On The spot
Tavleen Singh
An old and ugly enemy of India resurfaced last week and with him returned ghosts of mistakes past related to jihadis and their evil designs. The enemy I speak of is Maulana Azhar Masood who the Indian Government released in exchange for the passengers of IC 814 hijacked from Kathmandu on Christmas Eve 1999. He repaid India by organizing the attack on Parliament two years later and has reappeared to celebrate the memoirs of Afzal Guru. Incidentally, anyone who still believes Guru was a hapless victim of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) terrorists and that his execution last February was unjust should read his book. The extracts I have seen in the newspapers urge Muslims to continue Allah’s war by eliminating Hindus, Jews, Christians and other ‘heathens’ from the face of the Earth. Here is a sample. ‘Our immediate and pressing problem is Indian militarization. Our lives, property and dignity are not safe till their presence here. It incumbent upon all resort (sic) to jihad as per the Quran.’ In this book of essays and thoughts written in jail Guru praises the Taliban as heroes. It should be clear to everyone that Guru was no innocent bystander in the attack on Parliament.
His mentor, Maulana Masood, released the book in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (POK) last week with the warning that India would suffer ‘dreaded revenge’ attacks now because of having executed Afzal Guru. At another rally, or perhaps the same one, Indian intelligence reports say that he warned that 313 fidayeen (suicide bombers) were already waiting to be sent to India and this number could go up to 3000 if they were needed to free Kashmir from India. ‘Kashmir is part of Pakistan and unless Kashmiri Muslims get their rights, there cannot be any friendship with India.’
Maulana Masood hates India with such venom that when our External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, took him to Kandahar on that special flight he refused food and water. In an account of this journey that he wrote afterwards he wrote contemptuously about how the Minister himself urged him to eat something and how he refused because he did not want to take another sip of Indian water or another morsel of Indian food. The Vajpayee Government never explained why a senior minister accompanied the terrorists.
After his release in Kandahar Azhar Masood and his companions, among them Omar Sheikh, disappeared into Pakistan and India did nothing to bring them to justice. The Indian Government’s inability to organize a counter-jihad is mostly because the infrastructure of counter-intelligence was dismantled by prime minister, Inder Gujral, who believed that he and Nawaz Sharif could bring peace to the sub-continent by establishing a cozy Punjabi relationship. It did not happen and the infrastructure was never rebuilt. So bumping off monsters like Masood is not an option. This was not the only mistake India made where he was concerned. The first mistake was to let him rot in Indian custody for five years without trying him for terrorism.
Other ghosts resurfaced with him. One of these is the ghost of mismanagement in the hijacking of IC 814. In a conversation I had with K.P.S Gill long ago he said that the aeroplane should never have been allowed to leave Amritsar. It landed there for refueling after being hijacked. When I asked him how it could have been prevented from taking off without risking the lives of the passengers he said there were several ways in which this could have been done one of which could have been the simple act of placing obstacles on the tarmac. But, what is frightening is that if another flight were hijacked there would be the same mistakes made. There is no crisis management system in place that could immediately respond. As for airport security it is mostly a farce as I pointed out some months ago in this column when a Pakistani friend, Lady Nadira Naipaul, was able to walk through security at Srinagar airport with a box of matches, a bottle of water and a tube of Odomos while security officials spent an hour searching my bags because they spotted a tweezer.
If this can happen at our most high security civilian airport you do not need much imagination to know what happens at other airports. Ostensibly there is a lot of checking and a lot of procedural examining of bags but since most security staff are not trained to look for specific things that could be used as weapons they usually waste their time harassing passengers carrying such things as tweezers and nail files. At Mumbai airport last week I saw a young mother begging security personnel to allow her to carry a bottle of water in her bag for her one year old baby.
It is not just airports that lack proper security measures it is most public buildings across India. And, what is even more frightening is that despite 26/11 almost nothing has been done to train ordinary policemen in counter terrorism. When P. Chidambaram was Home Minister he concentrated on trying to set up a national counter-terrorism centre in Delhi without noticing that it would be useless without major changes in police training. In the attack on Mumbai the police did nothing till commandos arrived from Manesar and it took them more than eight hours to arrive in Mumbai because the Government of India could not even find them a plane on time. When they landed in Mumbai there were not even enough buses to take them to the besieged hotels.
Meanwhile, the Mumbai police did nothing. Had they been trained in counter-terrorism they would have been able to save most of the people who were killed by Ajmal Kasab and his nine companions. It is a matter of deep shame that ten, semi-trained young men were able to bring the might of India’s security establishment to its knees for two whole days. But, what is a matter of even deeper shame is that nobody has been punished for the lapses that occurred and that if Maulana Azhar Masood sends us a fresh batch of suicide bombers they would probably be able to cause as much mayhem and murder in Indian cities as we saw in the 26/11 attack.
Jihadi terrorism is the only war Pakistan has fought against India in the past twenty years and is probably going to be the only war it will fight in the future. And, the horrible truth is that India remains as unprepared as it was twenty years ago.
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