by Barkha Dutt
Less explicably, the same upper echelons of society who complained about privacy and dignity not being preserved in television’s coverage of the Mumbai attacks, were not disturbed by images of a poor man threatening to immolate himself so he could get an unresponsive administration’s attention or by the public spectacle of a farmer’s suicide at a political rally in Delhi. Why were public responses so different both before and after 26/11? And what happened to laments about privacy and dignity when, a few years later, the chatterati vicariously lapped up every single personal detail in the sordid murder saga of Sheena Bora, in which the high-society businesswoman Indrani Mukerjea was the prime accused, coverage that was often so tawdry that it even embarrassed most of us in the fraternity.
When the two planes crashed into the twin towers in New York and brought them down, the image that remained embedded in our heart was that of the unidentified ‘Falling Man’. Taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press it showed a man who plunged to his death from the North Tower, where he and hundreds of others were trapped with no chance of surviving. When the New York Times published the photograph the next morning, it was labelled ‘exploitative and voyeuristic’, words that would be all too familiar to us seven years later. The photograph was deemed so controversial it was struck from the record only to reappear several years later.
When I look back at 26/11 that sense of despairing helplessness was just as disturbingly encapsulated by a single image. From the windows of the Oberoi-Trident hotel people were holding up scraps of paper and cloth, stationery, napkins, whatever they had, for the cameras to capture. Handwritten on these was the single silent scrawl—‘Save Us’. They waved down at us as if to say, don’t let us die. In the alley behind the hotel, friends and lovers stood close together and trained binoculars at the glazed, unbreakable glass to see if they could spot one of their own at the windows.
While these poignant scenes were playing out, throughout the city (as well as the country) the tornado of urban rage was picking up strength. Members of the public were hitting out—first at the politicians, then at the media and then at anything and everything that stood in its path. The anger was inchoate and unfocused. In contrast, the families of those trapped inside the hotels were quiet, philosophical, broken from within but stoic on the outside. Perhaps it was because those watching 26/11 unfold on the television inside their homes were gripped by a fear of the unknown and the realization that the alien now lived in their backyard, whereas those waiting outside those hotels had come together to form a wider community of shared grief. They wanted to talk, they wanted to be heard, they wanted a human connection at a time which was isolating as it was frightening. Those watching, however, probably wanted to be calmed and reassured about their own safety; every story that made them feel otherwise made them angrier with us.
Later I understood the rage against the media a little better. Until 26/11 every time bombs ripped through the bazaars of Delhi or Ahmedabad or Jaipur, it was still largely the poor of India who were the targets of terrorism. Middle-class India had never complained about how we reported on those crises. But 26/11 was too close to the bone in a way that it would never have been had, say, only CST—the main railway terminus—been targeted by Kasab and the other terrorists. This was now about ‘people like us’ and the Indian middle class did not want to be reminded, in the graphic way that TV coverage was capable of, that they too could be bruised by random, destructive violence. The anger grew out of the feeling that they were no longer safe. We, the media, reflected the class gap too. The only time CST, where most of the victims were from the poorer sections of society, really figured in television coverage was to show the CCTV images of Ajmal Kasab entering with a knapsack and a gun slung from his shoulders. Those who died at the railway station barely got attention.
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Is India safer after 26/11? Have we fortified ourselves well enough that such an attack cannot happen again? Although in the wake of the tragedy, our security grid and systems were put under the scanner and numerous recommendations made, in actual fact we are not much better off today. While it is probably impossible to ever make India completely terror-proof, it is ridiculous to see how little improvement has been made in the systems we have in place to deal with terror. In 2011, when serial blasts ripped through Mumbai, I met the then chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan. What he told me about our state of preparedness was frightening. For the first fifteen minutes after the bombs went off he was unable to contact his seniormost officers because the mobile phone circuits got clogged. ‘Networks got congested. I could not contact the chief of police, I could not contact the DG police,’ he told me, ‘until we organized wireless apparatus and came online.’ Three years after the Mumbai attacks no one had thought of giving key police officers satellite phones so the communication lines could always be open. Chavan also revealed that a proposal to procure 5,000 CCTV cameras—often the most critical evidence gathering mechanism—had been gathering cobwebs because no officer was willing to sign off on the file and clear it. Corruption controversies had engulfed recent government procurements and no one was willing to get embroiled. Chavan agreed that ‘bureaucracy had trapped the proposal’. He also revealed his unhappiness at the fact that the all-important portfolio of home affairs—the nodal counter-terrorism ministry—had been given to his ally, the NCP, instead of to the chief minister. ‘Decision making takes time,’ he conceded, ‘it’s very difficult.’ Yet, again the narrow calculation of political survival—in this case to keep the ruling alliance going—had been privileged over decisions that involved human survival. Terrorism, and the debates around it, would always be tragically politicized in India.
III
In the sixteenth century, Panipat was a dusty little village in the north Indian plain that would witness one of the most famous battles ever fought in medieval times—when the Mughal emperor Babur defeated the much larger force of the Lodis ranged against him through the brilliant use of artillery. Two more decisive battles would be fought in Panipat. In the sixteenth century, Emperor Akbar defeated King Hemu, and in the eighteenth century, Ahmad Shah Durrani was victorious against the Marathas. Today, Panipat is an untidy town that straggles along NH1, and is mainly known for its Pachranga pickles and as the country’s single largest centre for the manufacture and sale of blankets and carpets.
In 2007, war came to Panipat again, when the Samjhauta Express (a train that was also called the Friendship Express), which ran two times a week between India and Pakistan, was bombed by terrorists. The bodies littered throughout the wreckage of the train were so scorched and disfigured that it was impossible to separate Indian from Pakistani among the dead. Tubes of Fair & Lovely, embroidered juttis or khusas as they were called across the border, a kaajal stick, a teddy bear; the simple belongings of ordinary folk, whether from Delhi or Lahore, were poignant reminders of the violence that had taken place.
The bombs went off just before midnight as the Samjhauta Express was passing through Panipat. The improvised explosive devices were packed into suitcases that detonated in two of the unreserved coaches on the train. Later, police would discover two more suitcase bombs that did not explode. After the explosion the train continued to hurtle onwards, with some of its carriages wreathed in flames. As the driver was unaware of the explosion that had taken place, the train showed no signs of slowing down, even as fire began to engulf sleeping passengers. People began screaming and banging at the windows and doors as they tried to flee, but the bombs and the fire had jammed the doors of the two bogies in which the explosion had taken place. When the train was finally brought to a stop and the dead were counted and identified, it was discovered that sixty-eight people had been killed, most of them Pakistanis.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, was to arrive in India for talks in four days. Most believed, even in Pakistan, that this was a typical attempt by groups like the LeT to destabilize that dialogue. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf declared that h
e would ‘not allow elements that wanted to sabotage the ongoing peace process to succeed in their nefarious designs’.
Little did anyone know in the immediate aftermath of the blasts that this would soon become the most sensitive—and for India, the most embarrassing—example of Hindu extremism or right-wing terror. It added an entirely new dimension to the conventional narrative around terrorism and while it did not take away from the rising concerns about Islamist fundamentalism, it queered the domestic political pitch like never before. We had seen enough instances of fundamentalism among the loony fringe of Hindu extremist groups but the Samjhauta bombs were the first instance of an organized Hindu terrorist conspiracy.
The National Investigative Agency (NIA) would soon charge-sheet Swami Aseemanand, once the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in the Dangs district of Gujarat, as a key accused in the Samjhauta blasts as well as the terror attack that took place later that year at the venerated Sufi shrine of Ajmer Sharif. Aseemanand would later be granted conditional bail among charges by the Opposition that there was an unofficial go-slow on all cases which could be classified as Hindu terror, an allegation that the NIA chief Sharad Kumar rubbished in an interview to me. Yet the NIA decided not to challenge the bail. Nine months after the court granted him bail, Aseemanand remained in prison because he was also an accused in the Ajmer blasts of 2007.
In another terror strike—the Malegaon blasts of 2008—a serving army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Srikanth Purohit, also a member of right-wing group Abhinav Bharat, was arrested and listed among the main accused by the Maharashtra anti-terror squad. The ATS documents placed in court quoted Purohit as lamenting how weak Hindu groups had become. Even the Shiv Sena and its legacy of anti-Muslim politics was not ‘strong’ enough for Purohit, according to the Mumbai police. ‘In the daytime they shout slogans about protection of Hindus and at night they sit with Muslims and deal in illegal activities,’ Purohit told other members of the Abhinav Bharat. In this case too, there was criticism of the government’s response to Hindu terror. Rohini Salian, the public prosecutor in Maharashtra quit her job alleging that she was under government pressure to go ‘soft’ on the perpetrators.
Political scientist and critic of the BJP, Christophe Jaffrelot, while acknowledging that Hindu terror did not pose the same sort of threat as Islamist groups to national security, argues that the history of Veer Savarkar threw up its own clues to this particular brand of terrorism. ‘As a young revolutionary Savarkar created the first Abhinav Bharat society in 1905. The movement drew its name and its inspiration from Mazzini’s Young Italy, but was also influenced by [Thomas Frost’s] Secret Societies of the European Revolution, a book dealing mostly with Russian nihilists,’ he argued.
In its own defence, the right-wing BJP said the very phrase ‘Hindu terror’ was one designed by the Congress to please the ‘Azamgarh constituency’, a snide reference to a district in eastern Uttar Pradesh from where several young Muslim men had been recently implicated in terror cases. With the issue of terrorism becoming dangerously politicized between hyperbole and denials, in 2013, things reached a head when the BJP threatened to boycott any public function attended by the then home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde. Shinde, an otherwise affable Congress politician, was widely seen to be out of his depth in the home ministry. It was his influence as a Dalit politician that is believed to have been the reason that he got the portfolio. This was a development that again showed how poorly India’s battle against terror was being conducted. It was ridiculous to discover that the front line ministry in charge of counter-terrorism was being handed out like a prize to whoever was seen as influential, rather than choosing the minister on account of his or her expertise in national security. This time, Shinde—who had previously given himself a certificate of ‘excellent’ in an interview to me on the very day the country’s power grid collapsed—had provoked the BJP into reacting. He had accused the RSS and BJP of running ‘training camps’ to incite ‘Hindu terror’. Shinde had always had a reputation for being a bit of a bumbler and for committing verbal faux pas. For instance, in 2012, he had suggested that the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was unaware of the decision to hang Ajmal Kasab. And, sure enough, after an uproar in Parliament, in this case too, he denied the words attributed to him and hastily retracted them.
‘There is no such thing as saffron terror,’ announced BJP MP and journalist Chandan Mitra, who supported his claim by arguing that there were only two kinds of ‘organized’ terrorism—left wing and jihadi. The Congress—wary of a political backlash—was unprepared to take a strong position on whether it believed in the existence of ‘saffron terror’.
‘Some Hindu groups on the fringe may be involved in retaliatory attacks,’ Mumbai’s former police commissioner, M. N. Singh, told me, naming two: Sanatan Sanstha and Abhinav Bharat. But he believed their influence was restricted to pockets of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and thought they lacked the capacity for widespread, organized terror. Nevertheless, they remained a danger to national security. In 2015, members of the Sanatan Sanstha were accused of murdering Professor M. M. Kalburgi, a respected teacher and rationalist. Sameer Gaikwad, a member of the Sanstha, was subsequently arrested for the murder of Govind Pansare, a veteran left activist.
A BJP lawmaker in Goa called the Sanatan Sanstha a ‘terror group’ that must be banned by the centre, but Chief Minister Lakshmikant Parsekar ruled it out, saying the group could not be held responsible for one man’s action. Even more puzzling was why the hard-line group was not clamped down upon despite a 1,000-page dossier on it sent by the then Maharashtra chief minister to the centre at a time when his own party was in power.
The sad truth about India is that sectarian tendencies always have the potential to turn into overtly terrorist actions. This is true of both Hindu and Muslim radicals. I met Milind Joshi Rao, a portly, cheerful spokesperson for Abhinav Bharat who said without flinching, ‘We do believe in a Hindu Rashtra. But that’s because we believe no one can be more secular than Hindus.’ So what does the Abhinav Bharat stand for, I persisted. ‘We stand for making this country truly pro-Hindu. Why can’t we say like John Howard said in Australia about Christians, that in this country Hindus are the majority and so this country will run on the principles of Hinduism?’
Before investigative agencies began to suspect right-wing Hindu groups for their role in the terror attacks in Malegaon, Ajmer, Hyderabad and on board the Samjhauta Express, a series of wrongful arrests were made in almost all of these cases, implicating young Muslim men who were later found to be innocent. In Hyderabad after the strike on the historic Mecca Masjid, as many as seventy men—all Muslims—were arrested and kept in illegal confinement. I met one of these men, Syed Imran, a few months after his acquittal. Initially he was charged with storing at his house the RDX used to set off the bomb; no such explosive was ever found. ‘Do you know they even said I spent ten years training in Pakistan?’ asked Imran incredulously. To my astonishment, he said this not just without a trace of rancour but with a bemused smile. ‘I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Hyderabad, then enrolled to become an engineer. The police had access to all my records, how could they level such a bizarre allegation against me?’ And yet, Imran ended up spending eighteen months in jail, where he was frequently tortured with electric shocks. Imran told me life after his release from prison had been even tougher than the time he spent behind bars. ‘The police still stop by at my house from time to time and harass me with strange questions. I had to go to court to get permission to complete my engineering degree. And after that, it’s been a nightmare getting a job,’ Imran told me. The acquittal had not erased the stain that the initial charge of terrorism had left on his resume; he was viewed with suspicion by potential employers. ‘And yet,’ Imran said, ‘for everything I’ve gone through, I still call myself a proud Indian.’ Inside prison, Imran said, he had been stripped naked and beaten by cops who wanted him to confess his links to the Lashkar
-e-Taiba. ‘I have never stepped out of Hyderabad; I know nothing about the Lashkar. Yet they didn’t believe me. I am a patriotic Indian. But I was not treated as one, was I?’ Imran had one question for those who said there was no equivalence between Islamist terror groups and Hindu terror groups—M. N. Singh had suggested that violence by radical Hindu groups was driven by the need for retaliation to jihadist terrorism—‘If I retaliate for what was done to me, won’t I be immediately branded a terrorist?’ Apart from the glaring question of injustice, if the purpose of terrorist strikes was to damage the amity between Hindus and Muslims and rupture India’s diversity from within, every such fake terror case—whether from incompetence or prejudice—had the potential to alienate young Muslim men from the mainstream. This too would come with its own dangerous implications, especially given the changing face of global terrorism.
On the other side of the ideological and political trenches was the spectre of the Islamic State. Unlike in the West, where people were leaving in the hundreds to join ISIS in Syria, in India intelligence agencies believed that there were only about a hundred young boys whom they had to keep under surveillance. A senior RAW official told me that by his calculation less than twenty had already crossed over; another thirty to forty had been stopped just before they intended to and had been brought back from countries like the UAE before they were lost in the fog of terror. The remaining were those who had been identified as potential terrorists. Four of the southern states of India—Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana—and in the west, Maharashtra, were the centres of recruitment for ISIS in India. Arif Majeed, a young twenty-two-year-old engineer from Kalyan near Mumbai, was the first identified Indian to join ISIS along with a group of three friends he had met on Facebook. Injured in the war, Majeed turned tail and fled to Istanbul where he contacted the Indian embassy. Take me home, he told them. His friends stayed back.