Easter carnage: Some unanswered questions

Sandeep Dikshit in New Delhi

There is a stunned sense of disbelief among Indian intelligence officials, both serving and retired, over the ease and sophistication of the Sri Lankan bombing and the single-mindedness of its perpetrators.  

Moreover, they feel it is not yet over. There is the looming threat of more violence from the men and women not yet picked up by the police and believed to be on the run. Rumours have been quickly emptying the streets in Sri Lanka. They begin to fill in only when the police sound the all-clear a little while later.

Till the other day, terrorists of a little-known organisation, Jamaat al-Tawhid al-Watania group (National Thowheed Jamath) — whose core belief is to reject democracy as a political system because its laws were not handed down by God — were known in just a handful of Sri Lankan police stations as motorcycle ruffians, who would vandalise Buddhist statues and scoot.

Intelligence officials in India had detected the activity in this group and may have even placed moles inside Tawhid as evident from the detailed information passed on to their Lankan counterparts. This raises the first flag. The conspiracy theory of a well-placed rat inside the Sri Lankan government, who prevented this information from being acted upon, has been well flogged.

“Take a deep look at their domestic politics for clues,” suggests an Indian intelligence officer. Indeed, the Sri Lankan government is at war with itself. There was a moment late last year when Sri Lanka had two Prime Ministers. Today, parliamentary elections are looming and will be followed by the Presidential elections. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe did not receive the advisories from the Sri Lankan security forces that had built a case on the basis of three Indian tip-offs. The question that crops up is why didn’t the police take them into preventive detention when the Indian advisory was event and venue specific? After all, the time-honoured method of cops all over the world is to remove suspects from public circulation till the doubts about their intentions are cleared.

A warning had surfaced as early as in January when the cops had stumbled upon a massive cache of explosives and weapons linked to this group. The police’s April 11 security memo even mentioned the timings during which one of the Tawhid terrorists, supposedly on the run, would visit his wife. A week earlier (and 10 days before the blasts) Indian intelligence had transmitted to its Sri Lankan counterparts, the cellphone numbers and information about Tawhid chief Zaharan and his cohorts.

In Sri Lanka, where human rights abuses were rampant and few heads turned over the hundreds of cold-blooded assassinations during the more than 30 years that the security forces battled Tamil militants, its post-conflict society surely wouldn’t have minded if the suspects had been put behind bars.

That the police knew who exactly the group members were is borne out by the swiftness of arrests after the blast. So far, 50 arrests have been made. Indian officials offer leeway only on one count — departmentalism that exists within governmental bodies the worldover. Colombo has admitted that the security memo was circulated only among those in VIP security. But how could the April 11 security memo that was detailing the scenario of an impending catastrophe in very plain language be ignored? Steeled in the crucible of reoccurring and extremely bloody turmoil since the early 1970s (which invited the first Indian military intervention), the police would have known what to do. This lack of activity by the police more than the convulsions of domestic politics befuddles Indian investigators.

If there is a missing link of the as-yet-unknown people who sat on the April 11 security memo backed by frequent Indian warnings, there is another missing link of the master-trainers who inserted sophistication and the ability to wreck spectacular depredation by what was till the day considered a rag-tag gang. Where is the link to an international network which Sri Lankan health minister Rajitha Senaratne confidently predicts?

The ISIS claim of involvement is not yet taken as gospel. After all, it is its wont to take ownership of every single attack in Europe, even if some of these have later turned out to be the handiwork of Muslims who happened to very frustrated and/or ideologically doctrinated individuals.

And now that the deed is done, it is this doctrination that worries Indian investigators. Like the Dhaka cafe attack, many of the suicide attackers came from families that did not lack material wealth. In the wider Indian subcontinent, from the times of Osama bin Laden, the affluent lot were the ones who instigated and motivated. Rarely did they get their hands dirty. Here in Sri Lanka, and much like the Dhaka cafe attackers, motivation and indoctrination among the super affluent component of the Tawhid was sky high. Living in a pristine three-storey whitewashed bungalow, the lady of the house did not bat an eyelid before blowing her three children and an unborn child along with her when the cops came knocking.

If people who lacked nothing and faced no existentialist fears of being mowed down by an aggressive majority were putting their lives and family reputation on the line, indoctrination might have entered a new phase in the subcontinent, suggest Indian security officers. The rage they directed against their fellow Sri Lankans may have its origins in the form of perceived injustices in other lands. ISIS’ hate speeches and its promise of a mono-faith Garden of Eden here on earth may have turned some minds. It has quickly capitalised on the tragedy and turned multilingual; its messages claiming ownership of the bombings were also issued in Tamil and Malayalam.

The Indian continent seems to be in a pincer group of perverted brainwashing. The known thrust was coming from the Hindukush and the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. This thrust from the south was not anticipated.