Only Indians killed, so no security breached?

by Jawed Naqvi

CATCHING the once-a-week flight from Delhi to Karachi last Monday, I overheard a riveting exchange between the immigration officer who was handling my Indian passport and a worried man who rushed to speak to him in a hurry, I suspect, after seeing my bearded profile from a distance.

In my banterish way I engaged both of them in a conversation about their source of worry. Upon close inquiry the man who had rushed to the passport desk with doubts about my bona fides turned out to be a religious Muslim from Uttar Pradesh who hadn’t watched TV for decades. His job was to alert the officers about any Kashmiris going to Pakistan, or perhaps anywhere at all.

What or who they were looking for was their business and I didn’t ask beyond a point, but I did glean from the chat that the government of India hires semi-literate and obscurantist Muslims who don’t watch TV for religious reasons, to keep an eye on their fellow brethren who may have given up watching TV because Indian channels usually misrepresent the reality as distinct from what they know it to be.

The incident also gave me useful insights into at least some of the reasons for the poor intelligence and security that haunts the country as it claims its seat in the colosseum where the duel with terror is perennially on.

Saturday’s bombing of a Pune restaurant frequented by foreigners bears resemblance in its strategic value to the Leopold Café in Mumbai, which was raided by suspected cross-border extremists in the November 2008 carnage. That eight or nine Indians have died in the Pune attack is shameful. That no foreigners were killed is a relief.

However, statements coming from senior officials have done little to address the questions that flow from the incident. Familiar smugness in the state’s response to a calamity such as Pune’s adds to the unabated gloom that comes with innocent deaths.

The home minister has said the bombing was not really tantamount to a security lapse. That sounds like a tall claim. In the same breath he held forth, as if to explain the claim, that the bombers had been forced to choose a soft target like the German bakery. The triumphant implication was that the terrorists could not get to the other potentially huge targets because the sites were better protected.

The Indian media, true to its wont, has been underscoring the fact that only Indians were killed in the attack. The reports stop barely short of declaring it a victory for India’s intelligence and security forces that the Jewish Chabad next door and the Osho ashram of the delightfully loveable guru (who was hounded out of the United States by rightwing Christians for preaching unbridled love) were secure.

This is a silly view of the tragedy. Much of the idiom of reporting and explaining an outrage such as a terrorist attack these days has got so markedly swayed by the old and now dated version of the western journalists’ sense of priorities, particularly in hotspots like India and Pakistan, that we look foolish, and often callous in trying to imitate them. Instead of grieving for the dead we scour their nationality, which ghoulishly determines the enormity of the crime.

There are two main issues involved here. First, what is the worth of the lives of Indians in the calculations of the Indian state as opposed to the lives of foreigners who are guests in the country? And second, what constitutes a soft target, and vis-à-vis who or what? The answer to both would require a definition of the class character of the Indian state.

Let’s pose the question differently and quote the example of two recent attacks that took place in Pakistan. There was an attack in a busy marketplace in Peshawar, which killed many innocent people. Then there was an assault on the Army GHQ in Rawalpindi, in which a few were killed on both sides.

The Peshawar attack may be deemed to have been launched on a soft target because it picked on unarmed, unprepared, trusting people who became its victims. Should the Pakistan government be allowed to get away if it declared the incident did not constitute a breach of security because it involved a soft target? Such a government will not last too long with the people’s support.

India has had its share of responsible public servants who would be so moved by an incident like the one in Pune that they would quit their jobs, or at least offer to resign. Lal Bahadur Shastri is cited as an excellent example of a minister who resigned as railway minister over a train accident. No one is asking Home Minister P. Chidambaram to go because of Pune, but must he indulge in legal casuistry and deny that the attack in Pune was avoidable and therefore constituted a security breach?

The narrative is related to American terror suspect David Headley who is now identified as having played a key role in the Mumbai attack. In 2008-20009, he lived in a hotel near the German bakery in Pune which witnessed a bomb blast on Saturday. There are intelligence reports that he did a recce of the blast site too.Headley also visited the Osho ashram, located near a Jewish prayer house. According to India’s federal investigations agency, the NIA, Headley had moved to Pune from Goa to recce the area around Koregaon Park.

Though initially it was believed that he wanted to target the foreigners coming to the Osho ashram, it was found that he had scouted the area for targeting the Jewish prayer centre in the vicinity.

Indian reports specifically say Headley had later left from Pune to Mumbai where he went to the Cuffe Prade area and apparently firmed up some loose ends in targeting the Israel Airways office before flying to Pakistan.

Headley’s last visit to India before being arrested by the FBI was said to be in March last year, to finalise synchronised terror strikes on Jewish houses located in five cities at the instance of Lashker-i-Taiba.

The entire story is shrouded in mystery and begs questions that are seldom asked. If it was known that Headley who is being investigated by the FBI had plans to attack places in Pune and elsewhere, was there any need felt to improve the human intelligence inputs in the area?

To do that might seem a logical, and also a simpler way to address a complex problem. But it would be an ordeal for the state called India to involve as many Muslims as possible to improve its vigil among an increasingly alienated people who are or may become catchments for young terror recruits. The state seems pretty fixed in its notion of which talent to tap, and it has chosen the stereotype Muslim as represented by the man stalking real or imagined Kashmiris at airports.

Given the home minister’s penchant for living in denial there unfortunately will be more attacks that he again could claim were not a result of intelligence failure, and there will be more alienated Muslims, who would not be too keen to publicly blame their plight on the state’s studied aloofness with them.