T
he jihadi strategy has repeatedly been articulated by terrorist leaders located in Pakistan. Thus, Nasr Javed, a trainer of LeT suicide attackers, delivering a speech after the evening prayer at the Quba Mosque in Islamabad on February 5, 2008,stated: "India is also afraid of jihad. India fears that if the Mujahideen liberated Kashmir through jihad, then, it will be very difficult to keep rest of the India under control. Jihad will spread from Kashmir to other parts of India. The Muslims will be ruling India again." He added, further, "We want to tell the Kashmiri brothers that thegovernment of Pakistan might have abandoned jihad but we have not. Our agenda is clear. We will continue to wage jihad and propagate it till eternity. Nogovernment can intimidate us. Nobody can stop it--be it the US or Musharraf."
A year earlier, addressing a huge gathering at the Al Qudsia Mosque at Lahore on February 5, 2007, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Amir (Chief) of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (also known asJama'at-ud-Da'awa), had declared that the "jihad in Kashmir will end when all the Hindus will be destroyed in India… jihad has been ordained by Allah. It is not an order of a general that can be started one day and stopped the other day." Much earlier, during a three-day annual congregation of the members of theMarkaz-ud-Da'awa-wal-Irshad at Muridke near Lahore on February 6, 2000, Saeed had declared that Kashmir was a "gateway to capture India" and that it was the aim of the Markaz and its military wing, the LeT, to engineerIndia's disintegration.
The LeT has been able to recruit non-Kashmiri jihadis in order to orchestrate attacks across India. The arrests in Rampur and Lucknow only reaffirm the apprehensions that the Lashkar network is gradually being "extended and exported" to other parts of India. The Uttar Pradesh Director-General of Police, Vikram Singh, disclosed that the arrested militants had planned terrorist attacks at Churchgate in Mumbai, the Bombay Stock Exchange and Army convoys in Rampur and Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. Preliminary interrogation of these jihadis as well as interrogation reports of militants arrested in J&K and elsewhere in India clearly demonstrate theLeT's nationwide striking potential.
T
he south of India is now also increasingly coming under the terrorist radar, although the Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorist threat to the region has been in existence at least since the early 1990s. The repeatedly declared intention to target"India's growing economic sinews has also resulted in escalated threat perceptions in the more dynamic cities of the South, particularly Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai."