By Fazal Mehmood
After Azamgarh in UP, Bhatkal and Beed in Maharashtra get exposed as yet another kindergartens of terror following Zabiuddin Ansari’s arrest. Why are young men of these small towns vulnerable to indoctrination?
Beed last made news in 1994 when the source of the panic causing breakout of bubonic plague was traced back to a village in this poor Marathwada distict that was once a part of the Nizam’s Hyderabad.
The past week, the non-descript town that lends its name to the district has been making headlines after the Delhi Police arrested one of its residents, Zabiuddin Ansari aka Abu Jundal, on the charge of being the Indian link of the terrorists who perpetrated the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai.
Immediately after the arrest, Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray declared that Marathwada was becoming a “mini Pakistan”. Thackeray is prone to exaggeration, but officers of the Anti-Terrorist Squad admit the region is very similar to places such as Padgha on the Mumbai-Agra highway, which found its place in the sun in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Hindutva terror hub Malegaon and even Ratnagiri, where fundamentalists of both Islamist and Hindutva persuasions are stronger than they are elsewhere.
Aurangabad for instance was the headquarters of the now-banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), whose offspring is said to be the Indian Mujahideen. Parli Vaijanath in Beed in fact provided SIMI with a huge support base, which is why the state police were not surprised when on May 10, 2006, the ATS with the help of the Intelligence Bureau, seized 43 kilos of RDX, 16 AK-47 rifles and 4,000 rounds of ammunition near Aurangabad. This arms haul is also connected to Zabiuddin Ansari, who had arranged the arms for what investigators now say was a precursor to the 26/11 terror attack.
In spite of the huge support for the SIMI, the organisation didn’t have support to motivate cadres enough to challenge the writ of the Indian state. “Though there were many fiery speeches, like in 1999, when during a convention in Aurangabad SIMI cadres declared that “Islam is our Nation, not India”, they were not a militant outfit, says an ATS officer on the condition of anonymity.
There was a lot of anger building up over the Babri Masjid demolition, but it reached the tipping point after the 2002 Gujarat riots. The imagery of the riots is a frequent tool used by hotheads to egg on young people to turn against the Indian state. Potential terror recruits are usually intensely trained in religious madrasa run by Sunni Muslims, according to the ATS and are continually exposed to graphic CDs with very disturbing pictures of the Gujarat riots.
The brainwashing is done in such a way that evens the most mild-mannered and docile young men would be inclined towards turning into terrorists such as Ansari. This is one of the reasons why many people in Beed still find it hard to believe that he was the man who went to Pakistan and had been egging on the 10 terrorists to spill more blood.
“This boy used to get bullied and beaten; he couldn’t even hurt a fly. We can’t fathom how he is now being talked about in the same breath as Lashkar-e-Tayyeba founder and commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, we find it hard to believe that in six years a boy from our locality could undergo such a transformation,” says Mukram Pathan, a resident of Beed’s Hathi Khana who knows the Zabiuddin family well.
In cities, the ATS officials point out, as a result of the greater presence of cops, terror modules run a higher risk of being busted. The police are less ubiquitous and the informer (khabri) networks are not as well-established in the villages, so it is easy to indoctrinate young people without getting noticed.
The indoctrination starts with one young man in a locality and those who are in close contact with him also get radicalised, which is what happened in Beed. Ansari was the first to fall for the jihadi bait; his childhood friend Fayyaz Kagzi was next in the queue.
Another suspect and Ansari’s friend, Himayat Baig, is alleged to be the prime conspirator in Pune’s Best Bakery blast case, but Maharashtra ATS officials point out that he is not as big a fish as he is made out to be. Baig, like Ansari, has been absconding since 2006. Besides Baig, the police say at least 15 of Ansari’s friends wanted by the police are absconding. Locals insist that the men have gone underground to prevent being harassed. “ATS officials arrested one of the young men in our neighbourhood at 3 a.m. for being involved in the 2006 Aurangabad arms haul case; when we protested against it, he was booked in a fake dacoity case,” informs Pathan.
The ATS says community bonds are thicker in small towns and rural outposts than in big cities. It prevents even rational people within the community to take the police into confidence in case they find anything suspicious. It’s easy to spot an informer in a small town, so a code of omerta is at work.
There’s a bigger social issue too. Muhammad Ilyas Fazil, Principal, Milliya Arts, Science and Management Science College in Beed, says the problem with such places is that the young people are not finding avenues to channel their energy.
“Both Hindus and Muslims depend on each other for work, so neither of us wants to escalate an issue that would create communal tension,” Fazil says. “Which is why the people who could have brainwashed Zabiuddin and others are from outside.” Young men in towns like Beed, adds Fazil, need more educational and employment opportunities.
Fazli’s colleague and terror suspect Fayyaz Kagzi’s father, Riyaz Kagzi, is the junior college principal of the Milliya College, and he has been at the forefront of the campaign to get young Muslim men to focus on education and not get swayed by external factors. In the case of men like Ansari and Kagzi, the message seems to be falling on deaf ears. INAV