BOMBAY, Aug 28: The founder of Bombay’s ruling far-right Hindu party called for India on Thursday to unleash “terrorism” on Pakistan to “avenge” car bombings in the city that left 52 people dead.
No senior Indian official has directly blamed Pakistan for Monday’s attacks, which police believe international militant groups may have been involved in after discovering traces of RDX explosive in the bombs.
But Bal Thackeray, whose Shiv Sena party shares power in Bombay with the BJP-party of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, had no doubt that Islamabad was responsible.
Mr Thackeray called for India to employ guerillas and arm citizens to create a “bigger monster” to fight Pakistan.
“Terrorism is growing today from a craze aimed at making the whole world Islamic. To counter this, a bigger terrorism is needed,” Thackeray said in his party mouthpiece Samna, which means ‘Confrontation’.
“Terrorism will not die just by creating stringent laws. It has to be countered by arming common people also. That is also one way of creating a bigger monster that crushes the current form of terrorism.”
Mr Thackeray, whose party is part of the federal coalition, said he recently told Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani that India should “plant members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from Sri Lanka in Pakistan and create terror there.”
He said: “The LTTE has not harmed us in any way. Let us use them and terrorise Pakistan. Only then will that country know what we are suffering.”
The Tamil Tigers, who are predominantly Hindu, fought for decades to carve a separate homeland in Sri Lanka but they have observed a ceasefire since February 2002.
POLICE ON RDX: As the Hindu extremist blamed Pakistan for the car bombs, the Indian police were probing any international links after it was found that the explosive used in the bombings was RDX, commonly used in international terror attacks.
“We are sure that there is an international link to the car bombings after finding the presence of RDX in the explosive. We can safely say there was outside help in triggering the blasts,” Bombay’s joint police commissioner Satyapal Singh told AFP.
“The explosive could have been smuggled and given to groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba or Jaish-i-Mohammad to carry out the attacks. We suspect these two groups to be behind the car bombings.”
Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad, both banned in Pakistan, are among the most militant groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.—AFP
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