http://www.kashmirherald.com/main.php?t=OP <http://www.kashmirherald.com/main.php?t=OP&st=D&no=166> &st=D&no=166 Northeast: Long Shadows of Subversion BIBHU PRASAD ROUTRAY
The hunt for the terrorists involved in the Mumbai serial blasts of July 11 reverberated across the northeast with the arrest of a number of Islamist militants. While many of these militants are not known to be directly linked to the Mumbai incidents, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that they represent tiny threads of a larger network that aims to destabilise the country. On July 19, a confidential official order directed Police Stations and outposts in seven Districts of Assam: Cachar, Karimganj, Hailakandi, Dhubri, Barpeta, Darrang and Sonitpur, to prepare a list of persons suspected to have links with fundamentalist groups, including the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The order specifically asked for information on former SIMI cadres, who had 'quit' the organisation after it was banned on September 27, 2001. Interestingly, police appears to have only anecdotal information on about 5,000 SIMI activists, who have simply disappeared following the organisation's proscription. The chief of SIMI's Guwahati unit, Mohammed Taher, for instance, who used to stay in a rented accommodation in the city's Hedayetpur area and went missing after the Government banned the group, is reportedly hiding in the Barak Valley. The orders come in the wake of intelligence inputs regarding the threat of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) modules planning to detonate several explosions targeting the rail networks in the State. Specifically, Rangia, Bongaigaon, Tinsukia and Lumding railway stations have been put on a month's alert since July 17. The fact that arrests of Islamist extremists also took place at roughly the same time, adds greater significance to such inputs. On July 16, two SIMI activists, Mohammad Hussain Ali and Mohammad Yasin Nuri, were arrested from Fakiragram in Kokrajhar District, and a revolver and four rounds of live ammunition were recovered from them. A day later, on July 17, the Guwahati city Police arrested Nurul Islam, a leader of the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam (MULTA) from Ambari locality. Police sources maintained that the arrested MULTA leader was the camp commander of the outfit's training camp in Bangladesh and he was hiding in the city in the guise of a rickshaw puller for the past three years. MULTA is known to have maintained at least two camps in the Chittagong and Cox's Bazar Districts of Bangladesh for the past several years. On July 18, Imamuddin Ahmed, a 45-year old cleric in a madrassa (seminary) in Chaulkhowa in Dibrugarh District, a practising quack, and also a suspected SIMI cadre, was arrested by Army personnel. 600 grams of 'brown sugar' worth INR 800,000 (about US$ 17,500) and some incriminating documents relating to SIMI activities were found in his possession. Army sources stated, "We have specific inputs that Ahmed was born in Bangladesh and came to Manipur in 1994, where he established and nurtured the SIMI network. After that, he came to Dibrugarh and has since been working as the chief co-ordinator of SIMI for the two states (Assam and Manipur)." Again, on July 18, five persons, all Muslims, claiming to have hailed from Bihar and Orissa and posing as Army recruitment agents, were picked up from two hotels in Guwahati's Paltan Bazar area. They were found to have checked in to the Hotel under fictitious Hindu identities. During their interrogations it was revealed that they had visited the renowned Kamakhya temple in Guwahati twice in the preceding week. Two electronic toys, with their internal wires removed, were recovered from them, leading the investigators to suspect that the toys were to be used as bombs after being primed with explosives. Sustained attempts at consolidation by Islamist militant groups in Assam have repeatedly failed over the years. Even though 14 Islamist organisations are said to be operating in the State with active assistance from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Bangladeshi Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the State police has maintained that it is capable of neutralizing their activities. However, past capabilities might prove a handicap in future. Assam, which witnessed the growth of Islamist political parties in the April 2006 Assembly elections, might see a spurt of Islamist extremism. In that eventuality, Muslim majority Districts such as Dhubri, Goalpara, Barpeta, Nagaon, Karimganj and Hailakandi, in addition to Districts with substantial Muslim populations, such as Cachar, Marigaon and Darrang, would pose serious problems for the security establishment. The Mumbai blasts have brought further focus on the hidden processes of Islamist consolidation in other States of the northeast. In the first such case in the State, ten militants of the People's United Liberation Front (PULF) were arrested from the commercial town of Dimapur in Nagaland on July 19. The group operates in neighbouring Manipur. Their arrest from Dimapur, a town which, over the years, has witnessed a massive influx of Bangladeshi Muslim migrants (a 2004 estimate put their figures at 200,000), could be a pointer towards the unmonitored Islamist mobilisation that has escaped the attention of the security establishment. Little is known of the vast and isolated areas the Bangladeshi migrants have now come to occupy in Nagaland, and the linkages they may have developed with local and regional militant groups, or the support structure they provide to activities of covert agencies like the ISI. Some elements among the Bangladeshis in areas like Dimapur and Niuland have, thus far, been seen as mere criminals and trouble makers. Highly publicised, yet miserably unsuccessful, 'oust-Bangladeshis campaigns' have been launched by local organisations after the migrants have been involved in criminal activities such as theft and rape. Intelligence and enforcement agencies are now increasingly concerned about the potential of subversive alliances within such constituencies. Little, however, appears to have been learned from incidents like the October 2, 2004, twin blasts that rocked Dimapur, claiming 27 lives. In Tripura, on July 14, three days after the Mumbai blasts, police arrested 11 Muslim youth from a mosque in the border village of Sonarai in Dhalai District. The youth hailed from Mumbra town in the Thane District of Maharashtra, located a hundred kilometres from Mumbai. Two days later, on July 16, another eight young Gujarati 'preachers' were arrested from a mosque in Udaipur, headquarters of Tripura's South District. All of the arrested persons were later confirmed to be members of the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ, the Arabic name denotes a Group that propagates the Faith), and were released on July 19 after investigations, even though three of the persons detained admitted to a SIMI past. In spite of the clean chit given to the detainees, it is the case that the TJ, formed in the 1920s by Muhammad Ilyas in the Mewat area of India (now in the State of Haryana), with an explicit agenda of proselytisation, is known to have hobnobbed with the militant groups worldwide. Though the organisation publicly rejects terrorism and seeks to distance itself from various Islamist militant groups, TJ members have often been recruited by terrorist groups in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. Experts believe that the TJ has worked as a catalyst for Islamist extremism, creating the mindsets that lend themselves to subsequent recruitment by more radical groupings. With an extremely successful outreach programme, the TJ has, over the years, managed to secure a significant presence in countries including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the United States, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Incidentally, the United States had put the TJ under a scanner following the 9/11 attacks with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) indicating that the al Qaeda had used the TJ in the United States for recruitment of cadres. In Pakistan the TJ is known to maintain links with the LeT and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM). The TJ was also involved in a failed assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and senior army officials in September-October 1995. A large number of Pakistani, Saudi and Jordanian TJ activists were provided arms training in HuM and LeT camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The possibility of the TJ bringing these linkages into Tripura, a State enveloped by Bangladesh from three sides, at some point in the future, cannot be ruled out. The shadows of subversion appear to be strengthening over other States, such as Meghalaya and Manipur, as well. While Meghalaya, with an extended and porous border with Bangladesh, provides points of ingress and egress, the interior States, such as Manipur, have been gradually turning into areas of Islamist consolidation and potential loci of future flare-ups. The arrested MULTA 'camp commander', Nurul Islam, during his interrogation at Guwahati, disclosed that a group of 15 to 20 MULTA cadres had used Meghalaya's capital Shillong and Lad Rymbai in the Jaintia Hills, as their hideouts during their journeys to and from Bangladesh. Bangladeshi migration has emerged as a serious issue in Manipur. In late April 2003, Bangladeshi immigrants in the Jiribam Sub-division of Imphal East District teamed up with the Islamist PULF, to avenge the death of an illegal migrant, hounding out 300 Bengali Hindus from their villages. According to sources, of late, subtle ISI activities are being noticed in various places, including capital Imphal and Moreh. Given its geographical location, the hostile terrain, porous and unmanaged borders with Bangladesh, administrative apathy and political myopia that the Northeast is enmeshed in, the forces of destabilisation will always find opportunities to organise themselves, plan and execute attacks. There is substantial cumulative evidence of incessant efforts of subversion in the region, and an urgent need to establish a strategy and mechanism to continuously assess, monitor and neutralise such threats as they emerge. The writer is a Research Fellow at Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi, India [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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