TACTILE TERROR, true lies

Three years after the Batla House encounter, and many blasts later, the line between fake and real becomes blurred and bleary
Manisha Sethi Delhi

There is a fairly typical story that appears in the media after every bomb blast. It is accompanied by a visual spread that graphically 'joins the dots' in the supposed Indian terror network, the Indian Mujahideen (IM). At the centre of this graphic is Atif Amin, the youth slain in the 'encounter' at Batla House, and various arrows shoot out towards photos of Bhatkal brothers, Mufti Abu Bashar, an elusive Abdul Subhan Qureshi 'Tauqeer', and many others. The cast changes marginally, and the plot moves between Kerala, Bhatkal in Karnataka, Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Ujjain and Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh (MP), with detours to Hyderabad, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

SIMI, IM, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and HuJI morph seamlessly into each other in this story of homegrown terror. Speaking at the launch of a recent book in the capital, unimaginatively titled, Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within, to an audience made up largely of the elite of the security and intelligence establishment, Union Home Minister P Chidambram stressed that we could no longer rest easy in the assumption that the source of terror was across the border; we must wake up to the homegrown variety that SIMI and IM represent. A stunning regurgitation of chargesheets and confessions – the latter not admissible in court – the book was launched around the time two prominent Indian magazines chose to do cover stories on the IM (based again on chargesheets and confessions, and little else), weeks after the blasts in Mumbai.

This was barely a month after the investigative agencies were claiming successes in busting modules and making arrests. June 2011 saw several arrests in MP – even a shootout in Ratlam, after which ostensibly high-ranking IM operatives were arrested – and the Gujarat police claimed the trophy of Danish Reyaz.

Does the IM exist?

In all honesty, it's not an easy question to answer, given that the only proof of its existence have been the e-mails received after the 2008 blasts, and the State's dossiers. Surely, the Norway narrative should caution us against eager conclusions drawn from purported claims of organisations. What can be done – and ought to be done by journalists who love the prefix 'investigative' – is to subject to some scrutiny the claims of the police and anti-terror agencies, especially after the Malegaon and Mecca Masjid (also, Ajmer Sharif and Samjhauta) blasts' revelations. Such an exercise reveals another pattern altogether, that of the web spun by counter-terror agencies, whose threads connect Kashmir and Delhi Police Special Cell, Gujarat Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) and UP ATS, and various police departments in between.

In fact, several such blasts, besides fake encounters in Gujarat, have been traced to RSS-linked Hindutva terror groups, as much as to top Gujarat cops and former ministers like Amit Shah, now out on bail. So why were so many Muslims, including youngsters, 'picked up', brutalised, condmened and tortured for the crimes committed by Hindutva terrorists? And why is P Chidambaram so afraid to book RSS leader Indresh, despite his proven links?