Opinion The riddle of Muslim ‘sleepers’

It’s a strange argument coming from a sophisticated legal mind. What Ahsan is saying is: “I have no evidence of a local hand behind Mumbai 26/11. But since I believe there was a local hand,the evidence has got to be there.”

Well,it’s not there. On the contrary,there is clear circumstantial evidence to indicate that after landing at the Badhwar Park fishing village,the 10 Pakistani gunmen acted entirely on their own.

It was very easy for them to access four target locations,by boat or taxi — the Oberoi and Taj hotels,Leopold restaurant and CST train station. The difficult one was the Chabad Jewish centre tucked inside Colaba village. This is where the reconnaissance by the clever David Headley proved critical. The selection of the landing site was a masterstroke. Even a Saraiki Punjab peasant would’ve been able to follow the directions to Chabad House from there — after landing,cross the main road,turn right,look for a gap in the wall,enter the narrow passage and walk straight until you reach the Jewish centre.

Where Headley failed was in imagining that the CST had an accessible upper floor after office hours. Since Kasab and his cohort had instructions to kill people on the train concourse and retreat to a higher floor,they were lost. This is when assistance from local “sleepers” would have been critical. The Lashkar duo could have easily been whisked away by a local handler to the congested Muslim locality nearby,never to be seen again. Or they could have been guided to one of the hotels to join their fellow jihadis. Instead,they knocked around dark alleys and terrorised women and children at a maternity hospital. And drove frantically around the city in hijacked vehicles until Kasab was nabbed.

It is Kasab’s capture that complicated matters. He is a flesh-and-blood Pakistani,not a frayed document that could be refuted as fake. After the initial denial,intelligent opinion-makers like Ahsan had to accept that a Pakistani was the aggressor. But the dominant narrative for Pakistanis is the idea of being victims — of the wily Hindus before and after Partition,and increasingly now of the unreliable and evil Americans.

Coupled with this deep-rooted belief is an even more fundamental conviction — that Pakistan was created as a homeland and refuge for the subcontinent’s Muslims. It follows from this that the Muslims left behind in India are a disinherited and perennially persecuted minority,indiscriminately slaughtered,their mosques destroyed,their women raped. Enough has happened after Partition to sustain the idea that Pakistanis — and the larger South Asian Muslim ummah — are the historic victims. Bangladesh 1971 and Gujarat 2002 came as seminal events. And both have helped justify violence as retribution. I remember the stupefied look of a foreign ministry official in Islamabad in December 1988 when over a drink I mischievously asked,“So when are you guys going to take revenge for Bangladesh in Kashmir?” How was I to know that plans for the armed Kashmir insurgency were already underway?

Yale University’s Khurram Hussain argues that the “primary reference” for Pakistanis today is not the 1947 Partition but Bangladesh and “the traumatic vivisection of the country” in 1971. Indians misconstrue Pakistan’s national ethos by their failure to recognise this essential truth,he says. But how has Bangladesh changed the template? Even Hussain seems to go along with the acceptance by “the intellectual classes in Pakistan” of the violence in Kashmir as retribution.

But the bloodshed is getting worse. And more hazardous. Hussain continues with his eloquent defence in Outlook weekly: “It is for this same reason (the psychic fallout of Bangladesh) that there was no great outcry about the ISI’s supposed involvement in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. The general sense among the educated elites was that India deserved it for trying to “encircle” Pakistan through Afghanistan.”

With Mumbai 26/11,the jihadis have taken the idea of defending an Islamic state and extracting historic vengeance several notches higher. But since New Delhi did not react with a military offensive,this has created a moral vacuum for Pakistan’s “education elites”. Initial attempts to cast the Mumbai atrocity as the handiwork of the Indian Mujahideen bomber group out to further avenge the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom led to a dead end. How then to condemn it while at the same time evading responsibility and guilt? By insisting,as Ahsan does,that there were “20,40,50 local handlers and facilitators” who are not being arrested. In other words,since Mumbai 26/11,unlike the Kashmir violence,cannot be rationalised within Hussain’s Bangladesh 1971 paradigm,then try and link it to Gujarat 2002 and the thirst for revenge by Indian Muslim extremists.

But why would the Mumbai Police,who bravely nabbed Kasab,not arrest these local facilitators? After all,barely two months before 26/11 they had cracked the Indian Mujahideen,some of whose members were trained by the LeT in Pakistan.

I breached Indo-Pak etiquette and harassed Ahsan for an answer while he was at a private dinner,since his perceptions are an important window into the thinking of the Pakistani elite. “It’s baffling. There’s a lot of cynicism with the way things have been done,” is all he said.

But one can try and guess the answer: the Mumbai Police is covering up the involvement of Indian Muslims in 26/11 in order to put all the blame on Pakistanis. What’s truly worrisome is Ahsan using the “local facilitators” theory to justify Islamabad’s inertia in quickly and effectively dealing with the LeT handlers back home. Pakistanis still fail to recognise that there’s no going back from Mumbai 26/11. If relations between India and Pakistan are to move forward,there has to be some minimum accountability. Otherwise,only the violent religious fanatics on both sides of the border will prosper. To quote a line from Ahsan’s rousing poem that ended the peace conference,“Saari duniya poochch rahi thi,Bolo ab tum saath ho kiske”

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist