July has been a tough month. Besides the bombings in London, the shooting of an innocent man in London, the terrible bombing at a resort in Egypt, and the ongoing bombings occurring daily in Iraq, there have also been important developments involving terrorism that is home-grown to India.
The news is both good and bad. The good news is, Indian Express reports that the Punjab police have arrested more than 60 members of a Sikh militant group called Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), many of them with large caches of arms and explosives, including 53 kilograms of RDX and PETN (as specified here). The arrests took place mainly in Chandigarh and Delhi. The key arrest might be that of Jagtar Singh Hawara (pictured left; photo from Frontline), who masterminded the murder of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh some years ago. Hawara is clearly a brutal man bent on killing — a sort of criminal mastermind (he committed his first murder — of a Sikh Granthi — at the age of 15). He had escaped from a Chandigarh prison in February 2004, when he dug a 60 foot tunnel over several months that prison authorities claim they didn’t notice. He is, perhaps most importantly, the ringleader of BKI in India; we should all be glad this guy is behind bars again. Hopefully this time he will stay there.
The bad news is, there may be more terrorists as well as explosives out there. Since the BKI has been quiet since 1997-1998, when it initiated a bombing campaign in Punjab, Indian police hoped that the organization had gone defunct. Its current global leadership is based in Pakistan, where the leader, Wadhawa Singh is reportedly ailing. But the current arrests tell a different story. Not only is BKI not defunct, the police readily admit there are still known members as well as an alarming quantity of explosive material in India that has not been recovered.
The current wave of arrests occurred in the wake of arrests of two suspects after the May 22 movie theater bombings in Delhi (the “Jo Bole So Nihaal bombings”). Terrorists identified in the press as Balwinder and Jaspal were arrested after those attacks, on May 31 (see Manish’s link-filled post here). Then Jagtar Singh Hawara was arrested on June 7. His associate Hardeep Kaur (yes, a woman) was also arrested; her diaries and notes led police to the large terrorist ring that has just been rounded up. Two other BKI members, Paramjit Singh aka “Baiju,” and Kamaljit Singh, aka “Manna,” were arrested a week ago (see The Hindu). They were carrying about .5 KG of RDX with them at the time of arrest. At least a few of the people arrested are related to Hawara.
There is a follow-up on Hawara in today’s Indian Express, which makes for disturbing reading (I would also recommend this article on Hawara in Frontline last year). It seems he and his associates were given special treatment by the police at the Burail jail in Chandigarh, from which they escaped last year. Not only were they allowed to have a TV and a servant (!), they routinely met other known terrorists, and even a Pakistani spy in the same prison. They were also allowed to keep a cellphone, which they eventually used to coordinate their escape. Moreover, they shamelessly worked the system to continue their arms-collecting habits; at one point, the CIA (not itself a pillar of competency these days) called Indian authorities to tell them about a pound of RDX that Hawara and his men had managed to acquire while in prison. The RDX had been in boxes of sweets that had actually gone straight through the jail superintendent’s office, uninspected.
Not very inspiring, is it? This image of a completely incompetent, bribe-happy Indian prison system is rather different from the hardcore dungeon I had in my head.
Hopefully, Hawara will be watched more vigilantly this time, eh? (Some tips from a friendly English professor: try separating him from his friends. Check his cell occasionally to see if he is digging an escape tunnel. And no cell phones.) Fortunately, Hawara’s associates are incredibly incompetent; they seem not to have mastered either the code of silence, or effective concealment of information. All of the people arrested in the past few weeks seem to be talking to police — often openly confessing their crimes — and their videotaped interrogations are being shown to reporters. Moreover, they’ve written down the names of all their collaborators in handy little notebooks.
The Punjab and Delhi police have been remarkably effective at finding a large number of BKI terrorists in short order after only one bombing; let’s hope they can finish the job.
