India is a FAILURE...!!!
India's 'most wanted' gaffe will cost
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - A list of 50 most-wanted terrorists that India was hoping to use to pressure Pakistan has ended up deeply embarrassing the country. It turns out that at least two people on the list that Delhi alleged were fugitives from Indian law and being sheltered in Pakistan, are in fact in India.
India handed over the list to Pakistan during home secretary-level talks in March. In the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing in a safe house in Abbottabad on May 2 and Pakistan coming under international criticism for sheltering the al-Qaeda chief for at least six years, India decided to draw world attention yet again to Pakistan's sheltering of top terrorists wanted in India - it made the list public.
This list includes some of the biggest names in terrorist circles and the underworld. Topping it is Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed. Others include Major Iqbal, a suspected serving Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officer who also figures in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation indictment in a Chicago court in connection with the 2008 Mumbai terror attack; Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar, the prime suspect in a 2001 attack on India's parliament; Illyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani commando who is being mentioned now as a possible successor to Osama bin Laden and chief of Hizbul Mujahideen, the largest militant organization in Kashmir, Syed Salahuddin.
Among those wanted for their role in the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai that killed 273 people are underworld don Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar and his associates Memon Ibrahim alias Tiger Memon, Shaikh Shakeel alias Chhota Shakeel, Memon Ayub Abdul Razak, Anis Ibrahim Kaskar Shaikh, Anwar Ahmed Haji Jamal and Mohammed Ahmed Dosa.
The names of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack case accused Sajid Majid, Major Sameer Ali, Sayed Abdul Rehman alias Pasha and Abu Hamza also figure in the list.
India has often accused Pakistan of sheltering its most wanted. Indeed, several who figure in this list, such as Saeed, are often seen addressing public rallies in Pakistani cities.
But it turns out that at least two of the "fugitives" on the list are in India.
Wazhul Kamar Khan, who figures at number 41, is out on bail and living with his family in Thane, a Mumbai suburb. Accused of involvement in at least four blasts that date back to 2002-03, he was on the run for around seven years but in May last year he was arrested in Mumbai, only to be let out on bail three months later.
Feroz Abdul Rashid Khan alias Hamza, number 24 on the list, is cooling his heels as in Mumbai's Arthur Road jail. An accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case, Feroz was on the run until his arrest in February last year.
The Indian government, while embarrassed, responded with airy disdain to the revelations. Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said, "There was a genuine human error in not updating the list." He added it was not such a "monumental mistake" of "calamitous consequences".
Even if the errors will not have "calamitous consequences", their impact on efforts to get Pakistan to stop sheltering anti-India terrorists and fugitives could be serious. A problem that is perhaps among the most serious confronting Indian people and the state has been turned by the government into a farce.
In the past, Pakistan's stock response to India's most wanted lists has been to deny that they were in Pakistan. Worse, it has been dismissive of evidence provided. In February 2005 for instance, when India handed over files containing among other things evidence of involvement of Pakistani nationals in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks - the dossiers provided even addresses where the terrorists were staying - Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Basheer famously dismissed it as "literature", not evidence.
Now with India making a huge blunder over the presence of two "fugitives", Islamabad will be in a position to be even more dismissive of India's allegations. Next time Indian officials hand over a most-wanted list, Pakistani officials could gently remind them to circulate the list first among India's own law-enforcement and investigative agencies.
For decades India has complained of being at the receiving end of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Delhi often complains that its drawing of global attention to Islamabad's provision of sanctuary to terrorists has never been taken seriously.
The goof over the most-wanted list provides answers to why India's allegations are not taken as seriously as they should be. It is weakened from within by a bureaucracy and a ruling class that lack professionalism, many of whom are at best incompetent and inefficient.
Since the 2008 Mumbai terror attack and particularly after the killing of Bin Laden by US Special Forces, a section of Indian security experts has been calling on the government to carry out "surgical strikes" to "take out" anti-India terrorists who are enjoying sanctuary in Pakistan. India's army chief General V K Singh boasted that "all three arms of the [Indian] military were competent" to carry out an operation similar to the one conducted by the US at Abbottabad.
On what intelligence would such a "surgical strike" be based? Obviously, those carrying out the strike would need to know the exact location of the terrorist. But India lacks such information. It doesn't have much of a clue regarding even those who are in its custody.
Indian analysts have blamed the blunder on the casual attitude of the internal security establishment to updating and maintaining records and to the failure of officials to follow procedures, whether it is with regard to preparing important documents and dossiers or carrying out investigations.
In the unseemly haste to embarrass Pakistan, officials did not double-check the names on the most-wanted list.
But more importantly, there is a problem in the way India conducts diplomacy with Pakistan. As The Hindu points out in an editorial:
When it comes to India's relations with Pakistan, or any country for that matter, the sole window for public pronouncements and even unofficial briefings ought to be the Ministry of External Affairs or the Prime Minister's Office. What we have instead is a free-for-all in which top generals, bureaucrats, and even defense scientists feel free to make statements - or plant stories - that have a crucial bearing on foreign policy.
By making public the most-wanted list, India's investigative agencies were hoping to embarrass Pakistan. By not doing their homework thoroughly before they sent off the list to Pakistan and then went to the media with it, they ended up shooting the Indian government in the foot. Years of painstaking effort to draw attention to Pakistan's support to fugitives and terrorists was destroyed in the process.
As the Hindu editorial observes in conclusion, "The error should also serve as a reminder to our intelligence agencies and internal security bureaucracy that their time is best spent getting their house in order rather than hamming it on a diplomatic stage for which they have neither talent nor aptitude."
They set out to embarrass Pakistan but ended up with egg on their face.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore. She can be reached at
sudha98@hotmail.com
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