Been There, Not Done That...

In the evening of August 25, 2007, 44 persons were killed and 54 were injured in twin blasts at a laser show at the Lumbini Park, and at the Gokul Chat eatery in the Kothi locality in Hyderabad.

Reacting on Television shortly thereafter, the union home secretary, with suitable gravitas, informed the nation: "It is a terrorist strike" (the ignorant public was, perhaps, at risk of mistaking it for a humanitarian strike). Lest the profundity of this observation be lost on national audiences, the union minister for home affairs, for good measure, trotted out his own practiced cliché for all such occasions: "It is a dastardly act", he intoned.

Islamist terrorist attacks on soft targets have been occurring with a sickening regularity across India [outside Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and the Northeast], at intervals of roughly two to three months over the past years, and the August 25, 2007, twin bombing in Hyderabad falls squarely into this pattern.

Such attacks, however, are progressively becoming iconic manifestations of utterly senseless violence. This is terrorism without strategy, purpose or direction; a machine hurtling on, round and round, long after its driving mechanism has snapped out of joint. The succession of attacks over the past five years across India have secured no recognizable tactical or strategic terrorist objective, and, once the media storm after each incident dies out, leave little trace of impact on the administrative order, policing, or the lives of the common people. Apart from the tragic consequences for the direct victims of terrorism and their families (and they are, by definition, merely incidental to the terrorist objective), these attacks leave little trace behind, and, literally weeks, indeed, often days or hours, after the incident, the target areas return to a forgetful, if perverse, ‘normalcy’, as do local and national authorities. 

In terms of structural impact on national or local politics, governance and public intercourse, the consequences of the succession of incidents over the past years have been negligible. This factor has been the more pronounced as a result of the fact that, after the December 2001 attack on India’s Parliament, there has been no significant Islamist terrorist attack on a strategic target. Despite all the clamour about ‘intelligence’ and ‘security’ failures, the fact is, Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorist groupings--principally the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HM)--the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and their Indian collaborators, such as the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), have failed to strike at anything but the softest of soft targets outside J&K. Moreover, those killed have, with rare exception, been the poor--and their lives have little value for India’s elite, except when elections come around and the political parties are compelled, briefly, to solicit their votes.

Nevertheless, each terrorist attack provides the occasion for posturing and creating a little storm of uninformed ‘analysis’ in the national media teacup, as well as for a continuous sequence of motivated leaks from intelligence and investigative agencies. Hence, central agencies leak the information that, since March 2007, they have known that eight kilograms of military grade explosives (RDX) were delivered to a HuJI operative in Hyderabad, but that "for its own reasons, the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh did not allow the kinds of aggressive--and unpopular--policing that the Central Bureau of Investigation and city police felt were necessary to secure the city". 

It does not appear to be relevant to this critique that it was not military grade RDX, but locally available industrial explosives, that are known to have been used in the August 25 twin blasts; nor is it clear what kind of ‘aggressive policing’ would be required, either to find a little packet of eight kilograms of RDX, or to secure every potential soft target, in a city of 6.25 million. It is useful, in this context, to note, however, that at least six modules or cells of Pakistan-backed terrorists have been located and neutralized in Hyderabad since 2004, the last of these on April 1, 2007. Indeed, the very fact that Islamist terrorists have failed to target strategic locations, and have been forced to limit their attacks to the softest of locations, would suggest that policing and intelligence have been reasonably successful.

As for ‘securing the city’, that is, simply stated, an impossible task under existing conditions. For one, attacks are, overwhelmingly, no longer orchestrated by networks and cells established within the target city, and have progressively been transformed into synchronized multi-group operations coordinated by handlers located in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Individual members of these groups are simply directed by handlers to enter into evanescent and anonymous contact with members of other groups to provide specific materials and services: explosives, detonators, safe haven, bomb-making expertise, and local support, and most disappear without trace long before the attack. It is only the low grade cadres or mercenary elements charged with the ‘delivery’ of the explosive devices to target areas who are occasionally recognized by eyewitnesses and eventually arrested, but they have no idea of the broader participation in, and location or execution of the larger conspiracy. Significantly, the planning and preparation components are ordinarily located outside the (urban) target areas, in India’s vast and virtually un-policed mofussil and rural hinterland.

It is useful, in this context, to reiterate the truth that India’s cities cannot be ‘secured’ if its hinterlands remain entirely ‘unsecured’, and the fact that this is a thoroughly under-policed country . India has an average police to population ratio of 122 policeman per 100,000 population. Most Western countries have ratios ranging getween 250 and 500 per 100,000, and the UN recommends a minimum norm of 1:450, or 222 per 100,000. Andhra Pradesh has a current ratio of just 98 per 100,000, and is also tackling (fairly effectively) a raging Maoist insurgency.

Deficiencies of capacity are also endemic in the intelligence agencies. While disaggregated data is unavailable, it is useful to recall that the Kargil Committee report had called for a tremendous augmentation of capacities, including manpower, a massive upgrading of technical, imaging, signal, electronic counter-intelligence and economic intelligence capabilities, and a system-wide reform of conventional human-intelligence gathering. Every suggestion in the Report was accepted by the Group of Ministers, who released their recommendations in February 2001. 

Most of the recommendations of the Report remain unimplemented, beyond a few symbolic changes. One of the recommendations called for a ‘multi-agency set up’ to confront the challenges of terrorism, and this was, at least formally, implemented through the creation of two new wings under the Intelligence Bureau (IB): the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI). MAC was charged with collecting and coordinating terrorism-related information from across the country, the JTFI is responsible for passing on this information to the state governments in real-time.

Regrettably, both MAC and JTFI remain under-staffed, under-equipped and ineffective, with even basic issues relating to their administration unsettled. Their principal objective, the creation of a national terrorism database, has made little progress. Augmenting HUMINT capacities has also lagged far behind requirements. In 2001, the Girish Saxena Committee had recommended at least an additional 3,000 cadres in the Intelligence Bureau. According to available information, till now, just 800 additional posts have been sanctioned, though the requirements would have expanded dramatically over the intervening years. As with the larger administrative apparatus in India, there has been a long, slow process of deterioration in the country’s intelligence and policing capabilities--perhaps not in absolute terms, but certainly in terms of capacities lagging well behind the magnitude and pace of emerging challenges.

At least certain policies intended to contain terrorism have proven counter-productive as well. Certainly, the April 2004 decision to ban the possession, sale and use of nitro-glycerin (NG)-based explosives throughout the country, in view of the widespread ‘leakage’ of these explosives from the mining sector to the Maoist insurgents, has resulted in an enormous dispersal of the manufacture and distribution of Class II (ammonium nitrate based) explosives. Just three manufacturing facilities were licensed to produce NG-based explosives prior to April 2004, and these were in the large scale sector. Within the first year after the ban came into effect, as many as 73 Class II explosives manufacturers, spread virtually across the country, were in existence, a large proportion created after the ban. The cost of setting up a manufacturing plant for Class II explosives is in the region of INR 20 million as against INR 400 to 500 million for a NG-based facility, and the former have virtually become a cottage industry. Many of the new units are located in utterly lawless areas of the country, including Bihar, or in areas dominated by Naxalites in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. Significantly, these explosives are fairly easily available in formal and informal markets around mining areas, and are often bought even by ordinary folk, such as farmers who use them to frighten animals off their lands, or fisherman who use them to illegally blast fish out of the waters. Significantly, it is now suspected that it was precisely these explosives that were used in the latest terrorist strikes in Hyderabad.

The specifics of the twin blasts in Hyderabad are yet to be determined--and given the recent modus operandi of the Islamist terrorist groupings it is possible that, as with investigations into earlier blasts, inquiries will hit a dead end in this case as well. Crucially, however, if India is to devise effective counter-terrorism policies, strategies and tactics, the country’s leaders and intelligence and enforcement agencies will have to go beyond the current incident-led patterns of response and analysis, and address the tremendous capacity deficits that afflict every aspect of security and intelligence administration, policing and law and order management in the country. A strategy to exert pressure and impose costs on the external sponsors and supporters of terrorism, and capacities to implement such a strategy, are also necessary. If we are to ‘secure our cities’, our hinterlands cannot be abandoned to lawlessness, and our hostile neighbours to a policy of hopeful supplication.

Ajai Sahni is Editor, South Asia Intelligence Review (SAIR) of the South Asia Terrorism Portal, courtesy which this piece appears here and Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management.