Raymond Barrett

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

The murderous rampage by Islamic militants in Mumbai threatens India’s important twin revenue streams of foreign investment and tourism, writes Raymond Barrett in Chennai.

A wave of attacks by Islamic militants in Mumbai last week left 195 people dead and more than 300 injured in India’s financial and entertainment capital.

At least a dozen gunmen attacked a number of prominent landmarks with automatic rifles and hand grenades before taking scores of hostages in two of the city’s most prominent five-star hotels. The three-day siege ended yesterday.

The attackers, all young men in their 20s, are believed to have travelled from Pakistan by ship before transferring to small dinghies. After coming ashore, the men spread out across the city, and attacked numerous targets including a hospital, a train station, a restaurant and luxury hotels. They also fired indiscriminately at passers-by from a commandeered police vehicle.

Throughout the military-style operation, the militants repeatedly tried to identify American and British citizens, though ultimately the vast majority of those killed were Indian nationals, including the commander of Mumbai’s anti-terror squad. Though Mumbai has suffered deadlier attacks in the past – a number of bombs in 2006 that targeted the city’s subway system left more than 200 dead – this assault marked a radical shift in the tactics used by Islamic militants in India.

The high-profile targeting of foreign tourists and iconic landmarks, such as the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, has generated an unprecedented level of global media coverage. Given the global economic downturn, last week’s wholesale slaughter has taken on a heightened significance for the broader Indian economy, as it threatens the important twin revenue streams of foreign investment and tourism.

The death toll has also brought intense pressure on the Indian government to crackdown on the ever-present issue of Islamic militancy. Since 2004 India has suffered more than 4,000 deaths related to Islamic extremism. This year alone, there have been numerous bombings across the country – in areas such as New Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Varanasi – which have killed approximately 200 people.

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh laid the blame firmly at the feet of Islamic militants based in Pakistan. In a televised address to the nation, he criticized ‘‘neighbours’’ (a clear nod towards Pakistan) for providing support and safe havens for those responsible.

‘‘It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country,” he said. In response, the Islamabad government condemned the attacks and denied any involvement.’ “We need to take strict measures to eradicate terrorism and extremism from the region, while continuing with concerted efforts to make it a peaceful place to live,” said Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. However, there was a certain irony to this condemnation, as Gilani was himself the subject of an assassination attempt by Islamic militants earlier this year. Furthermore, a significant number of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service (known as ‘the shadow government’) and the all-powerful Pakistani military are known to support radical Islamist groups operating in both India and Afghanistan.

A previously unknown group called the Deccan Mujahedeen (Deccan is an area of southern India) has claimed responsibility for the attacks, although Indian media reported that one of the attackers captured by the security forces admitted a link to Laskar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of the Pure), a Kashmiri militant group based in Pakistan which has a long history of violence across India.

Though the exact affiliations of those responsible are as yet unknown, Reuters reported that one of attackers (speaking with a Kashmiri accent) telephoned an Indian television station and accused the Indian army of carrying out atrocities against Muslims in Kashmir. ‘‘Muslims in India should not be persecuted. We love this as our country, but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody? Release all the mujahedeens, and Muslims living in India should not be troubled,” he said.

Experts are still divided over the exact motivation behind the attack. Some view the killings as the work of a new generation of al-Qaeda-inspired Indian Islamists who feel threatened by Hindu hardliners. Others say Pakistan-based fighters venting their fury about the ongoing territorial dispute with the Indian government over Kashmir are the likely culprits. In the labyrinthine and opaque maze of Islamic militancy on the Indian sub-continent, clear answers are often difficult to come by. Bu t, if you follow the Islamist string in recent Indian history far enough, the trail regularly leads back across the border to Pakistan.

The ongoing issue of Islamist violence also hints at a deepening sense of sectarianism seeping into the political landscape of the country. Though India is constitutionally a secular nation, its population of more than one billion people is deeply religious, and faith-based violence has been a recurring issue since the founding of the state. An estimated half a million people were killed in the violence that greeted India’s independence from Britain in 1947, as the former raj was partitioned into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India.

To this day, Hindus account for around 80 per cent of India’s billion-plus population, while approximately 150 million are Muslims. Though the secular Congress Party had been the dominant force in Indian politics since independence, it has lost its complete monopoly on political power in the last decade. Hindu political parties, such as the BJP or Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), have increased their support.

Other pro-Hindu groups are also becoming more vociferous in their calls for more pro-Hindu legislation, openly challenging the ruling government and the federal courts. Last month, Hindu fanatics burned churches and murdered Christians in the state of Orissa after missionaries were accused of actively trying to covert Hindus to Christianity. At the same time, groups such as the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India, which have been linked to many recent bomb attacks, have seen an increase in their support outside of their traditional strongholds.

Even as police units were still flushing out the remaining militants from their barricaded strongholds, the political blame had already begun. BJP politicians criticised the ruling Congress Party anti-terrorism policy as weak and inefficient, and for being too soft towards Pakistan, always a populist issue in the aftermath of Islamist violence.

As well as being the nation’s most populous city, with 18million people, Mumbai has also become the fault-line for sectarian tensions in the country between certain Hindu and Islamist groups. Mumbai was the scene of savage inter-communal riots in 1992 and 1993 following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya by Hindu extremists, when almost a thousand people were killed.

The largely Hindu police force in Mumbai has been accused of standing by while Hindu mobs murdered large numbers of Muslims. The violence resulted in a large-scale displacement of people within the city into religious enclaves, divisions that remain to this day. Throughout last week’s attacks are unprecedented, India – and Mumbai in particular – has proven to be resilient when faced with such crises.

Mumbai is home to India’s largest stock exchange, which reopened last Friday, after closing its doors for a day, with the Sensex index of leading shares trading slightly up.