The Mumbai attacks and the Kashmir question

By Alex Neill, Head, Asia Programme

India is not new to suffering bloody terrorist attacks, but the Mumbai crisis is certainly of the greatest political significance. Terrorists have created a triangle of terror in the centre of Mumbai and have launched simultaneous, well planned attacks across the city. Designed to create multiple stressors simultaneously and demonstrating tactical foresight, the desired intent has been to create immediate terror and knock-on effects for the foreseeable future. By assassinating the head of Mumbai’s Counter-Terror (CT) team and some of his senior management, the ability for the CT, Police and emergency services to react to the unfolding disaster in a co-ordinated way has been significantly curtailed. This has resonance with the assassination by Al-Qa’ida of Shah Mahsud, the Tajik leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance the day before the 9/11 attacks took place. Clearly the gunmen have no qualms with martyrdom and they have wished to single out US and British ‘coalition of the willing’ passport holders.

Apart from the immediate panic in the vicinity of the attacks, by shutting down the city’s transport network, the terrorists have sought to create what Indian experts describe as a ‘communal backlash’, whereby the ensuing chaos of focused attacks in India’s dense urban centres causes anger to spill out onto the streets and the creation of a near anarchic environment. Mumbai’s Muslim population will be particularly vulnerable at this time. The targeting of a Jewish community centre seems to indicate a desire to draw the world’s attention to the Palestine conflict and pan-Islamic sentiment. Furthermore, the selection of Mumbai as the financial centre of India and the city of choice for India’s rich elite means that immediate economic loss of revenue will be considerable and there will be an accompanying loss of confidence in investment in the city.

It is difficult to predict the provenance of the attackers who have dubbed themselves the ‘Deccan Mujahadeen’, only to say that there has been growing concern over the last decade of a home-grown element to Islamist extremism within India. This name seems to suggest the coming of age of an indigenous Indian Islamist militant movement. The Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) has gained notoriety in recent years having been outlawed by the Indian government in 2006, when the group subsequently went underground. India is home to the second largest Muslim population in the world, most of which, recent statistics suggest, finds itself at the bottom of the pile in India’s highly stratified society. It may be the case that a SIMI splinter group or a militant wing has been created to undertake attacks such as the atrocity that has unfolded. Even if it transpires that the terrorists hail from Pakistan, it would be difficult to discount the collusion of an Indian domestic network which has supported this operation. The group of gunmen who executed the attacks are just the tip of the iceberg for an operation of this scale and sophistication. Target reconnaissance will have taken place by surveillance cells over the last few months. Facilitator teams will have assisted the attackers’ infiltration into the city and provided plausible cover should they have been challenged.

Ironically, the real salt in the wound for the Indian authorities is that in recent days, after several years of escalating terrorist attacks throughout India, the Indian government had announced the creation of a US-style Homeland Security Agency. As with all successful terror attacks, the Mumbai atrocities represent a significant intelligence failure on the part of India’s experienced security agencies. It is a sad truth that for every successful terror attack, a great many others will have been thwarted, unnoticed by the public at large. Nevertheless, for an operation of this scale to have taken place without, so it seems, any alarm bells ringing for Indian intelligence analysts suggests extremely good operational security on the part of the attackers. As with the 9/11 attacks it may be the case that in the aftermath, there will an aggregate weight of evidence that could have given advance warning of the attacks.

The Kashmir factor

In the wake of the worst violence in nearly twenty years over the summer, when violent protests by Muslims and Hindus took place over a proposed transfer of land to the Hindu Amarnath Shrine Board, the legislative assembly in Indian-administered Kashmir was dissolved and the state was placed under direct federal rule. The Kashmir region is already tense and while regional elections take place across India, particular focus is on this disputed region, where elections will take place in a staggered fashion over the course of six weeks in each of the Indian administered Kashmiri constituencies. Kashmiri separatist and independence groups have called for a boycott of the elections alongside threats of violence but much of the population has ignored these threats to cast their votes. The whole Kashmir valley is in lock-down by Indian forces and voting will take place under strict security with curfews in force. It cannot be ruled out that the terrorists who have struck in Mumbai would wish to stir up what is already a hotbed of resentment in Kashmir and to provoke a confrontation across the Line of Control, the heavily militarised demarcation zone between India and Pakistan administered Kashmir. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a recent televised statement has already suggested a foreign hand in the perpetration of the attacks, a thinly veiled accusation pointed at Pakistan, which threatens to erase any progress made in recent bilateral talks between Pakistan and India. Further complicating matters were the apparent off-script comments by Pakistan’s President Zardari, who during the recent talks declared that Pakistan would adopt a ‘no first use’ doctrine with regard to the use of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. This peculiar gesture has left many puzzled as to Zardari’s own motives but this comment will have enraged both hard-line Pakistani nationalists and religious conservatives proud of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capability.

On a broader international scale Islamic militants in India and elsewhere may wish to seek to derail burgeoning relations between India and the United States. The attacks have been launched at a time of transition for the US administration and President-elect Obama has very publicly mentioned resolution of the Kashmir dispute as a pre-emptor for improvement in Indo-Pakistan relations and the ramifications for a solution to the Afghanistan insurgency. One of the significant successes during the tenure of George W Bush has been a turn around in US-India relations on all fronts. The Islamist movement in the Indian subcontinent has been deeply resentful of this rapid improvement in relations between the two powers. Islamists know that particularly during a global financial downturn, the US will view continued growth in Asia as essential to underwriting stabilisation of the global financial system.

The views expressed above are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of RUSI.