South Asia Terrorism Portal

Punjab 
Make-believe & a Real Threat

The grenade attack at Nirankari Bhavan on November 18, 2018, is simply another incident in continuous chain of efforts to revive Khalistani terrorism in the Punjab. At no time since the comprehensive collapse of terrorism in the State in 1993 has what KPS Gill, the architect of the state's victory, described as the 'defeated rump' of the terrorist leadership and its Pakistani state sponsors, ever given up this project. Top leadership elements of the Khalistani terrorist formations continue to be protected and resourced by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in their Pakistani safe havens, even as mischievous elements on the extremist fringes of the Sikh Diaspora in the West receive unstinted support from the ISI in the entire range of their activities, from virulent Khalistani propaganda, through recruitment and training, to active conspiracies to orchestrate terrorist attacks, such as the targeted killings of 2016-17, or other patterns of political destabilization, such as the Guru Granth Sahib desecration conspiracy of 2015, in the Punjab.

As usual, there was a great deal of kite flying in the 'expert commentary' that followed the attack at Nirankari Bhavan, with hysterical efforts to link the incident to intelligence reports relating to the presence of Zakir Rashid Bhat aka Zakir Musa in Amritsar. Musa is the head of the rag-tag breakaway of the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen (HM), the Ansar Ghazwat ul Hind, purportedly an affiliate of the Islamic State (formerly Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham) operating in Jammu & Kashmir. Before even preliminary investigations into the incident had been completed, some commentators had already confirmed Musa's and the Islamic State's role in the attack on the Nirankaris. Similarly, relying on intelligence reports relating to the presence of a Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) team of terrorists reported to be moving through the Punjab towards Delhi, several commentators attributed the Amritsar incident to this group. Neither assessment was credible at any stage, and the motivation for both continues to be the divisive ideology of the ruling dispensation at New Delhi which seeks to attribute all acts of extremism and terrorism to Muslim sources as part of its wider project of demonization.

A Pakistani role in the attack on the Nirankaris, through Khalistani proxies is, however, certain, directly or indirectly. Various conspiracies in the past have been linked to the surviving elements of the Khalistani leadership sheltered by the ISI in Pakistan, and Khalistani elements within the Sikh Diaspora maintain intimate linkages with Pakistani state agencies, including the embassies abroad, and receive significant support from both the Pakistani diplomatic and intelligence establishment.

As information around the attack crystallizes, the role of Khalistani radicals is being tentatively confirmed by state agencies. Their eventual and conclusive identification is a matter of time. Meanwhile, every political formation in the State is trying to harness the incident to its own electoral calculus, muddying the waters and ascribing to political adversaries motives and connections to radicalization and destabilization in the State, and to the incident itself. This is mere noise, and could easily be ignored; but there are rising dangers here. Though Pakistani and Diaspora efforts to revive terrorism in Punjab have been continuous, they met with little success for many years. Between 2008 and 2015, the Khalistanis failed to inflict even a single fatality in the Punjab, but three years in a row, since 2016, lethal terrorist strikes have been mounted. Worse, there is a rising environment of political instability in Punjab, and across the country; crucially, it is useful to remind ourselves that violence against the Nirankaris by extremists of the Damdami Taksal, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in 1978-79, is what seeded a decade and a half of terrorism in the State. Political adventurism and irresponsibility envelop the environment in India today, and it would be imprudent to neglect even incipient dangers in a State that has already gone through a long nightmare of terrorism.

Ajai Sahni
Publisher and Editor, Second Sight