Pune techie murder: The enemy could now be anywhere

The murder of a Pune techie, Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, earlier this week by a bigoted group of Hindu militants has rightly been condemned for its brutality and complete senselessness. The murdered youth had nothing to do with the so-called provocation – the offensive posts relating to Bal Thackeray and Shivaji that sparked off riots in Pune. The original creator of those mischievous posts cannot be traced easily due to his clever use of multiple proxy servers to hide his tracks. According to a report in Hindustan Times, the controversial post was uploaded using “four proxy servers located in Romania, Saudi Arabia and two other countries”. The report quotes one source as saying that “the user took every precaution to erase his trail.”[caption id=“attachment_1560471” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Security challenge. AFP[/caption] This itself should tell us two things: One, the offensive post was created with the deliberate idea of provoking communal or social tension. It succeeded. And, two, the perpetrators may never be brought to book even if one expends millions of rupees trying to trace them. For example, if, say, the Pakistani ISI, or a Saudi or Afghan jehadi group, is behind it, how are we ever going to nail it (or him)? We can’t get a Dawood Ibrahim back, nor can we get Hafiz Saeed, a key instigator of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, prosecuted. We will reach a dead end in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Looked at purely from motive point of view, there are only a few parties or agencies who might be interested in creating communal chaos in India. It is customary to blame some front organisations of the Sangh Parivar for communal trouble, but having worked so hard to put a BJP government in power, they have no immediate need to destabilise it. But no one can rule out the use of foot-soldiers and free-lance groups looking for trouble. The groups that would be keen to destabilise India at this juncture would be the Pakistan-based ISI, some jehadi organisations in India with cross-border linkages, and such-like people. The ISI and the Pakistani army, which were caught off-guard by Narendra Modi’s surprise decision to invite Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony in Delhi on 26 May, will be keen to slow down this normalisation process. Moreover, most of the ISI’s “assets” in India—jehadi groups—may also have a stake in damaging the Modi government. However, this is speculation, and whether we like it or not, the chilling fact is that anyone—inside or outside the country—now has the ability, with some technical help, to create chaos in India by deliberately provoking groups to take the law into their own hands. Can we do anything about it? Actually, there are. The most obvious thing to do is to make big investments in cyber tracking, sleuthing and hacking expertise and technology. Our strengths in this area need to be raised above global levels for the simple reason that we live in a difficult neighbourhood. Israel would be a natural partner for this, and US technology would be vital. Future wars will not be fought with guns and tanks, but with technology that can damage industrial infrastructure and generate social chaos. The Stuxnet computer virus was invented by Israeli and US cyber experts to invade and slow down the Iranian nuclear programme. Our enemies will seek to immobilise us internally whenever they can. The Chinese regularly test every country’s cyber defences, and India has faced many hacking episodes in the past that show a level of unpreparedness that can’t be forgiven. We already know that social and communal tension can be fanned by morphed images and deliberately provocative posts. The long-term remedy is to ask all political parties to warn their cadres that provocative posts may not have anything to do with perceived enemies within our society, but could involve mischief-mongers from abroad. Our political parties have the stupid tendency to burn a few buses without waiting to ask who or what about an allegedly offensive post. A post on Bal Thackeray could emanate from Islamabad, and a morphed image on Rohingyas being killed in Myanmar can be planted from anywhere. Mysterious SMSes threatening north-easterners in Bangalore can originate from anywhere. The central government should call an all-party meeting to warn all political parties that they should not jump to conclusions about offensive posts for the simple reason that they have been planted by our enemies. Without political maturity, we are going to have situations going out of hand. We will be strengthening our enemies by taking offense to every passing derogatory Facebook post. Political parties should be asked to wait a while before taking to the streets. They have to give the police time to act, and not rush to bash up anyone who they think is the enemy. The third thing that needs to be done is to make preventive arrests of all known religious militant groups from all communities whenever such provocations come to light. Many such groups are really free-lance thugs and extortionists who use the cover of religious affiliation to carry out their dark deeds. The law enforcement authorities need to treat thugs as thugs. Who they worship of which religious cause they espouse is immaterial.