Indian Mujahideen
The IM was first suspected as an indigenous terrorist outfit five years ago after the July 7, 2006, Mumbai local train serial blasts that killed 166 people.
Top leadership and cadre of IM is drawn mostly from SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India). A meeting in Hubli, Karnataka, in April 2007 is believed to be the starting point of IM.
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Pipe Road, Kurla West, Mumbai, is not an address anyone would aspire to. Filth and squalor stretch for miles on end, and the stench rises up to the structures that pass off for homes. In this underbelly of Mumbai lies a locked-and-sealed door. It used to be the office of the now-proscribed Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). A few paces away stands Qadri building, where Ismail Shahbandari owned two rooms. Last known, he had leased them out in mid-2010 for a monthly rent of Rs 3,000 each.
"Here—do you see that room—is where India's jehad boss used to live. My friends and I look at it on the way to school and wonder what it would be like to be part of their project. I would like to be trained like them," says S (name withheld), a teenager who has been fed on "heroic" stories of Roshan Jamal, alias Shahrukh alias Riyaz Shahbandari. S aspires to meet him and learn how to "give the country a thousand cuts", a phrase he has clearly heard often, though in hushed tones. "You see these tough-looking guys there? They are cops or khabris (informers) of cops," he says, as if disclosing a secret. "Hundreds of such men all over are not able to trace our Shahrukh."
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The IM assumed its name only in 2005 when internal ideological battles in SIMI forced the moderates out and converted it into a fanatical anti-India organisation. The IM as a home-grown terror organisation came into the limelight only five years ago, but the more ideologically proselytised members such as Riyaz and his earliest compatriots had left their fingerprints long before on bomb blasts that had rocked various cities of India. A spate of arrests between September and November 2008—which brought some key IM members from UP, Gujarat and Maharashtra into the police net—appeared to have "neutralised" the organisation. "But we were kind of surprised to see their footprint back again in some blasts of 2010 across the country," says a senior Maharashtra police officer. In the Mumbai July 13 blasts too, IM is emerging as the likely suspect.
Does July 2011 then mark the return of IM after a brief hiatus? Or is it just a convenient 'fall guy' option for anti-terrorism squads (ATS) of various state police, and more recently the National Investigation Agency (NIA)? Pieced together from various ATS dossiers, chargesheets that detail the IM, and conversations with serving and retired security officers, emerges the picture of a shadowy, sinister outfit of brainwashed young men, pursuing an anti-India agenda with support coming from the LeT. "We have only been able to catch the local guys; their main leaders are in Pakistan," says former Maharashtra DGP A.N. Roy.
 "IM is not like the underworld which is easier to penetrate. IM members do not have a criminal background." Rakesh Maria, Maharashtra ATS chief |  "Primary members called ansars elicit support for an operation. Then tanzeems are created for execution." Malay Krishna Dhar, Former joint director, IB |
If IM is, indeed, the face of indigenous terror and has been at work for a few years, it's chilling to know that security agencies tracking it either do not know or cannot agree upon what it looks like. Despite the presence of the NIA, a central agency mandated to coordinate anti-terror and security issues with states, there is little clarity on how many IM members are still in India, what aliases they are using and what their systems of communication are.
Take Riyaz Shahbandari 'Bhatkal', for instance. He reportedly fled to Dubai, then to Pakistan, where Mumbai police sources say he was housed in Karachi's Defence Enclave till his Pakistan handlers pushed him back to the uae. However, underworld don Chhota Rajan claimed in January this year that his men had killed Bhatkal in a Pakistani hospital. There has been no official confirmation of this.
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Clearly, the inability of India's security agencies to evolve a clear and comprehensive strategy to combat homegrown terror is proving costly. The IM's footprint extends across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. In a classic textbook case of what-not-to-do, the 21 alleged IM members arrested in Mumbai and Pune in 2008 were shifted from state to state because they were wanted in blast cases in those states. The Maharashtra ATS stopped keeping track of them until the July 13 blasts when they realised that the "arrested men had had unexplained visitors with fake identities".
Photograph by AFP, From Outlook, August 01, 2011
Intelligence experts argue, as Vikram Sood does in his book Radical Islam in South Asia and Implications for the Region, that homegrown terror is "a new phase of terrorism within India, where international terrorist groups like LeT and HuJI are likely to exert influence on a small and diffused group of individuals to take up arms against the state in the name of religion". But the security response has been a bit scattered. Rather than a cohesive counter-terrorism strategy, there's the spectacle of the ATS of different states tracking the organisation, the NIA attempting to knit it together but limited by the mandate to not step on state police toes.
The IM, sources say, is not one monolith organisation with a central command like an underworld gang. It's more a cluster of several modules spread regionwise—north, west and south India—where each module works independent of the other and each has four to five sleeper cells in it. The top level of the organisation is believed to comprise educated professionals, while the footsoldiers are recruited from lower-middle-class areas, especially those that nurse grievances against Hindu organisations or states. Most IM e-mails post the blasts have quoted the 2002 Gujarat riots where Muslims suffered.
Netted Suspected IM members arrested after Delhi blasts . (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook, August 01, 2011)
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Counter-terrorism experts and police officers find themselves on the same page as far as the difficulty in dismantling the IM is concerned. "It's not like the underworld which is easy to penetrate and get information about," says ATS chief Rakesh Maria. "IM members do not have a criminal background, they stay closely knit and it is very difficult to create sources within and get information."
Then, there is a section of Indian intelligentsia and a large part of the Muslim community which questions the very existence of IM. "It has become fashionable after every blast to pin blame on the IM, but what is the IM? If cops know so much about it, why don't they simply eliminate it?" asks Maulana Mustaqeen Azmi of the Jamait-ul-Ulema-Hind. Others say Indian agencies would be aware of the IM's principal funders/donors. Why can't they follow the money trail and bust much of the so-called support to the IM?
Intelligence agency officials and cops, however, say it's not just the money but also the local support the ideology commands that needs to be addressed. Riyaz's brother Iqbal, for example, organised lectures on jehad both in Mumbai and his native town, Bhatkal. Computer professionals like Mansoor Peerbhoy and Abdus Subhan Tauqeer presumably succumbed to the lure of the philosophy. Less educated men like Abu Faisal and Afzal Usmani—who organised the stealing of cars in Navi Mumbai and used them in the Ahmedabad blasts of 2008 and were arrested that year—investigators say, believed "they could become heroes in their own community by undertaking a high-risk job". Something like what the teenager S still believes in Kurla...
By Smruti Koppikar with Chandrani Banerjee
| ALSO IN THIS STORY |
INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN We are none the wiser one week on |
BHATKAL How a bustling Muslim town is carrying the burden of undeserved infamy, head down—and hurt |
MUSLIMS HARASSED What of the innocent Muslims picked up after every blast? |
AUTHORS: SMRUTI KOPPIKAR
TAGS: TERROR IN MUMBAI | TERROR IN INDIA | SIMI | INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN | TERRORISM | INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES | TERROR GROUPS
SECTION: NATIONAL
SUBSECTION: COVER STORIES
PLACES: MUMBAI
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JUL 24, 2011 06:25 PM 13 |
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JUL 24, 2011 11:09 AM 12 | IM claimed responsibility in that past, at least that was clear. Only the recent blast on July 13 was not claimed by anyone. But the signature of the attack is all that of IM. The support base if it becomes wide with money and moral support , we will face a dangerous situtation. Police has no clue and no clear picture at to how IM operates. We only have to wait until another blast takes place and they make a mistake (just have hopes that they might make a mistake revealing their identity) . Otherwise there does not seem to be any hope with the highly corrupt police . |
JUL 24, 2011 10:11 AM 11 | I think Yasin-ji and Riyaz Bhatkal-ji are innocent beyond doubt. And now that we are talking about it, so is Ilyas Kashmiri-ji. Celebratory prayers for their deeds must be organised this Friday in mosques across India. |
JUL 24, 2011 03:56 AM 10 | Tehelka's take: The terror. The threat. The twist In conclusion, one can say that it is too early to predict that the Indian Mujahideen is behind the blasts. But investigations into past terror incidents remain shrouded in controversy, with agencies contradicting each other. There do not seem to be any masterminds behind bars, only the operatives who carried out orders from above. As for those behind bars, they continue to be undertrials for years on end because neither the Maharashtra ATS nor the Gujarat ATS have built a foolproof case against them. Nor has their being in custody proved fruitful from the point of view of eliciting intelligence and crucial information or to prevent further attacks. On top of that, there is definite intelligence that fugitives like Yasin and Riyaz Bhatkal have been visiting their home in Karnataka. While the agencies have their handicaps, the practice of arresting easy suspects creates a false complacence and does not help to nab the real perpetrators. And the nation lives with the consequences. |
JUL 23, 2011 11:43 PM 9 | The direction is clear. Muslims cannot live with others and will attack other non mslims. Some day they will use nuclear weapon or some thing big and then only world will realise how dangerous the basics of islam is. Some day there will be a ban on the religion. |
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