How Safe Are Our Nukes?

"The war of civilisation between the Muslims and the infidels has begun in Indian territory."

So said the first statement issued in the name of the so-called Indian Mujahideen (IM) in November, 2007,  after the three orchestrated explosions in three towns of Uttar Pradesh outside local courts.

We saw the latest round of this war in Mumbai on the night of November 26, 2008, as an unestimated number of terrorists--divided into small groups and wielding hand-held weapons and improvised explosive devices (IEDs)--literally took control of Mumbai and targeted with frightening precision famous hotels preferred by the rich of the country and foreign tourists, railway stations, a hospital  and many other places scattered across this business capital of India.

It is not just 9/11. It is not just Madrid, March, 2004. It is not justLondon, 2006.

It is -- I am using the present tense because the situation is still not under control at 6:45 AM despite the Army's assistance being sought--an act of terrorism, the like of which the world has not seen before. The mind boggles as one tries to think and figure out how the terrorists could have planned and carried out terrorist strikes of such magnitude, territorial spread and ferocity without our intelligence and police having been able to get scent of it. Like what the Vietcong did during the Tet offensive.

The iceberg of jihadi terrorism to which I have been drawing attention sinceNovember, 2007, in article after article, in interview after interview, in discussion after discussion has struck not only Mumbai, but the Indian state.

The iceberg moved from UP to Jaipur. From Jaipur to Bangalore. From Bangalore to Ahmedabad and Surat. From there to Delhi. From Delhi to Assam. From Assam to Mumbai now -- despite the claims made by the Mumbai Police some weeks ago of having discovered and crushed a plot of the IM to carry out strikes in Mumbai.

The Government of Manmohan Singh reacted to the repeated warning signals of the moving iceberg since November 2007, in the same way as the Bush Administration reacted to reports about the plans of  the Al Qaeda for an of aviation terrorism in the US; in the same way Megawati Sukarnoputri reacted to reports of the activities of the Jemmah Islamiyah; and in the same way Khalida Zia reacted to reports of the plans of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen .

Bovine. It just did no react. It was in a total denial mode. I wrote and said again and again -- hand over all the investigation about the IM to a central investigating agency for a co-ordinated investigation instead of their being investigated by the police in a piecemeal manner in different states ruled by different political parties. No reaction.

From a localised threat, jihadi terrorism has become a pan-Indian threat with a pan-Islamic ideology. Deal with it with a pan-Indian strategy, I said. No reaction.

The terrorists arrested some weeks ago in Mumbai, three of whom were IT experts well-placed in trans-national companies, pose a new dimension of the threat. Seek the help of the US, I said. No reaction.

I drew attention to an article of Hamid Mir, a journalist of Pakistan, which spoke of Indian Muslims going to  Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the US and which also said that India is one of the routes being used by foreign jihadis going to Afghanistan. No reaction just as Rajiv Gandhi did not react to repeated wake-up calls from the then Afghan President Najibullah that Muslims from Kashmir were being trained by the Afghan Mujahideen.

In October, when I had come to Delhi for a seminar, two diplomats from the EU countries sought an appointment with me for a discussion on the IM. They expressed their surprise and concern over the fact that the Indian intelligence and police seemed to know so little about the IM despite their having arrested many perpetrators  of the previous blasts and interrogated them.

Is the IM the name of an organisation or of a movement? Is it one or  many organisations in different states acting, like the International Islamic Front (IIF) of Osama bin Laden, as a united front--autonomously where they can and unitedly where they should? Who constitute its command and control? Where are they? In India or outside? Nobody knows for certain.

I could not sleep the whole of last night. One question, which kept bothering me again and again  was: how safe are our nuclear establishments and material?

Till now, we were greeting with glee Pakistan's incompetence in dealing with terrorism. We can no longer  do so. We have become as clueless as Pakistan.

I wanted to write much more, but my mind doesn't work. As I watch on the TV what is happening in Mumbai, I shiver and sweat at the thought of what is waiting to happen tomorrow and where. 

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi,and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.