Why is India under Attack?

Why is India under unremitting attack from Pakistan? In its answer lies the solution to proxy war being waged by Pakistan. It is not just ‘territory’; the honest answer would contain some ‘non-territorial’ reasons, politically dreadful and explosive.

On the morning of 26 September, terrorists attacked an armoured unit in Samba. The Second-in-Command (2IC) Lt Col Bikramjeet Singh was killed and the Commanding Officer Colonel Avin Uthaiya received bullet injuries. There was another attack on a police station at Kathua. At least twelve people were killed and four injured in the twin terror attacks. The usual suspect is the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), rather its latest ruse, Shohada Brigade. These attacks occurred near the International Boundary (IB), which is not a disputed area. Simultaneously, from across the Line of Control (LoC), there was brazen infiltration bid in the Keran Sector by at least 30 Pakistan based militants of which the Indian Army eliminated a dozen.

An Act of War!

The attack thus emanating from Pakistan’s soil addressed both the LoC and the IB. The simultaneity and the coordination of the attacks separated by hundreds of kilometers could not have taken place without the orchestration of the Pakistani dispensation. This constitutes an act of war!

The attack on the armoured unit is a perfect paradigm of “proxy war”. An armoured unit equipped with 45 tanks packs enormous amount of firepower. It just took three militants to neutralise it, not on physical but strategic terms and unambiguously demonstrated that a sleazy adversary can paralyse conventional military superiority with cowardly reliance on irregular warfare as a matter of strategic faith. Proxy war or sub-conventional war affords deniability to the perpetrator. Diplomatic visits and engagements serve tools for deniability and diplomatic reprieve to the perpetrator to perpetuate and calibrate ‘proxy war’. Pakistan has mastered this art and India has allowed itself to be a confounded victim. The cycle of terror and talks hence continues unabated. The media discourse on the attack unfortunately dwelt neither on the strategic enormity of the attacks across the IB and LoC, nor on the sacrifices made by our security personnel. It chose to focus on ‘whether PM Manmohan Singh would or should meet his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif’! The meeting was merely taking place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Yet the pretense was maintained that the talks were an end in itself and great dexterity was shown to distinguish between ‘Nawaz Sharif’, the secular political and democratic ‘face of Pakistan’, and the military-intelligence establishment. Nawaz Sharif was propped up as the face of peace and the attacks were construed as attempts to derail the ‘peace process’.

Negligible Peace Constituency

Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is an insignificant peace constituency left in Pakistan. The support provided by the terror outfit ‘Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’ (LeJ) to Nawaz Sharif in the recent elections is common knowledge. It is also documented that Nawaz Sharif’s brother Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab, has provided Rs.61 million to Hafiz Saeed in the current fiscal. The Punjab Government also provided Rs.350 million grant-in-aid to ‘Markaz-e-Taiba’ of Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD) for setting-up ‘Knowledge Park’. The JuD centre, which was located at Murdike on outskirts of Lahore, was taken over by the Punjab government shortly after UN Security Council designated JuD a front of the LeT in the wake of Mumbai attacks. In fact, the police in Punjab let all the LeT leaders escape arrest and only a year later the Shahbaz government approved a grant  of one million  US dollars to LeT.

Imran Khan’s Tehreek-i-Insaf not only collaborated with jihadi elements in run-up to the elections but also runs the government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa with Jamaat-e-Islami. The government has restored the violent jihadi content in the school textbooks in the province, which the Awami National Party (ANP), had removed in 2008. The stark reality therefore in Pakistan is that apart from the military-establishment, nearly all mainstream political forces are in truck with the jihadi outfits. In Pakistan, there could be internal differences between the political class and the military on power sharing, but there is near complete unanimity with regard to jihad and its anti-India objectives.

Nawaz Sharif, therefore talking to Indian Prime Minister will always prove to be a regressive affair as far as India’s resolve and capability to tailor the response to proxy war is concerned. Such meetings are meant to manipulate and undermine the meaning and acts of war. This can be ascribed  primarily to the reason that India unlike Pakistan (since 1947) has never waged proxy war against any country, and therefore it does not realise its military, political ,diplomatic and most critically intelligence, facets.

Jihadi Subversion of Universities

The Punjab province of Pakistan is now emerging as the new epicenter and base of Jihadis. Lahore, as per some reports, is now the hub of Al-Qaeda in the country. A communication center of the Al-Qaeda was busted in Lahore in August 2013 (Campus Terror by Khalid Ahmed, Indian Express, 27 September 2013). This centre, operating in the name of ‘International Technical Hub’ was receiving signals from Afghanistan. At least, half a dozen terrorists including women were arrested. The Arab funded International Islamic University, Islamabad is the ideological nerve center of global jihad. In fact, the father of ‘global jihad’ and the mentor of Osama bin Laden, the Palestinian Abdullah Azam taught in this university. The universities in Pakistan, as per Khalid Ahmed, are under complete sway of Islamic Jamaat Taliba (IJT), the student wing of JeI. The Lahore University of Engineering and Technology, where Hafiz Saeed served as a lecturer, is the most formidable stronghold of IJT. The Vice-Chancellor of Punjab University has lamented that the hostels in the university are infested with terrorists, but such is the influence of the IJT with the dispensation that nothing much can be done. The IJT cadres routinely beat up teachers having a liberal outlook. The IJT and the JeI members have been providing shelter to Al-Qaeda elements. Sheikh Mohammad, one of the planners of 9/11, was arrested from women’s wing of JeI in Rawalpindi. Abu Zubayadah, a Saudi Arabian citizen belonging to the Al-Qaeda, was arrested in Faisalabad from a shelter given by Hafiz Saeed. Together, Hafiz Saeed’s JuD and the JeI, command overwhelming influence on the youth of the country. All shades of jihadi organisations in Punjab, Taliban–Punjabinon-Punjabis as per Mr Khalid,are sustained by Al-Zawahiri’s Arab money, and muscle and purse of JuD. Hafiz Saeed is known for his spiritual links to the founder of Al-Qaeda, Abdullah Azam.

India Has To Go Alone

The operational links between Al-Qaeda, ISI, LeT and Taliban is well established. Supposedly, the LeT and its sponsors undertook the Mumbai 2611 attack, only after a similar attack planned against Manhattan (including UN headquarters) was abandoned by Al-Qaeda because of the infiltration by CIA in the organisation. Was David Headley, therefore, responsible for shift of target from Manhattan to Mumbai? Headley after all, had infiltrated Al- Qaeda and later LeT and became its key operative. Having known the details of the LeT, why does the US soft peddle on LeT and Hafiz Saeed. The bitter reality is that India will have to fight its jihadi proxy war all by itself.

Punjab:  New Global Jihad Epicenter

In a shift from Af-Pak region, the Punjab province of Pakistan is being nurtured by the jihadis of all hues as the base for the fresh jihad to be launched against the Afghan regime and its 3,50,000 strong new Afghan Army for takeover of Afghanistan. The province has been consciously chosen, as the Pashtuns in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Waziristan continue to be in an imbalanced state and the men who constituted the mainstay in the war against Soviet Union and later in support of Taliban regime, have suffered considerable attrition. Punjab province therefore is the new recruiting ground and jihadi hub.

Al-Zawahiri, the present head of Al-Qaeda, as per some reports, is located in the Punjab province, somewhere in the outskirts of Lahore.  The attack in shopping mall in Nairobi, in which nearly 72 people were killed and more than 175 injured, by Al-Shabab group,(affiliate of Al-Qaeda) and the attack in a Church in Peshawar (72 killed) carried similar signatures as the targets were specifically non-Muslims. There are many Pakistanis apart from Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenese  as well as Europeans in the ranks of Al Shabab. The overall direction is provided by Al-Zawahri.

The audacity of attacks witnessed recently, as per some analysts, suggests a resurgent sense of triumphalism amongst the jihadi groups because of the envisaged withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan. The same sense of invincibility was palpable in the jihadi discourse following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The series of attacks across the LoC and the IB including the latest in Keran and Samba sector, the attempted ethnic cleansing in Kishtwar and the demand for dismantling the Village Development Committees appear to be facilitation measures for the Pakistan sponsored jihadi project in India, particularly Kashmir.

As the new global jihadi hub in Punjab grows, the heat will be increasingly felt in India. Habib-ur-Rehman, a commander of the LeT, in a meeting of commanders convened recently in Muzaffarabad, exhorted them to carry out attacks in small groups in J&K. The attack therefore in Samba was not in an intelligence vacuum and the jihadi threat is not confined to J&K. In September 2013 itself, there have been intelligence alerts regarding 26/11 type attacks by LeJ which could occur in Delhi, Mumbai and South India.

Entire India is the Target

Calls made from ten different states including Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra indicate the phenomenon of Indian jihadi volunteers being sent for training with Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The Popular Front of India (PFI), a South India based organization was reportedly formed at the behest of Al-Qaeda and LeT. Two years back, four trained PFI cadres were apprehended in Kupwara in J&K. Another Indian from Tamil Naidu, Mohammad Niaz Abdul Rashid, accused of creating a group for ‘armed jihad’ told his French interrogators that he was part of PFI and was in contact with jihadis in Pakistan. Intriguingly, the PFI  is still not a proscribed organisation in India.

The proxy war soldiers and facilitators in India are spread all over the country. No amount of reactive strategies can insulate the people of India from such proxy wars; the secured space in India is rapidly shrinking even as our precious resources are being increasingly and inexorably being sliced in the name of security, predominantly reactive in character. We have failed to impose any degree of cost and caution on the perpetrator. The proxy war if not immediately bridled can have grave consequences on India’s internal security. We therefore need to have a proactive strategy to hit at the nerve centres from where such attacks are being launched on India.

Conclusion

And finally, let us remember the commendable role played by the CO and the 2IC of an armoured regiment  by taking charge and leading from the front in dealing with the proxy soldiers of Pakistan. The 2IC lost his life and the CO received bullet injuries while defending the nation. The CO, whom I know personally from the days when he was a young boy is the son of one Col M M Ravi, who was awarded the Vir Chakra in the 1971 war. A worthy son of a worthy father! Warriors therefore are not easy to create. The CO’s wife, this author has learnt, never left the company of the bereaved 2IC’s wife, even as her own husband was being evacuated for surgery of his bullet injuries. She is believed to have said that the 2IC’s wife needed her more than her husband. But for such men and women, proxy war by Pakistan would have consumed the country. After all, it did reach parliament.

 RSN Singh is a former R&AW Officer and an author of “Military Factor in Pakistan”

Views expressed are personal