As Indian police crack down after bombings, mistrust grows
By Somini Sengupta
Friday, October 3, 2008
NEW DELHI: Even by the standards of this fractious and sprawling country, a victim of terrorism for at least 20 years, the spate of recent strikes has been unusual and unsettling: seven separate attacks in four months, with a death toll of about 150.
It has also prompted the law enforcement authorities to begin an aggressive manhunt that has gripped the nation and raised anew questions about India's police tactics, the place of its large Muslim minority and the effectiveness of its overburdened courts.
In the past several weeks, under intense popular pressure to show results, the police across India have made about two dozen arrests, killed a man they described as the "mastermind" of several recent blasts in a dramatic shootout in the capital and presented to the public a rare and swiftly assembled portrait of a spectacularly well-oiled, homegrown Islamist terrorism network.
The network, Indian Mujahedeen, was described by the police as having recruited disaffected Muslims from a rural north Indian district famous for exporting hit men for the Mumbai underworld. It trained them in southern jungles, the police said, and even lured in urban educated youths. Its members were inspired as much by Osama bin Laden as by specifically Indian Muslim grievances, particularly the anti-Muslim attacks in Gujarat in 2002, they said.
Those arrested have ranged from a scrap dealer to a preacher to several ambitious, accomplished college students, including one described by his family of having dreamed of joining the Indian civil service. Three of those arrested, and the suspect killed in the shootout, were students at the acclaimed Jamia Millia Islamia, a predominantly Muslim university in New Delhi.
But the official account of events has divided the nation, in part along religious lines, failed to withstand the scrutiny of newspapers and civil rights groups, and in turn revealed a general distrust of law enforcement.
More worryingly, it has uncovered a deep well of anger among India's Muslims, who complain bitterly of being wrongfully singled out every time bombs go off.
In addition to the Jamia students arrested, several others have been picked up for questioning and then released. The mood on the campus was "angry but quiet," Ali Hashmi, 21, a Jamia economics major, said last week.
The discrepancies in the police accounts have been most glaring, critics say, in the case of the Sept. 13 blasts in the capital, which killed 25 people and wounded several dozen in three shopping areas in three corners of the city, just as Hindus and Muslims went shopping in preparation for their biggest festivals of the year.
Six days later, the police announced the first breakthrough. They stormed a fourth-floor apartment in the Jamia university neighborhood and killed a 24-year-old college student, Atif Amin. They said he had planned at least three recent terrorist attacks, including one in eastern Varanasi as far back as March 2006.
The police also killed one of his suspected accomplices, arrested another and seized what they called incriminating evidence inside the apartment: two pistols, a laptop computer and a mobile phone, in which, they later said, they found photographs of the Delhi blast sites.
The city's joint commissioner of the police, Karnail Singh, said in an interview that the laptop contained "motivational" material from Al Qaeda, but offered no details.
One of New Delhi's most celebrated police officers, M.C. Sharma, who led the raid, was also killed in the shootout. The day after his death, the local papers reported that he had "a kill tally" of 75 suspected criminals, a measure of how suspects are routinely killed in encounters with the police before they can be brought to trial.
Within hours, the police arrested three Jamia students from the area. The police said that they confessed to having planted two of the five bombs on Sept. 13, and that two of them were also involved in a strike on Ahmedabad, a western city and site of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim clashes, two months ago.
Two suspects escaped the raid.
Within days, civil rights groups, and Muslims in particular, began to question the police account. How had two suspects escaped the raid, when the building and the streets below were crawling with officers and national guardsmen? Why had Sharma not worn a bulletproof vest on a raid seeking such a high-value terrorism suspect?
Also, it later turned out that one of those arrested, Saquib Nisar, a business school student, had been taking an exam on the day of the Ahmedabad blasts.
Six days after the Delhi arrests, in a dramatic news conference of their own, the police in Mumbai announced five additional arrests.
Their suspects, they maintained, were responsible for most of the terrorism strikes around the country since 2005, including the ones that the Delhi police had pinned on Amin.
Tehelka, a weekly newsmagazine, drew up a list of contradictory police narratives under the headline "Sleuths in Wonderland."
Then, on Monday, two small bombs went off in towns in western India. They appeared to target Muslim-dominated areas and together killed five people. The police said that they could not rule out the involvement of Hindu radical organizations.
Whether the police account of the Sept. 13 plot will hold up in trial is anybody's guess. Confessions to the police are not admissible in court, and the judiciary is so woefully overburdened that the case could take years to resolve; it took 15 years, for instance, to secure a verdict in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts that killed more than 260.
But in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood of New Delhi called Shaheen Bagh, the boys on Nisar's street were seething with disbelief at everything the police announced.
Nisar, 25, the son of a test-tube salesman, seems to have been one of the neighborhood's best-known strivers. H.G.S. Dhaliwal, the city's deputy police commissioner, described him as a "chilled-out kind of guy" who was a strong academic performer and nursed big ambitions.
The 2002 anti-Muslim violence bred his rage, Dhaliwal said, and a friend from high school, Mohammed Shakeel, had lured him into the terrorist cell.
His brother, Shariq Nisar, 18, offered a different portrait, however. The elder Nisar had graduated with an economics degree from Jamia and was pursuing a master's in business administration from a private university.
He worked full time at an employment agency, exercised at a gym nearby and was determined to join the competitive Indian Administrative Service. Shariq Nisar said his brother had met Amin at college and because Amin was looking for a room to rent, referred him to another friend, Zia ur-Rahman, whose father managed the apartment.
Rahman and Shakeel are both under arrest. The apartment was the scene of the shootout.
Shariq Nisar said his brother had been framed.
"My brother was studying," he said. "Look what kind of dreams he had. Look what he got."
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
