Raising the bogey of terrorism in India
THE Narendra Modi-government in India is desperate to make everybody believe that Bangladesh’s outlawed Jamaat-ul Mujahideen ( JMB) has outsourced their bomb manufacturing unit to neighboring West Bengal and that the ruling Trinamool Congress party in the state has shielded the extremists from law. Yet, till the other day New Delhi was crying hoarse about Dhaka’s complicity with so-called Islamic terror groups. The Indian security apparatus, so far, has remained firm on its conviction that organizations like JMB were receiving full support from elements within Bangladesh government, army, bureaucracy, intelligence and political spectrum in carrying out anti-India activities. Now the Modi government says 180 under-cover JMB activists were producing explosives in various districts of Bengal to oust the Hasinaled Awami League dispensation in Bangladesh.
Interestingly, the districts pinpointed by Modi’s security advisers — after a whirlwind Bengal trip to generate sensationalism — as JMB infested are the ones where Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants a toehold before the 2016 state assembly elections at all costs. Surely, the conspiracy is far deeper than what meets the eye, with the principal political actor in New Delhi trying to exploit India’s strategic security community for selfish political ends. Is it not intriguing that the Indian Home Ministry’s secret archive continues to hold classified intelligence dossier that specifically mentions about the setting-up of at least seven camps in the Rajshahi zone of north-western Bangladesh by JMB, a splinter group of Harkat-ul-JehadiAl-Islami, to launch trained cadres into Indian territory for carrying out subversive activities? And the same JMB has suddenly started using Indian soil to harass the ruling Awami League in Bangladesh, if we are to believe the Indian government’s propaganda machinery.
The most worrying part of the confidential report was the direct link that it drew with Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Forces’ Intelligence with these anti-India militant organizations. Surely, the BJP must be aware of these developments because it was their ironman, the then Home Minister L.K. Advani, who took up the matter with his Bangladeshi counterpart on the basis of this information. Not only this, the intelligence dossier also raised concern about India’s north-eastern region — apart from West Bengal — turning into a safe haven for terror elements infiltrating from Bangladesh due to geographical affinity and a favorable demographic pattern. Moreover, the report also contains an adverse comment on the administrative-political nexus in Bangladesh, which sustains these extremists’ anti-India drive.
This author learnt from a very senior intelligence officer, having working experience in India’s northeastern theatre, that Congress Party-ruled Assam and Communist-ruled Tripura province too had recorded footprints of so-called Islamic militant groups in the form of well-entrenched sleeper modules. The territories of these states are also used as secret training and manufacturing hub by elements inimical to India’s security and sovereignty. With an eye on the 2016 assembly polls, Modi and his National Security Adviser Ajit Doval deliberately glossed over these aspects to corner an upright Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Why else did Modi’s central security apparatus turn a blind eye to surreptitious JMB movements in other Indian states bordering Bangladesh? Besides, what made them keep a stoic silence about JMB’s ostensible activities in Bengal’s non-descript district town of Burdwan all this while? Were Modi’s eyes and ears in the intelligence preparing the ground for the launch of a fierce anti-Mamata political propaganda in Bengal?
The domestic Intelligence Bureau’s district office, one must remember, stands very near to the alleged bomb-making installation of JMB. A careful analysis of the pattern of the politico-intelligence propaganda unleashed in Bengal points to a devious design of unethically toppling Banerjee’s government, enjoying 48.02 percent popular vote share, and impose president’s rule in the sensitive border-state sometime before 2016. The point is fresh classified information available with Bangladesh intelligence and even India’s external intelligence’s special operations directorate’s unit in Dhaka clearly indicates JMB’s virtual demise. After the execution of all the top leadership of JMB, including its founder Shaikh Abdur Rahman, the organization’s ultimate objective of a Taleban or IS-like military takeover of Bangladesh to enforce Shariah law is no longer achievable. Instead, this author understands reliably, the dispersed lower-rung cadres of JMB are now being exploited by Indian and other secret services operating within Bangladesh. So, how come rudderless elements of a virtually dead organization, who are under constant Indian intelligence watch, establish bombmaking units in Indian territories without the knowledge of their handlers?
Finally, a devastating Sri Lanka-like ethno-communal uprising is staring at Bangladesh if the country’s top political leadership is unable to prevent the tactful use of its Hindu politicians by the Indian state and the ruling Hindu nationalists to spread political propaganda in neighboring Bengal. Breaching diplomatic niceties, a Hindu representative from Bangladesh Awami League has been assiduously feeding the Indian television audience with fabricated stories of how Mamata’s government is lending support to the now defunct JMB’s minority-extermination agenda in his home country.
This deliberate folly will inevitably produce intense uneasiness within Bangladesh’s minority groups unless Hasina stops playing second fiddle to Indian hegemonic ambition in South Asia, which has now been effectively converted into the goal of Hinduization of Indian sub-continent under Modi regime.