The Mumbai serial bombings: SC has given justice — but not closure

By Praveen Swami “I slept”, said Abdul Gani Ismail Turk, when his interrogators asked him what he did after planting an improvised explosive device in Century Bazaar that claimed 88 lives—the worst of the twelve bombs that tore Mumbai apart on 12 March, 1993, killing 257 women, men and children. Now, twenty years after those savage killings, the Supreme Court has delivered justice for the victims of what our 26/11-suffused imaginations sometimes forget was the worst-ever terrorist attack on Indian soil. The court’s 790 page judgment , a massively detailed account of what happened, ought not however be confused with closure. India’s security services, the criminal justice system, politicians—and most important, us—can’t go to sleep on the serial bombings just yet. For one, the most important perpetrators of the 1993 bombing are still living as free men in Karachi. Finding them and punishing them, though, might be the simplest of the problems we have to face up to as we consider the 1993 case. The real life of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar, the man who sat at the top of the complex pyramid of the Mumbai serial bombings plot, has improbable similarities with that of Bollywood reel-life villains. From a stellar article by the Pakistani journalist Ghulam Hasnain, we know it involves Black Label whiskey, gambling, and private mujras. “Carousing through the night”, he reported, “Dawood and his companions quit only at dawn and then collectively offer prayers”. [caption id=“attachment_671058” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Activists belonging to Hindu hardliner group Bajrang Dal hold up signs demanding the death sentence for Abu Salem, prime suspect of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Reuters[/caption] Mr. Ibrahim escaped to Karachi from Dubai soon after the bombings, bearing a Pakistani passport G-866537, issued back-dated to August 12, 1991. There he moved into a 6,000-square metre plot in the upmarket Clifton area of Karachi that had amenities such as a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a tennis court. His lieutenant, Shakeel Ahmad Babu, was gifted with a similar premises in the Defence Housing Authority enclave. Ibrahim ‘Tiger Memon’, the third author of the Mumbai serial bombings, built a new career as property speculator, purchased several properties, including the multi-storey Kashif Crown Plaza situated on the Shara-e-Faisal boulevard. When a Karachi residents’ organisation protested against the encroachment of public space by the Memon family, it was told to mind its own business. “The ISI told us it is a Dawood Ibrahim building”, a member of the organisation told Mr. Hasnain. “They said, this is a man who has done a lot for Pakistan, so we should not raise our voices”. That is an opinion many powerful people in Pakistan’s all-powerful military appear to share—making it improbable Mr. Ibrahim will be handed over to India any time soon. In 2001, when Pakistan’s former military ruler, General Parvez Musharraf, met with then-Union Home Minister LK Advani, he asserted “emphatically that Dawood Ibrahim is not in Pakistan”. In 2011, though, he offered a somewhat different account to the journalist Barkha Dutt. Pakistanis, he claimed, “think that he did a very good job”. “Because Indians killed 3,000 Gujaratis. In Gujarat they killed 3,000 Muslims. Therefore Dawood Ibrahim reacted. So he is held in high esteem”. There are two lessons Indians ought be taking away this story—bar the minor point that Mr. Musharraf’s grasp of the details of recent history leaves something to be desired. The first lesson will be resisted by many in India, where our traditions of introspection and self-reflection are being drowned by ethnic-religious emotionalism. India’s struggle against terrorism—Islamist or otherwise—will not and cannot succeed unless the state is seen as an impartial enforcer of law. The commentator Jyoti Punwani, among others, has noted that that many of the perpetrators of the 1993 riots are still free—often shielded from the legal process by Congress governments. This is unacceptable, not because the riots somehow legitimise the 1993 bombings, but because terror thrives where respect for the rule of law ends. For the perpetrators of the Mumbai bombings, their actions were legitimate, because they believed they were avenging the anti-Muslim violence which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid. “My house was set ablaze during the riots, and then I was misled” said Shahnawaz Qureshi one of the men who planted a bomb at the Plaza Cinema. The Supreme Court’s judgment records that perpetrator after perpetrator acted thus. This sentiment was adroitly exploited by Mr. Ibrahim, who hoped it would rebuild his waning legitimacy. Back in 1999, I interviewed Mr Babu —who, parenthetically, made no effort to hide that he was in Karachi. “If you hurt someone’s religious sentiments”, he told me, “there will be a retaliation. So, after the Babri Masjid was martyred, the serial blasts took place. That was the end of the matter, and everybody accepted it”. Lines of thinking like these are the antithesis of the values our Republic rests on. No Indian ought endorse them, whether for riots or for terrorist attacks. It is pointless to discuss who did what first: all must pay for the crimes they committed. But how can a political system that has historically pandered to identity-based claims over the rule of law be pushed to do the right thing? Finding answers to the second question may be just as tough: how we can end the impunity terrorists enjoy in their Pakistani safe-havens. Paragraph 456 of the Supreme Court judgments lays out a nine-point summary of official Pakistani involvement in the 1993 bombings. Large numbers of those convicted, it notes, “were given training by ISI [or] Army personal in different camps”. They were taken from Dubai to Islamabad for this purpose, and “received by ISI operatives, who took them out of the Islamabad Airport without observing any immigration formalities after completion of training”. In essence, Pakistan stands indicted by the Supreme Court for waging war against the Indian state—the first such judicial determination. This isn’t, of course, news to anyone in India. The conspirators in the bombing Air India’s Kanishka—in which 329 people were killed, making it the worst terror crime directed at the country— had links with the ISI . The organisation which attacked the Jammu and Kashmir assembly has close links with it. No less than Pakistan’s former spymaster, Lieutenant-General Javed Ashraf Qazi, publicly admitted that the Jaish-e-Muhammad attacked India’s Parliament. Indians now need to ask their government what it is going to do about it. The United States has asserted the right to strike against nation states, and kill individuals, simply to pre-empt threats. It assassinated American-born al-Qaeda jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen—and his teenage son— because he was an “enemy leader” , not because he had been personally involved in a strike in the United States. India, however, has chosen not to develop and unleash the kinds of offensive covert capabilities which will allow it to impose punitive costs on proven terrorists. The reason is simple: successive Prime Ministers have concluded that the costs of a such action outweigh the benefits. For example, assassinating the Lashkar commanders responsible for the 26/11 attack could lead to retaliation—with each attack and counter-attack imposing costs on India’s grand economic growth. In essence, we have chosen to live with pain, for fear punching the bully might result end in injuries which cause even more pain. Yet, the impunity terrorists in Pakistan enjoy could lead to an escalation of violence anyway. Following their drawdown in Afghanistan in 2014, as the United States’ direct equities in South Asia will decline. Ever since 9/11, the United States has pressured Pakistan to scale back terrorism against India, to prevent a crisis that would threaten their interests in Afghanistan. After 2014, that pressure will have less effect—particularly since, for domestic political reasons, the Islamist movement is resurgent in Pakistan. India could face threats of a severity it can no longer afford to absorb. Little time for India’s political leadership to prepare. For more reasons than one, then, this is no time for the calm, deep sleep that comes with closure.