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Terrorism in South Asia nothing official about

The modern version of terrorism came to undivided India a few years before the Second World War and continued till 1947, courtesy of militant factions of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Communist Party of India (CPI). Side by side with Gandhian principles of non-violence, terrorist cells of those political parties carried out attacks against “enemy” targets, most of them British, including communication centres, railways and bureaucrats, etc anybody adjudged to be collaborators or useful to the British war effort. A young Hindu girl hardly in her teens, shot dead the Deputy Commissioner of Comilla at point blank range in the 30s. The use of terrorism to accomplish the means of the State was incorporated as State policy by India from the time of independence in 1947 and as an instrument of its implementation, Research and Analytical Wing (RAW) was created several years later. RAW was meant to keep India’s neighbours in line and/or cut them down to size, taking active part in the 60s in anti-Pakistan movement in the East Pakistan, culminating in the pro-Bangladesh movement in 1971, aided no end by the short sightedness and selfishness of the then leaders of Pakistan. RAW’s modus operandi remains a model for cross-border terrorism in South Asia, terrorist activity coming to (West) Pakistan in earnest not from the East but from Kabul in the Northwest, along with the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in the late 70s. Bombs exploded in markets, bus stands, railway stations and other public places etc throughout Pakistan in the 80s, sometimes at the rate of more than one a day. The dead and injured numbered in the thousands annually as the Soviet KGB, along with Afghan KHAD and Indian RAW made a major effort to break Pakistani civilian morale (and thus Pakistani support for the Afghan cause) by terrorist attacks directly and/or indirectly through paid agents and surrogates.

Al-Zulfikar may not have been a creation of the Indians, it was partly funded and sustained by them for most of its existence. Enough evidence was available with the intelligence agencies for an aggrieved sister, then PM Benazir Bhutto, to keep her only living brother Murtaza at arms length till he was assassinated by rogue elements in her own police services in 1996. In the late 70s, the island paradise of Sri Lanka was economically booming and on its way to become another Singapore, RAW created the plan to promote strife between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, supporting the concept of Tamil Ealam (Tamil Liberation). Parbhakaran Tigers, along with other Tamil insurgent movements, were trained by RAW operatives in camps in and around Madras. Like Sikh militant Bhindranewala, Parbhakaran ultimately fell out with his RAW creators and gave the Indian Peace-Keeping Forces (IPKF), that had come to Sri Lanka to establish somewhat of a PAX INDIAN quite a bloody nose, but still receives funding from sympathizers in South India. The report on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination clearly spells out continuing low-level RAW involvement with LTTE, though they claim there is “nothing official about it”.

Terrorist activity in the region is a natural residual of the Afghan war. With the Soviet withdrawal the many Mujahideen factions ran virtual fiefdoms in the territories they controlled. “Octroi Posts” sprung up everywhere on stretches of road, sometimes not even five miles apart. The purity of the independence struggle of the Afghan came apart at the seams, the great silent majority having to take part in factional (and sub-factional) struggle as individual leaders strained for supremacy, pressure being “enforced by the barrel of the gun”, to quote Mao Tse Tung. The Mujahideen factions were further sub-divided among those who wanted to continue the purity of the ideological struggle both inside Afghanistan (and elsewhere in the world) as opposed to outright criminals who wanted to go into business on their own, looting, kidnapping, highway robbery, protection money racket, etc. From a small core group in Kandahar taking part in an inconsequential incident, Mullah Omar formed the Taliban, who were so successful in restoring peace, by de-weaponisation and strict application of the rule of law in the areas they controlled, that “the great silent majority”, some of whom were not in conformity with their rather austere ideology, joined the Taliban in droves. Among the Taliban were a great many volunteers from many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Sudan, etc. Some of them turned their attention to their home countries as malcontents in an extension of the religious war (Jihad) they had waged against the Soviet oppression in Afghanistan. In a 180 degree change of roles, by indulging in activities directed primarily against civilian targets, from freedom fighters they become terrorists, a majority of their victims being innocent bystanders unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. One can eulogise Osama bin Laden for the successful guerilla war he waged against the Soviets in Afghanistan, what are we to make of the hundreds of innocents who died in the bombings of the US Embassy in Nairobi and Dar es Salam ? That is pure terrorism, there being no justification whatsoever for the murder of these poor innocent people. Freedom fighter Osama may have been, by any token he is now outside the pale of civilised society and is a terrorist.

India has tried desperately to paint the freedom struggle in Kashmir as terrorist activity in international eyes. Many veteran Mujahideen of the Afghan war having volunteered to physically help the Kashmiris in their struggle, the Indian attempt is to provide a linkage between US Enemy No.1 Osama bin Laden and Kashmiri Mujahideen. The Indians have used the Kargil crises and the Kathmandu hijack as evidence of Pakistani involvement at official level in cross-border terrorism. It may be true that some of the freedom fighters who have been trained in Afghan camps have infiltrated into Indian-Held Kashmir but any such struggle has to have indigenous support, otherwise how long can it survive? And one may well ask, why is this indigenous struggle still alive in the face of massive Indian repression? A majority of the civilian casualties in the resultant crossfire have been downed because of callous and indiscriminate Indian fire. Most of the freedom struggle is directed against Indian occupation troops and their facilities, virtually all military targets, even the Indians themselves acknowledge this. Whereas their propaganda machine has not managed a “smoking gun” link between Osama bin Laden and Kashmir, his continued presence in Afghanistan is a source of acute embarrassment not only to Pakistan but also to the Government in Kabul. The Taliban cannot turn from him because Afghan culture will not allow a friend in trouble to be evicted from his sanctuary. On the other hand the US has hard evidence he is misusing that protection to further terrorist activity against US interests throughout the world. An equitable solution to this impasse has to be found and soon !

India is the only country in the world after the Second World War that continues to occupy adjacent territories and continues to do so. Were not Kashmir, Hyderabad, Junagarh, Sikkim etc free States in 1947? Did Goa, Daman and Diu cede voluntarily to India or were they taken by force of Indian arms? India is the only country in the world that has border disputes with all its neighbours. In this age when countries have substituted regional hegemony by binding and equitable economic links, India’s bid to impose its hegemony over South Asia and the Indian Ocean is reflected in the massive 28% increase in its defence budget, surely the biggest outlay for defence by any country in the world at this time. India accuses Pakistan of conducting a “proxy war”, what has it been waging against all its neighbours for over 50 years? Siachen was not even an issue till the Indians made it in 1984 into the highest battleground in the world.

Partly because of economic reasons, partly because of the media blanket India has successfully thrown over its many insurgencies, the world has turned a blind eye to India’s excesses as a terrorism-exporting entity. A fair number of the insurgencies in the Northeast e.g. Mizoram, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Bodoland, etc being Baptist Christians with support from like-religious groupings in US and other countries of the world, do we also label them as Christian terrorists? The world is being fed deliberately misleading Indian propaganda about Pakistan, one has to separate terrorism from support for a broad based and indigenous freedom struggle of an oppressed people. One cannot condone any operation by ISI any time it acts in support of terrorism anywhere but one has to separate that from support for a freedom struggle. India is the only full-time practitioner of State-sponsored terrorism in South Asia, either against land that it occupies or against the people’s will and/or the war that it wages against its own people.

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