This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  It is beyond the scope of this book to cover all the acts of terrorist violence that have plagued India throughout its history, but even if we look at just the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the drumbeat of terrorist activity has been steady and has caused much damage.

  In 2014, India ranked sixth on the Global Terrorism Index, just below war-ravaged Syria and ahead of Yemen, Somalia, Egypt and South Sudan. The index divided terrorism in India into three categories—Islamist, separatist and left-wing extremist. Officially, the government recognizes sixty-six terror groups in India. While five of them are active in Jammu and Kashmir, with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the indigenous Hizbul Mujahideen topping the list, more than thirty are operational in the single northeastern state of Manipur; several others are entrenched in Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Mizoram in the east and three of them remain threats in Punjab.

  We have seen it all—armed militants seizing control of one of our most revered places of worship (the Golden Temple), planes blowing up in mid-air (Air India Kanishka bombing) and prime ministers and chief ministers assassinated by terror squads (Rajiv Gandhi and Beant Singh). Some terror groups could be traced back to flawed politics—like the ascent of Sikh separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was originally propped up by Sanjay Gandhi as a countervailing force to the rival Akalis; others drew sustenance from external enemies or a global community of radicals.

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  In July 2011, thunder and lightning veined the clouds overhead and angry monsoon rains lashed the streets of Mumbai as I waded through mud and water in the city’s iconic Zaveri Bazaar. A tangled crisscross of lanes, its 7,000 shops glittered with gold and diamonds in dramatic contrast to its decrepit, crumbling buildings and open drains. Though business was mostly driven by Gujarati merchants in this 150-year-old jewellery souk, it brought together migrants from across India in an economy of interdependence. That morning I had met a vada-pav seller from Uttar Pradesh, a Muslim craftsman from Bengal and an ebullient trader from Rajasthan.

  I was in Zaveri Bazaar because multiple blasts had left Mumbai locked in the all too familiar grip of fear and uncertainty that had begun to shadow the city in the modern era. One of the explosion sites was the khau-galli (eating lane), a bustling street food hub in the interiors of Zaveri Bazaar, where the bomb had been left strapped to a motorcycle. This was the third time in eighteen years that this bazaar was a target for terrorists—the first attack was in 1993, then 2003 and now 2011.

  Congestion and commerce both primed Zaveri Bazaar to be an attractive target. Any assault on a market that drove 70 per cent of India’s gold business meant damage to the financial nerve centre. Because it was so crowded, it was impossible to fully secure and fatalities were guaranteed to be high. There were other reasons why Zaveri Bazaar drew terrorists. Its inherent cosmopolitanism—even if constructed around the imperatives of economics and livelihood—made it a microcosm of India’s pluralism. Historian Sharada Dwivedi has documented how the bazaar stood at the geographical intersection of neighbourhoods that had otherwise become segmented along religious lines. To wear out friendships between Hindus and Muslims, to disrupt the traditional economic overlaps that had kept different communities working together for decades and finally to trigger religious violence, even riots—this was the ultimate terrorist fantasy that played out again and again in bazaars such as this one.

  In the late twentieth century, the theatre of terrorist action in India had expanded to areas outside of conflict zones and localized insurgencies—Kashmir, Manipur or Nagaland, for instance—and had become more and more urban in nature; it was India’s cities, and the multiculturalism they embodied that were under siege.

  Studying how, post 9/11, terrorism all across the world was becoming urban in character, H. V. Savitch, an American expert on urbanization and public policy, explained why. ‘The incongruous mixture of growth, density, wealth, poverty and immigration makes… cities primary targets, both as venues of operation and targets of calculation,’ he said. In India’s case, as I’ve said, you could add one other word—diversity—of particular interest to jihadist groups who believed they could not just challenge, but disrupt its secular genesis and lock the country into long-term internal strife.

  Everyone at Zaveri Bazaar carried a memory that still hurt. Yet, no one had shut shop or moved out because of the recurring terror strikes. Some like Narendra Jain were here all three times, beginning with 1993, when terror hit home. Why have you never thought of leaving this place, I asked him. ‘Rozi roti ka sawaal hai, jayenge to kahan jayenge (It’s a question of our bread and butter, in any case where could we go)?’ he said.

  This is what we failed to acknowledge. Every time terror returned to haunt us we tried to seek cover behind that terrible cliché called ‘resilience’. Or in Mumbai’s case, its fabled stoicism. When people turned up at work the morning after a terror strike, we pretended that our collective spirit had stared down the barrel of a gun and had not blinked.

  But truthfully, life carried on because of a strange combination of compulsion and fatalism. For most, their economic condition mandated what they needed to do; others counted on the law of probability and hoped that it was something that happened to other people. Many of us had grown to be strangely fatalistic about terrorism, a consequence of living in a country that was extraordinarily vulnerable to terror attacks.

  Which one of us had not said out loud, at some point or the other—while jostling for breathing room on a railway platform teeming with passengers, during the Ganga aarti at the Dashashwamedh Ghat when cycle-rickshaws ferrying tourists and devotees crawled through a crammed alley, or while buying a pair of jeans at an upscale shopping mall where the entire city appeared to have converged, bored and hot, on a summer afternoon—‘it would be so easy for someone to plant a bomb here’. Terrorism in India, as we experienced it, was random, unsparing, difficult to foretell, and hence, impossible to protect ourselves against. Sometimes a walk in the park, an evening out with your children—or even just the simple act of crossing the road—could place you in the line of lethal attack. Syed Raheem discovered that in Hyderabad.

  When I first met him, he casually took out his left eye and held it up for me to see on the palm of his hand. Just like that. Startled, and unable to look at the hollow, purplish-red socket that was left bare for millions to see on live television, I reached out and tried to cover the raw flesh he had left exposed. ‘Please don’t do this Raheem Bhai,’ I implored, ‘please, I know how upset you are, but you shouldn’t do this.’ We couldn’t even look at his damaged eye—he had to live with it.

  On a Saturday evening in August 2007, a holiday, Syed Raheem had taken his teenage daughter Chinni out for a treat. They were going to buy a softy ice-cream cone from Hyderabad’s much-loved Gokul Chat shop. As he stepped out of the autorickshaw into the heaving crowd, a bomb, triggered by a mobile phone, went off. Almost instantly, mangled metal strips of the ice cream machine that Raheem was walking towards were strewn on the road, alongside bangles, slippers and blood-soaked bodies. Just a couple of minutes earlier, five kilometres away at the open air auditorium in the city’s Lumbini Park a bomb had ripped through the middle row of the theatre, flinging bodies into the air. Chinni jumped out of the rickshaw, making her way through the panicked swarm of people trying to run in the opposite direction. A man screamed out for help, his arm was hanging loose from his shoulder; a woman bleeding from a head injury held out her hand, pleading for help. Pushing past both the injured and the dead who lay on the road, she kept going, desperate to find her father. When she finally found him, he was lying on the ground, badly injured, with a long, sharp piece of metal embedded in the cornea of his left eye. Pieces of shrapnel, they would later discover at the Osmania Hospital, had pierced his skull.

  Raheem, who used to be a commercial painter, was blinded in one eye and barely able to see with the other. Now, six years later, unemployed, angry, bitter and broken, he wasn’t willing to be just
one more forgotten statistic in the numerical grid of India’s terrorism victims. When he pulled out his eye in front of the TV camera to reveal the sunken pit that lay beneath, he was showing us all what we failed to see once the blaring headlines had faded—the impotent fury of the survivors, who were forgotten about as soon as the outrage had taken place.

  It is hard to see when things will get better. With two hostile countries, both nuclear powers, as neighbours—Pakistan in the north, China in the east—terror travels easily across the border. For decades, Pakistan has used terrorism as a weapon in its strategic arsenal, pushing in men it has called ‘mujahideen’ into the Kashmir Valley, armed and trained in camps controlled by its spy agencies. Chinese intelligence, while not overtly aggressive, has lent support, financial and organizational, to militant groups in the Northeast.

  Over the years, and especially after Osama Bin Laden’s audacious strike on the twin towers in New York, American pressure mounted on Pakistan to shut down factories that manufactured and exported terror to India. This marked the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘Karachi Project’. The anti-India intelligence infrastructure was shifted to the port city in the south of Pakistan where, instead of Pakistani guerrillas, disaffected and radicalized Indian Muslims (not from Kashmir, but from states as varied as Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra) were preyed on in a recruitment hunt to create a generation of proxy warriors.

  It illustrated what Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of US National Intelligence, called a Pakistani strategy to ‘use militant groups as an important part of its strategic arsenal to counter India’s military and economic advantages’. The Karachi Project took this a step further—the militants were now not only Pakistani but Indians as well, creating an inter-connected terror network that transcended borders and created an enemy both within and without.

  Pakistan had previously argued that its fostering of Kashmiri insurgents was linked to its support for a cause it believed intrinsic to its nationhood. But this had nothing to do with its favourite ‘core issue’. Classic conflict zones—Punjab, Kashmir, states of the Northeast—were no longer the most vulnerable to extremist violence. A new script was being written for the changing theatre of terrorism with freshly cast protagonists that helped Pakistan’s shadowy non-state actors disown their role.

  Under the Karachi Project discontented young Muslim men from India were smuggled into Pakistan via a third country—Nepal—trained in the UAE and then sent back to India to execute attacks. Because they were Indian citizens they were able to embed themselves deeper into the system without suspicion. Groups like the LeT continued to be the handlers of these operatives. But because they were Indian it offered Pakistan perfect deniability and disassociation. As far back as 2000, LeT chief Hafiz Saeed had warned of a ‘third round of jihad’ against the enemy. The Kargil incursions were described as the ‘first round’ in this ‘holy war’ against India; suicide squad attacks on military camps in Kashmir were dubbed the ‘second round’. ‘Very soon we will be starting the next round,’ announced Saeed, India’s most wanted terrorist who functioned with impunity from across the border. This is how the Indian Mujahideen (IM)—the most dominant and lethal home-grown terror outfit—came to be born, with the Lashkar playing the part of godfather.

  Named after ‘Bhatkal’, their hometown in coastal Karnataka, brothers Riyaz and Iqbal (born with the family name of Shahbandari) and their follower Yasin Bhatkal (born Mohammed Ahmed Siddibappa) were the founders of the Indian Mujahideen. Its first ‘manifesto’ was released in 2007 shortly after it bombed courthouses in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad. Emailed to newsrooms across the country it spoke of ‘wounds given by the idol worshippers to Indian Muslims… If you want to be a successful person in India then you should be an idol worshipper and kill Muslims.’

  Tapping into a siege mentality and constructing a narrative of perennial victimhood for Muslims and themselves as righteous avengers, this and subsequent ‘manifestos’ repeatedly referenced cataclysmic events in India’s recent history—the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Gujarat riots a decade later. Its proclamations repeatedly targeted the judiciary, ‘Supreme Court, High Court and the lower courts and all the commissions’ for letting down Muslims. In 2011 there were explosions outside the Delhi High Court.

  Scholar Stephen Tankel, who spent years documenting the rise and fall of the IM, called it ‘an internal security issue with an external dimension’. He also argued that the ‘primary indigenous jihadist threat’ was created as a result of ‘endogenous factors, specifically communal grievances and a desire for revenge’, but became ‘more lethal and resilient…thanks to external support from the Pakistani state and Pakistan- and Bangladesh-based militant groups’. Pakistan’s essential aim of propping up this domestic insurrection was an attempt to destabilize India from within.

  What was bewildering to me was the absence of focused anger by Indian society at large at the repeated attacks by terrorists, and the inability of our intelligence and security networks to stop them. The 26/11 attacks would finally rouse the country out of its apathy but until then, our ‘acceptance’ of terror was passive in the extreme. This was brought home forcefully four months before the 26/11 attacks.

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  On 25 July 2008, at Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, policemen lit incense sticks and bowed in prayer; women squatted on their haunches to scrub the blood off the floors and the body of a man lay abandoned in one corner of a desolate corridor.

  In a new chapter in India’s long tryst with terror, for the first time ever, a hospital, and the doctors, medical workers, nurses and patients inside, had become the target. The civil hospital, frequented by those too poor to afford private medical treatment elsewhere, was among the locations of the twenty-one synchronized blasts that tore through Ahmedabad that day. That evening an ambulance had driven into the hospital’s trauma ward, its siren blaring—most people thought it was ferrying a patient—and then there was a gigantic explosion. Later, police believed a suicide bomber was inside the ambulance.

  Even children had not been spared. Inside the ICU I met Yash Vyas, all of ten years old, who was asking the doctors where his parents were. He was in acute pain and shivering. On the bed beside him was his elder brother, Rohan, who doctors said was not likely to survive. The children had come to meet their father, Dushyant, who worked in the hospital’s cancer wing as a technician. He had been teaching the kids how to ride a bicycle in the hospital grounds when the explosion took place. When I met the children their father’s body had just been wheeled out of the mortuary. Their mother was too distraught to break the news to them. In the same room, another father had just identified his son—his body blown to bits—by his earring.

  Stretchers usually deployed to lift patients into the safety of the hospital were today soaked in blood. Students who had not yet earned a medical degree were doubling up as doctors because so many of their seniors were wounded.

  This was the most brutal image of terror the country had yet been exposed to. And yet, it would be another four months before India decided to get really angry about terrorism. I always wondered why. Was it because the attacks in Mumbai would bring home terror to the upper middle class—to ‘people like us’? Or was it because it was the most audacious assault India would ever see?

  II

  On the night of 26 November 2008, on a rare evening off, I was lying in bed watching episodes of 24, utterly gripped by the espionage and counter-terrorism series that the somewhat intelligent part of my mind recognized as even less believable than the ‘action’-hero Hindi movies of the seventies. Each episode of the series spanned twenty-four hours of a single day in which all manner of disastrous occurrences were averted by the hero with testosterone-drenched implausibility. But it was still enjoyable to suspend disbelief for an hour or two and lose oneself in a universe where Agent Jack Bauer could be relied upon to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. There were suitcase nukes, chopper chase
s and men slithering down ropes and crawling up walls in dimly lit passages where danger lurked in the shadows. Gunfire punctuated the dialogue like commas and colons. And, of course, Bauer never missed a shot.

  I heard a ping on my work email. It was about a shoot-out in Mumbai. Initial reports suggested an internecine gang war. I continued with my lazy TV fix for the evening thinking it was a local Mumbai story which would be reported by the bureau there. But within an hour of the first shot fired in Café Leopold just after 9.30 p.m., from the scale of the attack and the manner in which targets across the city were being hit it was clear that this was a terror strike. That ten men could bring a city to its knees and lock it down in a seventy-two-hour siege; that this was an attack that would leave India’s systemic incompetence and inadequacy on embarrassingly naked display; that this was going to be our equivalent of watching two planes blaze straight through the twin towers and knowing that your country could never be the same again—all this was still in the future.

  As I began to track the tragedy, I learned that two of the ten Pakistani terrorists (later identified as Ajmal Kasab and Abu Ismail) had been on a killing spree at the city’s main railway station, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST). Kasab wore grey cargo pants, a blue t-shirt with Versace printed on it in white and strode around jauntily, an assault rifle slung around his shoulder as casually as his duffel bag. If it weren’t for the weapons he was wielding he would have looked like a young tourist; the much-taller Ismail wore all black, a shiny plastic jacket over crumpled pants. They used hand grenades and AK-47s to shoot more than fifty people and wound a hundred others. They were able to wander through the railway station unchallenged for almost ninety minutes until police reinforcements arrived. They then moved to Cama Nursing Home, adjacent to the station. Three of Mumbai’s top police officers, including the head of its anti-terrorism squad (ATS), Hemant Karkare, were on their trail. With him were encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and assistant commissioner of police, Ashok Kamte.