December 1 2008
Guardian UK
*These attacks were born of local and regional hostilities, and it seems likely a part was played by a Mumbai crime boss*
A perverse narcissism seized the British media last week, with several papers seemingly desperate to claim the Mumbai terrorists as British citizens. There was no evidence for this beyond a couple of unsourced stories in the Indian press, but it served to confirm the thesis that the whole operation was organised by al-Qaida and thus merely another manifestation of the cultural clash between Islam and its religious competitors.
The Mumbai attacks were not about global jihad. The attacks on foreign tourists at the Taj and the Oberoi, and on the Lubavitch centre, were designed to secure maximum publicity - a strategy that worked splendidly. Yet the roots of this nightmarish event are to be found elsewhere: in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India since the late 1980s, and in regional relations between India and Pakistan.
The operational key to the Mumbai attacks, however, is almost certainly held by D-Company, the sprawling and hugely effective organised criminal syndicate that is steered from the Pakistani port city of Karachi by the most powerful figure in Mumbai's fabled underworld, Dawood Ibrahim. It is virtually impossible that Dawood was unaware of the preparation of the attack, given the D-Company's extensive intelligence network (which in several past instances has proved more effective than the Indian state's intelligence capacity).
India's security services have begun investigating Dawood's possible role in the attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India's great commercial centre. In 1993, he put his network at the disposal of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, to let it smuggle in huge amounts of the explosive RDX. As the Mumbai author, Hussain Zaidi, demonstrates in his extraordinary book, Black Friday, the RDX was then used for the terrorist attacks in March 1993, in which 257 people died, still the single highest death toll in any of the atrocities visited upon Mumbai in recent years. Dozens of co-conspirators have been convicted, largely thanks to the evidence of some bombers who became state witnesses, revealing the terrorist plans in minute detail.
Sasool Dock, where a dozen or so of the attackers landed, is one of the port areas under D-Company's control. In the 1993 attacks, Dawood was able to land the RDX at night because he corrupted police officials responsible for monitoring the coast in Mumbai and its environs. If Dawood's role in the recent attacks is confirmed, it is highly likely that officials will again have been paid to turn a blind eye.
Dawood himself has not returned to Mumbai, where he was born and raised, for more than 20 years, since he fled the city for Dubai to escape murder charges. But before he left, he had eliminated several of his major rivals on his way to becoming the biggest criminal boss in the city. The organisation has grown and prospered, trading primarily in gold, narcotics and weapons, ever since.
Until 1993, D-Company was a fully secular organisation. Dawood himself is a Muslim but his most trusted lieutenant, Chota Rajan, was a Hindu. In December 1992, however, a series of riots inspired by the rising power of extreme Hindu nationalism left the Muslim community in Bombay (as it was then called) cowed and frightened. Two thirds of the 900 people killed in the riots were Muslims and a number of Dawood's associates were injured or had their property damaged in the events.
Incensed by the anti-Muslim feeling whipped up by the local nationalist party, Shiv Sena, Dawood agreed to assist in the appalling bomb attacks of March 1993 in revenge. The result was a unique twist in the growing power of organised crime in Mumbai - the syndicates lined up behind religious faith. Chota Rajan established his own organisation, and a de facto war broke out between Hindu and Muslim crime groups. "Mumbai's underworld was the most secular part of this city," Rakesh Maria, a deputy police commissioner, told me. "In other spheres we saw communal issues having an impact, but we never for a moment imagined this could affect organised crime."
Dawood's relationship with the ISI in Pakistan became closer when the authorities in Dubai decided his presence in the city was no longer conducive to the public good (nor its relations with India) and in 2003 he moved to Karachi. Most analysts agree that this has increased Dawood's dependency on his ISI sponsors. Yet, despite an absence of almost a quarter of a century from his home, D-Company still dominates the Mumbai underworld.
The intended political impact of the attacks is to prevent any rapprochement between Islamabad and Delhi, a development that threatens to undermine extremist constituencies in both Pakistan and India. It will unquestionably strengthen the various Hindu nationalist organisations such as the BJP as general elections loom in the country.
As a consequence, along with sorting out its shambolic intelligence and security forces, it must be a priority of the Indian government to prevent any Hindu nationalist backlash against the Muslims of Mumbai. Dawood Ibrahim may believe that his proven links with atrocities are designed to defend the increasingly impoverished and marginalised Muslim communities in Mumbai and India. In fact, he merely places them at even greater risk.
Misha Glenny is the author of McMafia: Crime without Frontiers misha.glenny@which.net
