|
|
May 16, 2008
Investigators
Flounder as Terrorists Strike at Will
By Murali Krishnan
New Delhi
Nearly 500 people have been killed in nine well-coordinated
terrorist attacks across India since the Diwali-eve bombings here in
2005, but no case has been resolved and not one terrorist arrested.
Although the authorities admit that the terrorists are getting
increasingly sophisticated and appear linked to one another,
investigations invariably reach dead ends after the initial
enthusiasm to find the guilty.
Nine powerful bombs went off in 15 minutes in crowded areas in the
heart of Jaipur Tuesday, killing 61 people and wounding 216. They
were the latest in a series of carnages that started in New Delhi in
October 2005 when over 60 people were killed just before Diwali.
The worst were the synchronized attacks on Mumbai's commuter trains
in July 2006 that claimed 187 lives. The twin bomb blasts in
Hyderabad in August 2007 left 40 dead.
A bomb also ripped through the Samjhauta Express plying from India
to Pakistan, killing many Pakistanis too. There have also been
blasts in Ludhiana in Punjab, Malegaon in Maharashtra and at the
Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti shrine at Ajmer in Rajasthan. Last
year, bombs went off in courts in Uttar Pradesh.
The suspicion in most cases has fallen on Islamist groups, based in
India and abroad, particularly in Bangladesh and Pakistan. But there
have been no firm leads. The victims have included Muslims and
Hindus.
No one knows for sure who is planting the bombs - and who are the
masterminds.
There is now a clamor for a separate national authority to deal with
crimes threatening the country's security or perhaps arming the
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the top investigative agency,
with a federal role, similar to that of the Federation Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) in the US.
"We are already late in creating such an agency. It is beyond the
resources and capacity of some state governments to tackle terror.
Therefore it becomes more imperative to get such an agency off the
ground at the earliest," says Madhava Menon, the head of a
government appointed committee that has made the recommendation.
Such a professional body, argues Menon, should be autonomous, like
the Election Commission. He feels that the CBI is not independent
enough for the job nor does it have the resources, jurisdiction or
personnel.
Ajay Sahni, who edits the South Asia Intelligence Review and is an
authority on subcontinental terrorism, believes that more needs to
be done to augment the police capacities and improve intelligence
systems.
"There is no coherence in the 'national response' to terrorism, no
evidence of consistent strategy or policy perspective, no
institutional memory or visible learning process within the various
institutions of governance," Sahni told IANS.
"We need to derive lessons of past campaigns and counter-terrorism
experience in various theatres and to devise protocols, strategies
and tactics for appropriate response."
On numerous occasions, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has lamented
that core policing was wanting in the country and spoken of the need
to fill up the many vacancies in police forces if they were to face
up to the terrorists.
The prime minister has also stressed the importance of sprucing up
the intelligence machinery by proper staffing - the main weakness
cited by experts.
"The key to success in fighting terror is intelligence - and
intelligence needs to be precise and capable of being acted upon,"
Manmohan Singh has said.
According to senior officials, despite the manpower available with
the Intelligence Bureau, only a fifth was being used to gather hard
intelligence.
Although India and Pakistan have set up anti-terror mechanism to
share details and cooperate in trans-border terror attacks, there
has been little movement forward.
A desperate parliamentary panel asked the government in March this
year to grant statutory powers to the CBI to directly look into
crimes related to terrorist attacks.
The panel said vesting the CBI with appropriate statutory backing
would enable it to play a proactive role in collecting intelligence,
creating institutional memory and in capacity building.
"We are of the view that it is in the public interest that in this
era of successive waves of terrorist attacks and high technical
crimes, a statute is enacted through parliament granting powers to
the CBI to directly deal with terror attacks and other serious
crimes like human trafficking," says panel head E.M. Sudarsana
Natchiappan.
May 16, 2008
IANS | Top
|
|
