost as an economist put it. But to drive away investments on account of law and order is a crime on the state. This also happened in my tenure in the Internal Security Division. People may recall the Nandigram and Singur disturbances in this context.
In one case, leading automobile manufacturer Tatas had dreamt a people’s car which later was brought out as the Nano. They had acquired land for setting up the plant in West Bengal. Along with the Tatas, their ancillary vendors had also bought land and had started fabricating for their respective plants. Leave alone any loss of land, this plant along with its suppliers chain, would have brought direct employment opportunities to so many locals.
But Mamata Banerjee, a prominent political leader of West Bengal, scuttled the project. This leader mobilised the masses. A challenging law and order situation was created. As a result, huge resource deployment had to be done, causing pressure on the forces. The cost of this will never be factored. But the investments on account of both Singur and Nandigram were driven out. Two huge investment opportunities lost to Bengal. The locals lost job opportunities. The automobile investor shifted to Gujarat, with a resultant rise in the cost of the project. The wasted resources went down the drain. The investor had to suffer time lag in the project. Is there any compensation from the protestors?
But the irony hasn’t stopped. This political leader was elected the next Chief Minister of the State. I generally tend to agree with Bibek Debroy of NITI Ayog on the demographic dividend. But this dividend can be harnessed only if these are invested upon by way of skills and also offered opportunity. Otherwise, such huge cache of youth idle, with no opportunity for productive deployment, is a bombshell of social catastrophe waiting to happen. It is like sitting on a volcano. That’s one of the aggregators of today’s problem in that State with terrorist incidents like Basirhat, Bardhaman etc.
The Bunty-Babli cases
Being a civil servant has the virtue of being exposed to various situations. Sometimes, situations narrated in fictions come true. Many readers might have read the famous novelist Jeffrey Archer’s Honour Among Thieves. The protagonist was a small-time criminal who makes a living by forging originals. He was hired to and he did forge the American Declaration of Independence. Similarly, we have our own desi version of the Bollywood film, Bunty aur Babli, in this the famous Taj Mahal was sold with forged documents.
One late evening on a Saturday, while we were preparing to go home, a telephone call from the PMO stopped us in our tracks. We were told to wait for instructions regarding some matter warranting urgent attention. After a while, an envelope was handed over to Director (Internal Security). Upon opening the envelope, we were astonished. We did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Some iconic property in Lutyens Delhi belonging to the Government of India and the official residence of the incumbent Prime Minister had been sold. The purchaser was an NRI from the UK. He had purchased the property, and the conveyance had been registered in the Amritsar Sub Registrar Office in Punjab. Anyone inquisitive to know may visit the Amritsar Sub Registrar Office and inspect the folios pertaining to the period 2005-2007.
Since his possession was not forthcoming, the NRI initiated court proceedings and got an execution order from a court in the UK. I do not recall if it was the Sheffield court or the Coventry court. The said order was served on the Indian High Commission, London, who had passed it on to their Ministry and the Prime Minister’s O
ffice.
The Internal Security Division had to do the job of investigation, inquiry, and settlement. In the process, later we were informed that one Assistant Registrar in the land record office was suspended and proceeded against as per the rules.
Who is the victim?
Actually, we as a society, never give credit to policemen when they do an outstanding job. I would like to share with my readers some relevant portions of my draft affidavit which was filed in the Allahabad High Court.
Cooperation between the intelligence agencies of the Central government and the State government of UP has been good, and significant operational successes have been achieved in recent times due to such cooperation. It is worthwhile to mention here that three Pakistani terrorists of a particular terrorist group were arrested in a well-coordinated operation by the UP Police based on information from a Central agency.17 Similarly, a major tragedy was averted with the busting of a terrorist module, which had plans to target a passenger train during the Shraavan Mela in the month of July. Earlier, the Central government agencies had made important contributions towards successful investigation of major terrorist crimes such as the terrorist attack on Ram Janma Bhoomi at Ayodhya and the twin blasts at Varanasi.
It is not that these were an one-off event. Cooperation between law enforcing and security agencies of Centre and State is a continuous process. We had achieved a lot of success in preventing and preempting many terror attacks which go unreported. I would like to highlight a few attacks which the people should know about. They will respect the police and security establishment. They will stop ridiculing them. It is for a social cause that I am bringing this on record.
A very vital security-related establishment is located in a west coast town named Bhatkal. In very close proximity is a breeding ground for terror activities. One of the prominent leaders of the Indian Mujahideen, Yasin Bhatkal hails from Bhatkal. He has the name of this place as a part of his name. He is serving his term, having been convicted in one of the attacks he had engineered. There are two more, presumably his brothers Riaz and Iqbal, who are also Indian Mujahedeen members, whose names have also prominently figured in terror attacks, terror funding, FICN trafficking etc.