Re: Why is India blaming Pakistan when it has no idea who is responsible for the bombing?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19790545-28737,00.html
Terrorist strike puts Pakistan on the spot
This week’s deadly Mumbai attacks have rattled the Indian subcontinent, writes Bruce Loudon
July 15, 2006
TO a senior Indian analyst these are “difficult and dangerous days”, and who, in the aftermath of the devastation and carnage wrought by terrorist bombers attacking the suburban train system in Mumbai, the country’s teeming business and commercial metropolis, can doubt the accuracy of his assertion?
In the days since the attack, what has become clear is that the world’s largest democracy is under assault by the same evil forces of terrorism that are threatening so much of the rest of the world.
And how the Government of the scholarly and erudite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh handles this attack is going to profoundly affect India’s stellar performance as a growing economic powerhouse that is attracting investment from across the world.
Mumbai’s bombs, in themselves, were bad enough. Two hundred people killed, another 800 injured. The terrorists, assumed to be from the militant Islamic terrorist movement Lashkar-e-Toiba, aligned to al-Qa’ida and working with the Students Islamic Movement of India, could hardly have attacked a city with a higher profile, the hub of the nation’s economy as well as the base of its globally popular Bollywood film industry.
But the concern must be that, as with terrorism everywhere, there may be more to come. India, with its overwhelming Hindu majority, is being increasingly identified in al-Qa’ida propaganda as a target for jihadists loyal to the murderous madness espoused by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Previously al-Qa’ida had a “crusader/Zionist” enemy in its sights. Now, it seems, what it is targeting is a “crusader/Zionist/Hindu” enemy. And for a country as vast and diverse as India, that is a salutary new aspect to al-Qa’ida’s tactics. To add to the concern, there are reports claiming that, for the first time, al-Qa’ida is launching itself directly into the conflict in Kashmir.
The influential New Delhi newspaper The Asian Age has said that in messages since the bombing to media outlets in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, a spokesman for an organisation identified as “al-Qa’ida Jammu and Kashmir” has called on Indian Muslims to take up jihad, saying the jihadists are “encouraged by the success” of the Mumbai atrocity.
The spokesman is reported to have justified the terrorism as “a reaction to what is happening to minorities, especially Muslims, in India”, a reference to the fact that India has a Muslim population of 140 million, the largest in any country outside Indonesia.
There is little doubt that the claim of direct involvement by al-Qa’ida will worry those who believe India and its Hindu majority are increasingly in the sights of bin Laden.
Until now it has been Lashkar-e-Toiba and a range of other jihadist organisations that have been fighting in Kashmir, operating as surrogates within the context of al-Qa’ida’s global campaign of Islamic terrorism. Intelligence sources believe, however, that al-Qa’ida may now be seeking to intensify pressure on India.
Perhaps significantly, the claims of heightened al-Qa’ida involvement came on what is observed in the state as martyrs’ day, the anniversary of the day in 1931 when 22 Muslims were gunned down outside Srinagar central jail.
In itself, the reported moves by al-Qa’ida and its surrogates are portentous. In the context of always fragile relations with neighbouring Pakistan, they are even more so for, as always, the Indian suspicion is that its neighbour is, by design or default, complicit in any terrorist act within Indian territory.
A longstanding plan for high-level talks aimed at ironing out differences between India and Pakistan has been put on indefinite hold. The talks were due to take place next week, but in the present tense atmosphere they seem unlikely to go ahead, according to New Delhi television news reports.
Predictably, the Indian media is in full flight with accusations of Pakistani involvement in the attack, and one of the country’s leading newspapers, the Hindustan Times, has accused Islamabad’s all-pervasive security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, of having masterminded the Mumbai attacks.
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“A senior intelligence officer said the synchronised explosions had the hallmark of an ISI operation,” the Hindustan Times reported. And it quoted him as adding: “A lot of planning went into the blasts. This is typical of an ISI operation.”
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Pakistan has emphatically denied the claims and denounced the bombings. President Pervez Musharraf was quick off the mark in offering help in the investigation. And he has declared that Pakistan will do everything to stamp out terrorism.
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Subcontinental suspicions about the ISI, however, run deep, for it has a history of playing an underhand role in regional politics and has been accused of double dealing with the Taliban as well as with al-Qa’ida and the hunt for bin Laden.
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Indeed, the assurances by Musharraf that he will do everything to destroy terrorists based in Pakistan are unlikely to have much impact at the moment. In advance of a visit to Mumbai by Singh yesterday, the country’s top security adviser was reported to have briefed the cabinet on Pakistan’s possible role.
There is no doubt that if a Pakistani hand is, in fact, found to be behind the Mumbai blasts, this will severely test recent strides towards a rapprochement between the two countries.
The mood in India is uncompromising, according to most analysts. The depth of anger over the blasts is profound and the widespread belief is that the Government should seriously strengthen its stance on terrorism, even if this is at the cost of improving ties with Pakistan.
Suggestions that al-Qa’ida is more directly involved will add considerably to this pressure, since the belief is that increasing terrorism in South Asia results from Pakistan’s failure to get to grips with jihadists operating from its territory.
The widely admired Singh is seldom given to tough talking, but he has left no one in any doubt about his depth of feeling and has emphatically declared that India will not kneel before terrorist threats. The country, he has said, would spare nothing in its fight against those responsible for the blasts.
It is a stance that will have widespread support, for the feeling is that the blasts were a line in the sand as far as India’s fight against terrorism is concerned and that from now on the country will do everything to defeat the bombers, be they from al-Qa’ida, Lashkar-e-Toiba or any other similar movement.
good sources and knowledge people have