By Sudha Ramachandran
The twin blasts that tore through an amusement park and an eatery in Hyderabad on August 25 marked the second time in three months that the city had been targeted by terrorists. A high-tech hub that is second only to Bangalore for its booming information-technology (IT) and biotechnology sectors, Hyderabad appears to be emerging as a terror hub.
Hyderabad's economic success has attracted engineers, scientists, management consultants and students like a magnet in recent years. And intelligence officials say its contribution to India's growing economic muscle is also its appeal to terrorists.
Hyderabad ranks third among Indian cities (outside strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast) in terms of the number of attacks it has sustained over the past five years. Since 2002, 14 blasts have killed 258 people in Mumbai, while Delhi has seen seven blasts claiming 142 lives in the same period. Hyderabad has witnessed four attacks since 2005, the first in October that year, when a suicide attack was carried out at the Special Task Force headquarters in the city.
Prior to the August 25 twin attacks that killed 41 people and injured more than 60, a May explosion in Hyderabad's Mecca Masjid (mosque) killed 11 people. All of the Hyderabad attacks are believed to have been masterminded by the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), an outfit that is believed to be connected with Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Force.
Although attacks by jihadist terror outfits are a relatively new phenomenon in the city, Hyderabad has figured on the radar of these groups for more than a decade. Pakistan-based jihadist organizations such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) regard Hyderabad as Muslim land (about 40% of the city's 7 million people are Muslim), belonging to the ummah (Islamic community) and in need of "liberation" from "Hindu rule". LeT leaders have often referred to "liberating" Hyderabad in their speeches and writings and they have been setting up sleeper cells in Hyderabad since 1995, according to intelligence officials.
Initially LeT and its local allies were at the forefront of building a terror network in southern India headquartered in Hyderabad, but in recent years HUJI has assumed the leadership role. Intelligence officials say LeT is now focusing its effort in northern and western India and has "outsourced" its southern operations to HUJI.
Hyderabad is India's fifth-largest city and stands second - after Bangalore - in the hierarchy of IT hubs. Aggressive promotion of the IT industry and the development of infrastructure in the city by successive governments have contributed to Hyderabad's transformation to "Cyberabad".
Infosys, Microsoft, Wipro, GE, iGate, IBM, Satyam, Tata Consultancy Services, Oracle, Dell, Motorola, Amazon and Google have a significant presence in the city. In fact, Microsoft's largest product-development center outside its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, is in Hyderabad.
Indian intelligence agencies have issued repeated warnings over the past five years that the country's leading software hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad, figure on the hit list of terrorist groups. Analysts have pointed out that terror attacks in these two cities would not only be a symbolic strike at the heart of India's new economic might and rising global profile but they could shake the confidence of international investors.
While Hyderabad's global profile was no doubt a factor for whoever masterminded the terror attacks, there are several other considerations that have made it an attractive target.
Hyderabad's Old City, where a quarter of the city's population live in acute poverty, has pockets that are entirely Muslim and others with mixed Hindu-Muslim populations.
"The Muslim pockets provide extremist groups with a large pool of angry, disgruntled young men from which to recruit," a senior Hyderabad police intelligence official told HNN. "Setting up a network and sleeper cells would not have been difficult here. As for the mixed neighborhoods in the Old City, where Hindus and Muslims live cheek by jowl, these provide the perfect explosive environment in which riots, once triggered, can be expected to spread like wildfire."
According to analysts, terrorist attacks have aimed at igniting communal violence to provoke Muslim anger with the Indian state and provide the terror outfits with a steady stream of recruits. More important, they said, the attacks divide India's secular-democratic culture.
That is why terror groups targeted temples such as the Akshardham in Gandhinagar in 2002 or Sankatmochan in Varanasi last year. When these failed to provoke riots, mosques were targeted, as in Malegaon in 2006 and the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad.
Hyderabad has a long history of Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It has often been described as a communal tinderbox. "Having failed to provoke communal violence in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, terrorist groups are now trying their luck with Hyderabad," the intelligence official said.
Political parties have also played a role in fostering fundamentalism in Hyderabad. The most obvious is Majlis-e-Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen (MIM), which has its political base among Muslims in the Old City. Though MIM might not be linked directly to the terrorist attacks, authorities say it has encouraged the radicalization of Muslim youth in the Old City.
When controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin - Muslim clerics have issued several fatwas against her for her works - visited Hyderabad recently, MIM legislators and activists threw books and chairs at her at a media conference she was addressing. MIM leaders defended the attack subsequently and a legislator went on to say that she "deserved more". He even issued a warning that she would be beheaded if she set foot in Hyderabad again. It was not the first time MIM has incited violence.
If MIM's behavior is shocking, so is the silence of its ally, the Indian National Congress. The MIM is part of the ruling coalition in the federal government and in Andhra Pradesh. The Congress is reluctant to rein in the MIM as it does not want to antagonize its Muslim voters. With no curbs on its provocative brand of politics and with its support base in the Old City shrinking, MIM is expected to step up its divisive rhetoric in the coming months.
While the MIM is fueling Muslim fundamentalism in Hyderabad, the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using similar tactics in the Hindu neighborhoods of the Old City. where anger over unemployment and poverty is seething and being increasingly articulated through the religious idiom. Police officials complain that their hands are tied by the political backing that both the MIM and the BJP enjoy, and that this has sent a signal to extremists that they can do what they want in Hyderabad and get away with it.
It is not just the police who are fed up with the mix of political patronage and extremism in Hyderabad. The general public and business leaders, especially in the IT and biotech sectors, are equally annoyed.
The chief executive officer of a medium-sized Indian IT company in Hyderabad told HNN that while the blasts are worrying, Indian companies are not yet pressing the panic button.
"Indian companies are accustomed to working in the security environment that exists in India," he said. "But the global giants are unlikely to be as sanguine. An attack here or there is unlikely to shake the industry much, but if they become frequent, then we will have a problem." Thus the attacks in May and August do not bode well for Hyderabad.
B S Nagaraj, manager of public policy and risk management at Hill & Associates (India) Private Ltd, told HNN: "Typically, multinational companies operating out of emerging markets like India have a lower risk tolerance than their home-grown counterparts." Yet "there are no instances of any multinational company quitting India strictly because of the threat of terrorism", he added.
But this could change, says the CEO in Hyderabad, if economic targets are directly targeted. Besides, if as in the case of Bangalore - where Indian IT giants such as Infosys and Wipro have been named by intelligence agencies as figuring on terrorist hit lists - specific companies (especially multinationals) are named as likely targets, the scenario will change, he warns. Multinationals could then look to other, smaller cities.
An already jittery Hyderabad will then have reason for alarm.
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