IM IS NOT ALL THAT INDIAN

06 January 2014

Sapna Singh

‘Indigenous’ terror group supported by Pakistan

South Asia expert Stephen Tankel's recent study of the Indian Mujahideen only proves what has been known for long within India's strategic circles — the terror group is propped up by Pakistani elements, and it is the lifeblood that it receives from across the border which makes this ‘home-grown' outfit so lethal and destructive. Mr Tankel’s detailed report exposes how the Indian Mujahideen has been nurtured, especially in its initial years, by well-established terror groups in Pakistan such as the Laskhar-e-Tayyeba.

Unsurprisingly, the LeT is also known to be the Inter-Services Intelligence agency's preferred weapon to fight its proxy war against India. The study underlines how the relative success of the Indian Mujahideen has allowed Pakistan the luxury of changing its terror-export policy for India. From using Pakistani nationals to carry out attacks on India, the focus is now on recruiting Indian locals for the job. This brings Pakistan the benefit of plausible deniability which is a major plus point, according to Mr Tankel, as terror groups there, along with their patrons in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, seek to navigate the ongoing peace process with New Delhi.

Consequently, the focus is on disaffected Indian Muslim youths, who are trapped in the victim narrative and tempted by the prospect of avenging the ‘wrongs’. This understanding of how external factors exacerbate internal faultlines should be an eye-opener for Indian Mujahideen apologists in the country who justify the group's violence as a reaction to the ‘marginalisation’ of Muslims in India. While it is true that recruiters play on this alleged sense of social injustice and use emotive events to manufacture a sense of political persecution, the fact is that without Pakistani support, the Indian Mujahideen would not have been capable of the kind of damage that it has been doing.

A number of major terror attacks in India — from Patna to Hyderabad, in recent years — have been attributed to the Indian Mujahideen. Yet, not so long ago, high-ranking Government officials claimed that the group simply did not exist. Back in 2008, a member of the Colombo-bound delegation on board the Prime Minister's aircraft had famously said: “There is no such thing as Indian Mujahideen”. More than five years later, Mr Tankel's study of the group's organisational structure offers a more a nuanced understanding of that statement. The Indian Mujahideen is a loosely-knit umbrella group with a decentralised leadership.

Often, individual units even carry out attacks that are not sanctioned by the top leadership — making it difficult to decide between attacks that are the handiwork of the Indian Mujahideen and those that are launched by ‘lone wolf' modules. Interestingly, most jihadi networks in the world today function in this manner, making them especially resilient and almost impossible to defeat militarily. Al Qaeda, for instance, is growing as a mesh-like structure (although it still has a more firm framework than the Indian Mujahideen). Therefore, even as the group's arm in the AfPaK region is weakened, its affiliates in Yemen and Somalia have gained strength, making the network virtually indestructible.