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I had never imagined my first post from India would be about a series of terror attacks in two economically vibrant cities, 1,000-odd miles apart, which claimed over 50 lives and left more than 100 wounded.
I was in Singapore last Friday (July 25, IST), waiting to board my flight home to Bengaluru (Bangalore), India's tech city, when I heard about the blasts. Nine low intensity explosions (BBC reports seven) in the city earlier that day claimed two lives and injured dozens. The southern city of Bangalore was last hit in 2005, when a professor was gunned down and four others injured by gun-men brandishing AK-47s at the elite Indian Institute of Science.
I was expecting chaos and heightened security at the new Bangalore International Airport when my flight landed later that night. The process was remarkably smooth. I couldn't tell the city was on alert after a series of bomb blasts if I hadn't heard the news at Singapore airport.
I had barely settled down with my family --- pleased with the relative calm in the city and a crisis contained --- when the very next day, a series of 17 explosions ripped through the western commercial city of Ahmedabad (capital of the state of Gujarat that witnessed deadly communal violence in 2002), including two blasts at hospitals that were treating the injured. The attack has so far claimed 55 lives. Over a 100 were wounded.
In the days that followed, over 20 unexploded bombs were discovered in Gujarat's "diamond city" of Surat. A couple more were discovered in Bangalore and Ahmedabad as well. The country is on high alert, even as bomb hoaxes add to the distress.
This is not our first face-off with terror strikes: India has been dealing with this demon for decades now. This
New York Times story states that according to the Washington-based National Counterterrorism Center, between January 2004 and March 2007, the death toll from terrorist attacks
in India was over 3,000, second only to that in Iraq during the same period.
But our security agencies seem to be struggling to piece together the cases individually and to establish a connection, if any, between them. I am left just as flummoxed as I try to piece together a story from news that is trickling in bit-by-bit everyday. In the past one week, we are still figuring out the basics, and reports are swinging the full 180 degrees:
- The blasts may be linked/ They are probably not. Splintered jihadi groups may be behind the attacks
- The unexploded bombs in Surat were only meant as a show of strength./The bombs were meant to have a deep impact. After Ahmedabad, security agencies were combing cities for bombs, so the perpetrators had to abandon their Surat plans.
- The bombs were of low intensity, so the attack couldn't have been masterminded professionally. /The modus operandi of terror groups are getting more sophisticated. Al-Qaeda's footprints are emerging. Integrated circuit chips were used to assemble bombs in Bangalore and Surat.
- Emails of more terror strikes were sent out to media houses (just prior to the Ahmedabad blasts) from an obscure group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen, a group believed to be a new front of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). /Cops are unsure about this. While SIMI activists are being detained, al-Qaida-linked Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah is the new suspect.
Phew! Whoever is behind these attacks, have achieved one huge success: We are confused and struggling to see the whole picture. And if we don't get our act together quickly, they will accomplish more than a few blasts. This is what I am left worrying about all day:
- We are weeks away from August 15, India's Independence Day. Is this a dry run? If it is, we are lucky we figured it days before the big day. The country stays on alert and security agencies get a chance to comb the country.
- We are months away from general elections next year. Terrorism has to be back on the table, nuclear deal or no...
- Which brings us another problematic law: The Prevention of Terrorism Act (link via Council on Foreign Relations) that was introduced in 2002 by a right wing government, and repealed in 2004 by the current government for
