Four ticking questions about the Burdwan bomb blasts and why we should be worried

If bombs had gone off in a house somewhere in the middle of Uttar Pradesh and the police had discovered Pakistani operatives with a stockpile of guns, bombs and RDX, and pamphlets with the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaida chief we would have been in a state of all-stations red alert. But Burdwan? Not so much. Where’s that anyway? [caption id=“attachment_1635173” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image[/caption] The story about a terror module from alleged Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen operatives in the middle of Bengal is already slipping from the headlines. There’s so much else to keep up preoccupied – election sniping in Maharashtra, shelling across the Line of Control in Kashmir and breast-beating hysteria from Jayalalithaa devotees in Tamil Nadu. And honestly it seems the media takes neither Bengal nor Bangladesh that seriously when it comes to national security. When the Burdwan story first broke on October 2 it created few waves even in West Bengal. Bengal was in the middle of Durga Puja celebrations and that meant no newspapers for four days as well ensuring a semi news-blackout while the citizens pandal-hopped. But as the story slowly comes out it raise more and more worrying questions and not just about what those operatives were doing there. Given that they were caught with 150 containers of explosives, 59 IEDs and 55 hand grenades it’s clear they were not there just to proselytize. The more disturbing questions are about the reaction to the discovery of this powder keg in the state. After the explosion, the two women who lived in the house and were married to the men involved in the blast held the fire brigade and police at bay saying they had guns while they tried to destroy incriminating evidence and mop up bloodstains. All this while two men lay dead and another lay injured. No guns were eventually recovered. What kind of police force is held at bay for hours by two women claiming to have guns? The local police detonated the recovered cache of home-made bombs apparently after getting clearance from the Director General of Police before the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) could show up on the scene. The bombs were detonated not defused which means a lot of intelligence information also went up in smoke. Media reports have pointed out that blasts happened at 10:45 am and the detonations started at 4 pm and then the next morning which means the devices were not ticking time bombs in imminent danger of exploding anyway. “It was either professional stupidity of was deliberately done as a cover-up,” Prakash Singh, former director-general of the BSF and Uttar Pradesh police tells The Telegraph bluntly. The Chief Minister of West Bengal completely trusts the Administration of Bengal to crack the Burdwan case and is confident that they will do their job,” said Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien at a press conference adding for good measure that trust was not a word found in the Prime Minister’s dictionary since the PM does not “trust his own party colleagues – L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj.” But an unnamed bureaucrat tells The Telegraph “It may become necessary to send probe teams to Bangladesh. How can that happen without a central role?” The question is why has the main issue become a turf war between local law enforcement and the central NIA rather than cooperating around national security? When the story first came out in the papers, reports said the house in which the blast happened belonged to Nurul Hassan Chowdhury, an active Trinamool supporter. In fact Mehboob Rahman, the working president of the Trinamool Youth Congress in Burdwan told the media “We have a party office on the ground floor”which Trinamool’s Mukul Roy emphatically denied. But if there was an office on the ground floor that raises uncomfortable questions given that the residents were notoriously secretive and rebuffed all advances and questions from their neighbours even rebuking them for trying to raise the alarm when a child was perched dangerously on their wall. The Bengal government not surprisingly wants to present this as a one-off bad apple but as The Times of India writes Bengal is on the terror map far more than most people realize. The May 2007 Mecca Masjid blasts had SIM cards traced to Asansol in Bengal. One of the people who died in the Burdwan blast was a tailor in Garden Reach in Kolkata when bombs exploded in an embroidery factory there in 2012. Beldanga in Murshidabad which features in this story but was also known to be a safe haven for LeT operative Abdul Karim Tunda who had family there. Some of this is circumstantial and Trinamool accuses the BJP of trying to sow communal tension for electoral benefits. But the question is is Trinamool trying to sweep Bengal’s problems under the rug? Debajyoti Chakraborty reports for TOI that the two women have proved surprisingly difficult to crack. They have given very little information to the police. Now that the authorities have found they were schooled in khariji or unaffiliated madarsas that do not receive government aid and one met her future husband there (he was a cook at the hostel) some 18 such madarsas in border districts like Burdwan, Nadia and Murshidabad are being monitored. Mamata’s predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had tried to do a crackdown saying they had become “hubs of anti-national activities” but the current government has not wanted to stir up that controversy says The Telegraph. So the question is why were they not monitored before and why does the state government have so little information about them? Politics being politics Mamata’s opponents will not miss an opportunity to discredit her and both the BJP and the CPM, ideologically opposed on most other fronts are going hammer and tongs at her because they sense an opening. But the response to that cannot be pretending that this is just electoral politicking and something is not gravely amiss. The Bengal government’s real worry should be not that the NIA is setting up camp under its nose but that if those bombs had not blown up by mistake it would have no idea about the terror plot in its backyard.