Enduring Terrorism

Hon'ble Chairmen, Hon'ble Members of the Sub-Committees on Asia and the Pacific and InternationalTerrorism, Non-Proliferation and Human Rights,

I thank all of you for inviting me to testify at this joint hearing today and to give my assessment ofcross-border terrorist challenges facing India and their implications for the counter-terrorism policies ofthe United States.

THE BACKGROUND

2. India has been the victim of the use of cross-border terrorism by the State of Pakistan and its intelligenceagencies since 1956 to achieve their strategic objectives, which are three in number. First, to create areligious divide between the Hindus, who are in a majority, and the Muslims, who are in a substantialminority. Second, to keep the Indian State destabilised and preoccupied with internal security tasks in orderto hamper the economic development of the country. And third, to annex the State of Jammu & Kashmir(J&K), which is an integral part of India.

3. When India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, the Muslims constituted about 11 per cent of India'spopulation. Today, they constitute about 14 per cent. In 1947, in the territory, which is now known asPakistan, the Hindus constituted a little over 10 per cent of the population. Today, they constitute about twoper cent. The rest of them were either massacred or driven out of the country or forcibly converted to Islam.

4. Today, India has the second largest Muslim community in the world with about 140 million plus, afterIndonesia.  India has more Sunnis and more Shias than Pakistan.  They are guaranteed equal rightsunder the Constitution of India, which was inspired by the Constitution of the United States of America.

5. The Indian Muslims suffer from no discrimination from the State and are entitled to occupy any office of theGovernments of India and the constituent States, however highly placed, however sensitive. Three distinguishedMuslim sons of India have held office as the President of India.  Mr.Abdul Kalam, the current Presidentof India, was a distinguished space scientist and had served as the Scientific Adviser to the Ministry ofDefence of the Government of India before he was elected as the President of India.

6. Illustrious Muslims of India have held office as Cabinet Ministers, as the Chief Justice of India, asAmbassadors to important countries, including the USA, as the Cabinet Secretary, which is the senior most postto which an Indian civil servant can aspire to rise in his career, as the Home Secretary, as the Chief of theAir Staff , as Lieutenants-General in the Army and as the heads of Police and Para-Military organisations. The Cabinet Secretary co-ordinates the functioning of the different Ministries of the Government of India andof its sensitive intelligence agencies. The Home Secretary exercises important internal security tasks and, inthat capacity, monitors the working of India's Intelligence Bureau (IB), which is responsible for internalintelligence.  No Hindu has ever been posted to such sensitive posts in Pakistan. Hindus have served asmembers of the Council of Ministers in Pakistan, but without any sensitive charge.

7.If one leaves aside the State of Jammu & Kashmir, which has been affected by Pakistan State-sponsoredterrorism since 1989, no Indian Muslim from other parts of India went to Afghanistan in the1980s to join thejihadi mercenary force which fought against the Soviet troops.   When the US-led international coalitionlaunched its Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, no Indian Muslim, not even fromJ&K, responded to the call of the jihadi terrorist organisations of Afghanistan and Pakistan to go toAfghanistan to wage a jihad against the US troops. There were no major anti-US demonstrations by the IndianMuslims to protest against Operation Enduring Freedom.

8.Similarly, at a time when pro-Osama bin Laden jihadi terrorists are gravitating towards Iraq to wage a jihadagainst the US troops there, not a single Indian Muslim has responded to the call.  Whereas the variousfundamentalist and jihadi organisations in Pakistan have been collecting funds for the so-called jihad againstthe Americans in Iraq, there have been no such instances in India.

9. Hon'ble Chairmen, Hon'ble Members, if you happen to take a stroll in the streets of many Asian cities, youwill find bin Laden T-shirts, bin Laden caps and other mementoes glorifying him.  But not in India. Since 9/11, many books on bin Laden and his Al Qaeda have been published  -- some correctly projectinghim as a contemptible terrorist and some glorifying him as a great Islamic leader.  Many of these booksfigure in the best-sellers' lists of other countries.  But not in India.

10. It is often not realised that as many young Muslim students from other countries come to India for theirhigher education as they go to Pakistan, if not more. There have been only two instances in the history ofjihadi terrorism of foreign Muslims, who had studied in India, joining jihadi terrorist groups.  In 1992,the Israeli security forces arrested a Palestinian terrorist, who was found to have been educated in India.The second instance is that of Abu Zubaidah, who used to be reportedly No.3 in Al Qaeda, and who was arrestedin Pakistan in March,2002. He was a law-abiding student of computer technology in India, but when he crossedover into Pakistan, he joined Al Qaeda.

11. All other foreign Muslim students, who were educated in India, went back to their countries of origin asconstructive, modern and law-abiding citizens of their country and are doing well as public servants,academics, media personalities etc. The most illustrious example of recent times is that of Mr.Hamid Karzai,the interim President of Afghanistan, who has rightly won the admiration of the international community and ofthe leaders and people of the USA as a proud, modern Muslim wedded to liberal ideas. Why? He did his highereducation in India and spent some of his formative years in the two greatest democracies of the world---Indiaand the USA.

12. Kindly do compare this with foreign Muslim students who go to Pakistan for their studies. Many of themreturned to their countries of origin as destructive citizens--as jihadi terrorists, as narcotics smugglers,as counterfeiters of US dollar notes etc.

13. It is said that the USA's counter-terrorism experts have been interrogating in the detention centres inGuantanamo Bay in Cuba and other places nearly 6,000 jihadi terrorists arrested during Operation EnduringFreedom.  They are of many nationalities, but reports say that there is not a single Indian Muslimamongst them.

14. The USA has a large number of Muslims of Pakistani and Indian origin.  In the 1990s, a Muslim extremistorganisation called the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra was active in the US and Canada.  Its activities figured in theannual reports of the Counter-Terrorism Division of the State Department on the Patterns of Global Terrorism. It had indulged in acts of violence against the Hindus and the Jewish people in the USA.  It is said thatDaniel Pearl, the young American journalist, who was kidnapped and brutally killed by the jihadi terrorists ofPakistan last year, had gone to Karachi to investigate reports of possible links between the so-called shoebomber and the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra.

15. It was reported in the media that last year the FBI had arrested some Muslims of Yemeni origin at Lackawanna,near Buffalo, in the USA who were found to have been taken to Pakistan and Afghanistan by the Pakistani branchof an organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) and brainwashed there. The TJ has its headquarters inIndia.  Its Indian branch does the humanitarian work for which it was established during the Britishdays, namely, to help the Muslims to become better Muslims.  But, its Pakistani branch has degeneratedinto a front organisation for the recruitment of foreign Muslims to various jihadi terrorist groups.

16. Recently, the US law enforcement authorities were reported to have detected in US territory the activities ofa secret cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a Pakistani jihadi terrorist organisation, which was designated bythe US in 2001 as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.  It has been reported in sections of the media thatsome of its members were Muslims of Pakistani origin.

17. In February 1995, the News, the prestigious daily newspaper of Pakistan, had carried a series ofinvestigative reports on the activities of the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), a Pakistani jihadi terroristorganisation, which re-named itself as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) after it was designated by the US as aForeign Terrorist Organisation in October,1997.  The articles quoted an unidentified representative ofthe HUA as claiming that amongst the foreign Muslims trained by it were 16 Afro-American Muslims from variouscities of the US.

18. The paper reported on March 27,1995, as follows:

"Official investigation has revealed that dozens of Saudis committed to jihad all over the world havebeen visiting the military training camps inside Afghanistan.  Sources estimated that at least 2,000persons, mostly Pakistanis and Arabs of different nationalities, are currently engaged in military training inthose camps for jihad in Kashmir and elsewhere in the world.  These sources estimated that since theexpulsion of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, at least 10,000 Pakistanis belonging to the Islamic partiessuch as the Jamaat-e-Islami, the HUA, the Markaz Dawa Al Irshad and the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam have acquiredtraining in making bombs, hurling grenades, firing from light and heavy weapons and in laying mines. TheHarkat and all other militant organisations committed to Islamic jihad all over the world have acknowledgedsending their guerillas to Tajikistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Burma and Kashmir.  TheJamaat-e-Islami, the Harkat and other organisations have never been challenged by the Government in theircampaign to recruit committed Muslims to commit jihad anywhere in the world. These organisations are alsopermitted to collect jihad funds anywhere in the country."

19. One would be entitled to ask : How is it that the Muslim migrants from India conduct themselves asconstructive and law-abiding citizens or residents of the USA and do not indulge in activities which couldthreaten US nationals or interests, but many Muslim migrants from Pakistan indulge in clandestine activitiesfor carrying the jihad to the US homeland?

20. An objective examination of this question would show that one cannot blame Islam as such for the spread ofjihadi bloodshed in the world. What one has to blame is a particular interpretation of Islam by some religiousclerics and madrasas of Wahabi-Deobandi orientation in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This interpretation holds,firstly, that a Muslim's first loyalty is to his religion and only then to the country of which he is acitizen or a resident; secondly, that Muslims recognise only the religious frontiers of their Ummah and notthe national frontiers; thirdly, that they have a sacred right and obligation to go to any country to wagejihad to protect the Muslims of that country; and, fourthly, that they have a religious right and obligationto acquire and use weapons of mass destruction (WMD), to protect their religion and the Ummah, if necessary. They project Pakistan's atomic bomb as the Islamic bomb to counter the Christian bomb, the Jewish bomb or theHindu bomb.

21. This interpretation of Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for some years now is as subversive ofdemocracies and as threatening to international peace and security as international communism was before 1991and has to be combated as resolutely by the liberal democracies of the world as they combated the evil ofinternational communism.  In fact, even more resolutely, because one did not find in internationalcommunism the kind of irrationality that one finds in pan-Islamic jihadi Islamism.  Internationalcommunism projected itself as forward looking and moving ahead.  Pan-Islamic jihadi Islamism is backwardlooking and wants to take the Islamic world back to the medieval ages, with the Muslim communities of theworld organised into a number of Caliphates.

22. The Indian Muslims have largely remained uninfluenced by the winds of medievalism blowing from Pakistan. The religious fundamentalists and the military-intelligence establishment of Pakistan cannot understand how aHindu majority State like India can produce such good Muslims.  What is called the two-nation theory isthe basic philosophy of Pakistan.  It holds that Muslims and non-Muslims cannot be part of the samenation. It is in pursuance of this theory that they campaigned for the partition of India.

23.This theory was falsified by the independence movement in the former East Pakistan and the consequent birth ofBangladesh. The remarkable spectacle of millions of moderate Muslims, not subscribing to the jihadi ideology,living and working peacefully and side by side with non-Muslims in the democratic State of India furthernegates this theory.  They are, therefore, determined to create a religious divide in India through theuse of jihadi terrorism in order to re-establish the validity of their two-nation theory.

24. It is this determination, which has been behind the use of State-sponsored terrorism by Pakistan againstIndia.  Its claim that the so-called dispute over J&K is the cause of the terrorist violence killingthousands of innocent civilians is a spin and a diversion.  Kashmir is not the cause, but only a pretextfor creating bloodshed in India.  Just as Palestine is not the cause, but only a pretext used by Al Qaedaand others of the same persuasion for killing hundreds of Israelis and Americans.  Unless and until thisjihadi terrorism is crushed by the common understanding and joint efforts of India, the USA and Israel, thethree greatest democracies and pluralistic societies of the world and the most bleeding victims of it, theinternational community will continue to bleed at the hands of the jihadi terrorists.

25. Since 1993, the international community has seen a prairie fire of jihadi terrorism spread across the world byOsama bin Laden, his Al Qaeda and the various constituents of his International Islamic Front (IIF) For JihadAgainst the Crusaders and the Jewish People.  Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by thejihadi terrorists owing allegiance to bin Laden in New York, Washington DC, Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam, Bali,Jakarta, southern Philippines, various cities of India, Karachi, Islamabad, Mombasa, Casablanca, Riyadh,Moscow, Chechnya, Xinjiang etc .

26. If one makes an objective analysis of these incidents, one would invariably find that practically all of themhad a linkage to the jihadi terrorism triangle of Pakistan-Afghanistan-Saudi Arabia. Many of the terroristswere either the nationals or residents of these countries; or had studied there and had been brainwashed bythe religious fundamentalists there; or were funded from there; or were trained, armed and motivated fromthere ; or provided sanctuary in those areas.

INDIA'S NORTH-EAST: THE BEGINNING

27. It is against this background that one should examine Pakistan's use of terrorism as a weapon against India.Its initial use of the weapon in the tribal areas of India's North-East starting from 1956 had nothing to dowith Islam. It exploited the grievances of the tribals of this region to instigate them to start a movementfor independence from India on the ground that they were ethnically different from the people in the rest ofIndia.

28. Its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provided the tribal insurgents sanctuaries in the then East Pakistan,where they were imparted guerilla training and given money, arms and ammunition. The birth of Bangladesh in1971 considerably reduced Pakistan's ability to sponsor insurgency and terrorism in India's North-East.

29. This led to a peaceful political solution being found to the problem of insurgency in Mizoram where normalcyhas been prevailing since 1985. In Nagaland too, a large section of the Naga insurgents gave up violence andreached a political solution to their grievances through negotiations with the Government of India in 1975. Only a small section belonging to the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Issac Swu-Muivah group) has notyet given up its insurgency, but it has been observing a cease-fire and is presently negotiating with theGovernment of India.

30. Insurgent groups in other parts of the North-East such as Assam, Manipur and Tirupura are still active. Someof them remain in touch with Pakistani intelligence agencies through clandestine contacts in Bangladesh andother third countries.