标题: Blasts after blasts [打印本页] 作者: tauringhuang. 时间: 2008-8-4 22:16 标题: Blasts after blasts Jul 31st 2008 | DELHI
From The Economist print edition
Fears of a new breed of terrorist—or the return of an old one
WITHIN days of a terrorism spree in India and a gunfight between their armies, the leaders of India and Pakistan, Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani, were due for an awkward encounter in Colombo on August 2nd. They were expected there for the annual shindig of South Asia’s regional co-operation club, SAARC. As it happened, terrorism, as well as energy and food security, had long been on the summit’s agenda. But after the recent violence, and the bad blood it has stirred, this seemed unusually apt—or, given how ineffectual SAARC is, tragic.
On July 26th at least 51 people were killed and 200 wounded by 19 bomb blasts in Ahmedabad, the biggest city of India’s prosperous, western state of Gujarat. They came in two waves. The first ripped through the city’s crowded old quarter. Twenty minutes later, car-bombs struck two hospitals to which victims of the first blasts were being rushed. Husband-and-wife doctors were among the dead.
The previous day, a lesser atrocity: a woman was killed and six people wounded by eight blasts in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka state. The total body-count could have been greater. India’s police defused two bombs in Ahmedabad and 22 in Surat, a Gujarati diamond-polishing hub.
A mysterious outfit called the “Indian Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad attack. It was reported to have sent an e-mail to Indian television-news channels shortly before, which read: “Await five minutes for the revenge of Gujarat.” This presumably referred to the slaughter of more than 2,000 Muslims by Hindu mobs in 2002. Gujarat, the birthplace of Mohandas Gandhi, has an appalling history of Hindu-Muslim clashes. The state’s Hindu-nationalist government, led by a saffron-clad demagogue, Narendra Modi, represents the most venomous, anti-Muslim wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s main opposition party. Senior state officials have been accused of organising the massacres in 2002.
The Indian Mujahideen are accruing form. The group is reported to have emerged last November, when it claimed responsibility for attacks on courthouses and legal offices in Uttar Pradesh state. In May it claimed to be behind nine bomb-blasts in the pink-hued Rajasthani city of Jaipur, which claimed over 60 lives. These attacks and the one in Ahmedabad all occurred in places with large Muslim populations. This was also the case with other recent terrorist attacks, in Hyderabad, Varanasi and Mumbai, for which no one has taken “credit”.
India’s 150m-odd Muslims—the second biggest Muslim population after Indonesia’s—have much to complain about. They are overwhelmingly poor, and in some places discriminated against, especially in Gujarat. Yet India’s Muslims, a wary minority, have been unusually reluctant to answer the call to jihad. Few—and they are almost exclusively from insurgency-wracked Kashmir—have been reported on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. But has something now snapped?
It would seem that the Indian Mujahideen, or whoever is calling themselves by that name, wants to give that impression. They also seem to want to incite Hindu-Muslim violence, given their communally sensitive choice of targets. If so, they have mercifully failed, so far. The ambitious Mr Modi, who has been trying to restore his appalling image since his American visa was revoked in 2005, has shown particular restraint. He called the Ahmedabad bombers “enemies of humanity”.
In the absence of much evidence, Indian commentators are minded to blame a proven foe, Pakistan. Over the course of a 60-year rivalry, its military spooks have made skilful use of Islamist militants against India, in Kashmir and elsewhere. It seems inconceivable that they would not still keep tabs on these zealots, even if they are not actively controlling them—as many in India believe that they are.
Recent events elsewhere have encouraged this view. A suicide bomber attacked India’s embassy in Kabul in June, killing 41, including an Indian diplomat and an army general. Afghanistan and India openly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of the crime. And on July 28th and 29th Indian and Pakistani troops fought a 16-hour battle along the front-line bisecting Kashmir. Naturally, both sides blamed the other for starting the fight. India, which claimed to have killed Pakistani soldiers and lost one of its own, said this was the worst fighting between the two rivals since 2003.
In a time of redoubled instability in Pakistan, senior Indians fear the ISI may be trying to impose an outworn belligerent foreign policy on Mr Gilani’s tottering government. That could spell peril for the countries’ hopeful—though stalled—four-year-old peace process, which would be tragic for both.