Seven members of the Central Reserve Police Force(CRPF) and one civilian were reported to have been killed between 2 and 3 AM onJanuary 1, 2008, when a group of four unidentified terrorists, reportedly armedwith AK-47 rifles and hand-grenades, attacked a camp of the CRPF at Rampur inUttar Pradesh.
According to Shri Brij Lal, AdditionalDirector-General of Police in charge of Law & Order, the terroristsopened fire killing two CRPF men and hurled grenades while entering the camp. Inthe firing inside the premises, five CRPF jawans, who were sleeping, werekilled.
Since March, 1993, there have been periodicincidents of jihadi terrorism in Indian territory outside Jammu & Kashmir.While the majority of these incidents involved the use of improvised explosivedevices (IEDs) and were directed at civilians and other soft targets, there havebeen instances of attacks on security forces personnel with hand-held weapons.Examples: Attacks on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, on thesecurity guards outside the US Consulate in Kolkata in January, 2002, on thesecurity forces personnel guarding the Akshardam Temple in Ahmedabad inSeptember, 2002, at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh in July, 2005, and on scientistsattending a conference in Bangalore in December, 2005.
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The Rampur attack of January 1, 2008, was on awell-protected hard target of a central police force and avoided indiscriminatekilling of civilians. The attack seems to have been well-planned and executedwith the objective of achieving maximum public impact with minimum civiliancasualties.
On November 23, 2007, 13 persons were killed inseven well-synchronised attacks with IEDs near courts in three different citiesof Uttar Pradesh--Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad. An e-mail received by somesections of the media coinciding with the attacks claimed responsibility for theattacks as well as for some of the previous incidents of terrorism in differentparts of India on behalf of what it described as the "IndianMujahideen". The e-mail said: "We are not any foreign Mujahideen. Weare purely Indian." It warned: "Our next target will be the IndianPolice."
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The UP Police are since reported to have detainedsome Indians on suspicion of having been involved in these explosions. They havebeen described as members of the Harkat-ul-Jihad--Al-Islami (HUJI). TheHUJI has its headquarters in Pakistan and an active branch in Bangladesh. In thepast too, the HUJI had been involved in terrorist strikes in different parts ofIndia. The dramatis personae came from Pakistan and/or Bangladesh with someIndian involvement.
From the indications available so far, theNovember 23, 2007, strikes with IEDs would appear to have been carried out byIndian cells of the HUJI with only Indians as members. If this is proved byfurther investigation, the HUJI possibly now has an Indian branch with Indianoperatives, capable of carrying out terrorist strikes autonomously without toomuch dependence on their counter-parts in Pakistan and Bangladesh. There is apossibility that the Rampur strike might have also been carried out by the sameorganisation, which had carried out the explosions of November 23, 2007. If so,the fact that the arrests made by the UP Police during the investigation of theNovember 23 strikes did not disrupt or prevent the attack at Rampur, wouldindicate that the organisation has a wider network of clandestine cells in UPthan detected so far.
B. Raman is AdditionalSecretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and,presently, Director, Institute ForTopical Studies, Chennai.
