Homegrown terror: Just the admission will make fight easy

Homegrown terror, an instrument of political point-scoring and a quick way to offer communal spin to bomb blasts and other such incidents so far, has finally got the official recognition as a menace as terrible as terror, exported from Pakistan to India. The rise of homegrown terror modules in India is one of the most significant developments in the fight against terror, said Home Minister P Chidambaram during a House debate on Thursday. He was referring to the German Bakery blast in Pune last year and the recent serial blasts in Mumbai, which killed 24 people. “We cannot go on living in denial. The new reality is that cross-border terrorism is not the only source of terrorist activities in India and that we have terror groups which are totally Indian and home-grown,” the Home Minister said, adding, SIMI, Indian Mujahideen and right wing fundamentalist and fascist outfits among them. [caption id=“attachment_54919” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Police gather at the site of a bomb blast at the German Bakery restaurant in Pune on 13 February 2010. A bomb ripped through the restaurant popular with foreign tourists in Pune, killing at least eight people in the country’s first major attack since the Mumbai massacre of 2008. Reuters”]  [/caption] The admission should mean a world of good for India’s fight against terror. Indian agencies have been blaming Islamabad and Pakistan-based terrorist outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba almost reflexively after every terror incident in the country. This, in turn, triggered unwarranted media overdrive and resulted in avoidable pressure on the probe agencies. Moreover, investigation skewed by this presumption always ran into the dead end. Now, the probe can be better directed with Indian terror modules and sleeper cells as the clear focus. Interestingly, the BJP has not responded aggressively to the politically loaded statement yet. While Chidambaram and Congress biggies like Digvijaya Singh have been harping on right-wing terror for sometime now to target the party and its mother organisation, the RSS, the former was cautious enough in the House not to rub it in. But he made it clear that terrorist activities by Hindu fundamentalists was as much a fact of life as acts of terror by Muslim groups. Right wing extremism is on the rise the world over and India cannot be immune to it, he said. The BJP seems to be coming to terms with the reality of right wing terror, which has become increasingly evident in recent times – the footprints of Hindu outfits are pronounced in many blasts in recent times, starting with the Malegaon blasts of 2006 through the Samjahuta blast in 2007 to some of those in 2008. It makes no sense for the party to be touchy about the rabid fringe of the community. These elements are basically guided by a criminal mindset with no allegiance to any ideology and are always a political liability. The BJP has been trying to distance itself from these groups for sometime without denouncing them in public. Moreover, community linkage to terror has weakened over time—Muslims are more careful about their association with extremist elements—and there are indications that the violent activity surfacing every now and then is more individual-driven than community-backed. Loose affiliates of the Sangh Parivar such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal and Sriram Sene have gradually receded to the background. It is obvious that they enjoy the political patronage more from the BJP. In Gujarat, Chief Minister Narendra Modi has effectively silenced all the rabid elements through strong action. There’s no evidence to back the contention in certain sections that groups like SIMI and Indian Mujahideen have the support of the Muslim community. Curiously enough, when the general communal climate is stable with not much charged passion to keep it combustible, politicians are busy raking up communal issues some ways or the other. But that is digressing from the point. Their intention is clear and it does not merit much attention, at least at this point. Would Chidambaram’s statement change the ground realities? Or was it just a statement on the ground reality? Difficult to answer at this precise point. But the acceptance of his statement from either side would make the fight against terror much more easy for the agencies involved.