Who is behind this act and why? What kind of explosives were used and from where these were procured? Is there a foreign hand behind the Hyderabad blasts? Why Hyderabad? Why now?
Then there are other more important big-picture issues.What are the immediate-term implications of these blasts for national security? What needs to be done to nip such terror acts in the bud? Do the Hyderabad blasts also convey something about the state of preparedness of the terrorists involved?
These are the kinds of questions which will generate answers as the investigations proceed. Some questions may never yield answers as many terror attacks in the past have remained in the grey zone.
Though no terror outfit has yet claimed responsibility for the 22 February Hyderabad blasts, it seems to be the signature act of the Indian Mujahideen, an offshoot of Simi (Students’ Islamic Movement of India). Typical IM tactics and tell-tale modus operandi have been used.
These can be enumerated as follows: placing bombs on bikes and tiffin boxes in crowded places during peak hours; picking soft targets and going for mass killings with the focus on not who but how many are getting killed; using tools for the blast that are readily available locally – such as choosing receptacles for the bombs, choice of explosives and the not-so-sophisticated modes of detonation of the bombs.
Most probably, easily available material like ammonium nitrate would have been used for the blasts. This has been the favoured chemical used by the IM ultras for committing acts of terror one after another in different parts of India.
From the preliminary reports and the fact that no crater was formed at the site of the bomb blasts it can be safely deduced that the perpetrators did not use RDX, a defence ordnance product, or plastic explosives. Why use these sophisticated explosives when the perpetrators can catch global attention by using commonly available fertilisers?
One motive for the blasts is probably to generate an impression that the Hyderabad terror attack is the handiwork of home-grown terror outfits, not foreign terrorists. This is a typical IM tactic: keep the deniability quotient very high as far as the involvement of foreign elements is concerned.
It can also be surmised that the Hyderabad blasts may have come in response to the hanging of Afzal Guru on 9 February 2013. While terror outfits would like to replicate their success in Hyderabad in many parts of India, particularly New Delhi and Mumbai, ironically it tells a tale about the state of preparedness of the terrorists as well.
One way of looking at it is that the terror apparatus, the modules, the sleeper cells, etc, are not in good shape elsewhere. But then this argument will have to be tested by time. If such or even bigger incidents are perpetrated in several other Indian cities then it is a major headache for the Indian security establishment.
If no more terror attacks take place in India in the next few weeks and months, then Hyderabad would emerge as a classic example of what local police must not do. The Andhra Pradesh police force has been stretched beyond limits over the Telangana-related mass agitations and obviously has had little time to take care of larger security issues.
These and many other attacks, before and after, made it well nigh impossible for the Indian agencies to nail the ISI with solid evidences. This does not mean that the ISI did not spawn these terror attacks. Rather it indicated the substantially improved ISI tactics and getting the dirty job done through their Indian proxies with the home-grown tag.
If the IM’s involvement in the latest Hyderabad terror attack is corroborated, it will be a wake-up call for the Indian intelligence agencies. Only a few years ago Indian intelligence had told the government in their despatches that the back of IM had been broken. Though the IM has been active since 2005, it was from 2007 onwards when the outfit started playing havoc with the Indian law and order system, exploding bombs at public places across the country with impunity and a remarkable consistency.
Moreover, if the IM’s role in the Hyderabad blasts is confirmed, it would perhaps be the first time when the IM had pulled off such a lethal operation with such large casualties since the US State Department added IM to its list of terrorist organisations on 15 September 2011. The State Department has stated that the IM has close ties with Pakistan-based terror outfits like Lashkar-e-Toiba and others, something that the Indian security and intelligence agencies had been saying for years.
Clearly the US ban on IM was meant to be largely symbolic sans any operational utility. It wasn’t expected to blunt the claws and paws of IM and reduce in any manner its capability to unleash more terror attacks in future. It did not. The American gesture was mere lip-service in the international war against terrorism.
Why? Entities banned by the US cannot operate on the American soil, people associated with them cannot travel to the US and the banned entities’ accounts are seized. The IM hasn’t been operating from the US anyway, nor does it have any bank accounts there. The IM has been operating on shoestring budgets, as is evident by its signature bomb attacks which are neither spectacular nor expensive like 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008.
The IM provides a perfect alibi for the Pakistani military establishment in implementing its policy of inflicting a thousand cuts on India while keeping the deniability quotient very high.
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The remarkable thing about hindsight is that, with its persuasive power, it’s possible to be 100 percent right about everything. So, media commentaries today are now pointing to a confession made by an Indian Mujahideen operative to the Delhi police in October 2012 – in which he had admitted to having carried out reconnaissance of three areas, including Dilsukh Nagar, in Hyderabad, the site of the blasts on Thursday evening – as proof that the intelligence had failed to avert the terrorist attack.
The confession of the Indian Mujahideen operative, identified as Syed Maqbool, is recorded in the police interrogation report of the Delhi Police (the full text of which is available here). Maqbool had been arrested by the special cell of the Delhi Police from Hyderabd following an investigation into the Pune blasts of August last year.
According to the Delhi Police investigation report, Maqbool and Imran Khan, another operative of the Indian Mujahideen, had told the police that while plotting the Pune blasts, they had stayed in Hyderabad and had reconnoitered “Dilkhush Nagar” (evidently a misspelling of Dilsukh Nagar), Begum Bazar and Abids in Hyderabad on a motorcycle. This, they claimed, they had done under instruction from Indian Mujahideen leader Riyaz Bhatkal.
From that account, the Indian Mujahideen had at that time also been plotting a string of bomb attacks in, among other places, Bodh Gaya in Bihar – as retaliation for the killings of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which is a Buddhist country.
In the wake of Thursday’s blast in Dilsukh Nagar, that confession by Maqbool and Khan (in which the name of the locality was misspelt) flashed on someone’s radar, and the point is being made that Dilsukh Nagar was a sitting duck, which the intelligence and security agencies failed to protect.
If you want evidence of lax intelligence-gathering and processing of information by the various police, intelligence and security agencies, at the Centre and in the States, there is plenty of it floating around, starting from the Home Ministry, presided over by a Minister who doesn’t exactly appear switched-on on the job.
Yet, the Eureka! moment that commentators are experiencing by pointing to a non-specific bit of information about their reconnaissance efforts in different areas appears to be a bit of an overreaction. The response is understandable under the circumstances, given the proximity of the horrific blasts at Dilsukh Nagar, but utterly misdirected.
By its very nature, the intelligence-gathering throws up millions of nuggets of information on potential threats to security. If an alarm were to be sounded on every one of those bits of information, it’s fair to say that as a country we would be in an eternal state of panic and alert, with no mindspace for anything else. Which is why intelligence agencies have to cross-verify every threat perception against a matrix of other information, and come to a conclusion on the extent of credibility that each potential threat enjoys.
If anything, the failure of intelligence in this case is more likely attributable to that stage of information-processing. And it is there that attention should be focussed on if there is to be more meaningful sharing of intelligence alerts of security threats.
Sadly, it is one area where politics has interfered to prevent meaningful efforts at counter-terrorism.
Last year, the then Home Minister P Chidambaram attempted to initiate a debate on the need to establish a National Counter Terrorism Centre to enhance anti-terrorism cooperation and intelligence-sharing at a pan-Indian level. The structure of the NCTC he envisaged may have been intrusive for State governments, who were wary of the potential for political mischief. Yet, by shooting down the proposal in its entirety on the grounds that States’ rights were being encroached upon and the federal structure of the Constitution had been violated, they spiked an initiative that did have intrinsic merits.
Firstpost had argued at that time (here) that for Chief Ministers to argue that the NCTC was unwelcome “in any form” was problematic, and would not serve the cause of meaningful counter-terrorism effort. It is the folly of that political stance that has given room for terrorist attacks of the sort we saw at Dilksukh Nagar on Thursday.
Of course, even in the absence of an institutional mechanism such as the NC TC, there is nothing that ought to have inhibited security and intelligence officials by processing the matrix of information that they had – and passed on credible intelligence alerts about specific security threats to the States.
Instead, under Shinde, the Home Ministry has become a post office, merely forwarding each and every strand of “potential threat” onto the States and leaving it up to them to frame an appropriate response based on their assessment of the credibility of the threat. Apart from swamping the States with countless false alarms, which induces a “boy who cried wolf” mindset to creep in, such interventions do not help much.
There is, of course, a case for the Home Ministry, and for intelligence and security agencies, to be more diligent in their processing of information relating to security threats. A bureaucratic file-pushing approach of the sorts that Shinde brings is grossly inadequate.
But if genuine intelligence information about potential security threats is to be harnessed meaningfully, the States must be part of the effort to establish a nodal mechanism to process disjointed bits of intelligence information - and process them for maximum effect.
Sadly, politics interfered with that effort. And on the streets of Dilsukh Nagar and in countless other neighbourhoods, innocent civilians are paying a bloody price for such political short-sightedness.
The finger of suspicion over the serial blasts in Hyderabad is already being pointed at Indian terror group Indian Mujahideen and its shadowy head Riyaz Bhatkal, with the group having conducted surveys of Dilsukh Nagar in the city last year itself.
Two of the persons arrested for their involvement in serial blasts in Pune had revealed that they had stayed in Hyderabad where they surveyed areas like Dilsukhnagar, Begum Bazaar and Abids in Hyderabad.
In a press release, the police said that Syed Maqbool and Imran Khan, both alleged Indian Mujahideen operatives, had said, “About a month before Ramzan in 2012, Maqbool helped Imran in doing a recce of Dilkhush (Dillsukh) Nagar, Begum Bazar and Abids in Hyderabad on a motorcycle. This was done on the instruction of Riyaz Bhatkal.”
According to an New Indian Express report, the ingredients used in the bombs were pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) and ammonium nitrate and had other signature elements of bombs used by the terror group including shrapnel, nuts and bolts and pieces of steel to cause maximum damage.
The suspected use of cycles to plant the bombs has also been used to point to a similar modus operandi used by the group in the past, most recently in the serial blasts carried out in Pune.
The group is accused of carrying out multiple serial blasts across the country since 2007, such as the 2007 blasts at Hyderabad’s Gokul Chaat Bhandar and Lumbini Park. At the time multiple unexploded explosive devices were found in the city that had been planted by the terror group and one of them incidentally was defused at Diksukhnagar, the scene of Thursday’s explosions.
No group has claimed responsibility for the blasts so far.
Whether the group was involved in the blast on this occasion as well remains to be seen but state intelligence officers have said that while they had received information of a possible bomb blast in the city it was very non-specific.
“The note did not have any specific information but mentioned that Hyderabad, Bangalore, Hubli, Coimbatore and Maharashtra and Gujarat could be targets of terrorist attacks,” an unnamed official was quoted to sources.
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