NEW DELHI: Indian officials, hunting the perpetrators of the latest terror strike in Hyderabad, are fighting an uphill battle against a volatile mix of domestic and foreign threats, analysts say.
The dual blasts in Hyderabad were the latest in a string of attacks in the past few years — none of which have been solved.
“The Indian state does not exude the will to tackle the terrorist in a firm manner, we need a system that is more nimble and determined,” security analyst Uday Bhaskar said.
Hyderabad, which is 40 per cent Muslim, was hit in a mosque blast in May that killed 11 people.
In February, 68 people, mostly Muslims, burnt to death on the “Friendship Express” train travelling to Pakistan. And in July last year, blasts ripped through Mumbai’s rail network, killing 186.
The latest Hyderabad blast “is more of the same. We’re seeing a pattern of attacks every two to three months somewhere or other in the country on soft targets,” Ajai Sahni, head of India’s Institute for Conflict Management, said this weekend.
Indian analysts blame ‘religious groups’ seeking to stoke Hindu-Muslim tensions, derail the stagnating India-Pakistan peace process and damage the booming economy.
The Times of India published figures on Monday showing India had lost more lives to terror than anywhere else except Iraq.
“As a nation, we are impotent when it comes to fighting terror,” it argued in a front-page editorial entitled “Time to act”. Deaths in India from terror attacks totalled 3,674 between Jan 2004 and March this year, second to Iraq with 29,070, but ahead of Afghanistan on 2,404, the daily said, citing figures from the US government’s National Counterterrorism Centre.
Mr Bhaskhar noted it had taken 14 years to sentence anyone in the country’s worst-ever terror strikes in Mumbai in 1993 that killed 256 people — and the main accused are still at large.
“That is just too long,” he said.
Analysts said India’s ‘struggle against terror’ has been vastly complicated by a political reluctance to alienate the important Muslim vote.
Muslims make up some 140 million out of India’s population of 1.1 billion.The analysts said this appeared to be particularly in evidence in Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh state, where the local Congress government had been elected with strong Muslim support.
Indian authorities allege the Hyderabad blasts were carried out by the Harkat-ul-Jehad-i-Islami which is based in Bangladesh.
.Indian intelligence learned more than five months ago that a consignment of military grade explosives had been delivered to an ‘Islamic extremist terror cell’ operating in Hyderabad, but that no action had been taken, reports said.
“For its own reasons, the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh did not allow the kind of aggressive — and unpopular — policing that the (federal) Central Bureau of Investigation and city police felt were necessary to secure the city,” The Hindu paper said.
The state government failed “to demonstrate the kind of even-handed political and administrative resolve needed to address the deep communal strains in Hyderabad,” it said.
“There are very cynical political considerations that overtake everything, that overtake the prevention of terror, politicians don’t want to lose votes,” said Rahul Bedi, correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly.
“There is also this dilemma that you don’t want to radicalise Muslims by treating them as criminals. Politicians fear these vulnerable fault lines in the country that certain forces are definitely exploiting,” he said.
—AFP