Gujarat: New Theatre of Islamist Terror K.P.S. Gill President, Institute for Conflict Management
Whether by accident or design, even as the second phase of elections was unfolding in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) on September 24, 2002, two terrorists launched an attack in the Akshardham Temple of the Swaminarayan sect of Hindus, one of the most hallowed temples in the western Indian State of Gujarat. They first lobbed grenades and opened indiscriminate fire on the devotees in the crowded hour of the evening aarti (prayer), and then, as darkness fell, entered into a protracted exchange of fire with security forces that lasted through the night. They were eventually killed at dawn by a crack team of the National Security Guard, but only after they had taken the lives of 32 persons, including 16 women and four children, and injured at least another 74. With this outrage, militant Islamists opened up one more theatre of terrorism on Indian soil. There has been a certain inevitability about a terrorist attack in Gujarat for some time now. The international pressure on Pakistan to curb cross border terrorism in J&K has mounted substantially since 9/11 - and can be expected to increase further after the very credible election process in that State. Under the circumstances, it had become necessary to extend the terrorist campaign to other theatres to maintain the cover of deniability, and to project the fiction that Islamist terrorism in this country is an 'indigenous' outcome of the frustrations and despair of the Muslim community. The tragic and indefensible slaughters after the Godhra carnage of February 27, 2002, in the retaliatory riots in Gujarat through the months of March and April, made this State the highest priority in this process, since it is here that Pakistan can most plausibly claim that the violence is 'indigenous', the result of local Muslim anger against the post-Godhra atrocities. It is significant that the Akshardham incident occurred within days after General Pervez Musharraf brought up the issue of the Gujarat riots in his address to the United Nations. Gujarat, however, will not be the last or only destination of such violence - more and more concentrations of Muslim populations will be targeted in this strategy to project to the world that Muslims in India are spontaneously resorting to violence as a result of their growing frustrations in 'Hindu India'. This, precisely, is why the perpetrators of the Akshardham Temple outrage identified themselves as members of an entirely unknown organization, the Tehreek-e-Qisas or 'movement for revenge', although there is preliminary evidence to suggest that they were linked to existing Pakistan based terrorist proxies operating on Indian soil. More significantly, there has been continuous evidence of recurrent efforts by Pakistan backed Islamist extremist groupings to engineer terrorist incidents in Gujarat in the months since the riots in this State. Thus,
These are only a handful of the recent intelligence breakthroughs that prevented acts of terrorism from taking place in Gujarat, and are part of a much larger plan that extends well beyond this State, and that predates the Gujarat riots by many years. Since 1998, for instance, Central intelligence and State police units charged with countering Pakistan-backed terrorism in India outside the State of Jammu & Kashmir, have identified and dismantled at least 162 terrorist and support modules [1998: 29; 1999: 30; 2000: 25; 2001: 59; 2002 (till September 25): 19] located virtually across the country. These figures relate only to terrorist and terrorist support activities, and do not include arrests relating to subversion and espionage charges. Despite these successes, it is in the nature of terrorism that someone will eventually slip through even the most elaborate intelligence and security net. As the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) said to the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, "We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." This is what manifested itself at Akshardham - one more among the many occasions on which the terrorists 'got lucky'. Such occasions, regrettably, will repeat themselves again and again, as long as the motives, the incentives and the external support for terrorism survive.