Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Second line of defence on border yet to take off

Guwahati, Aug 6 : It is now a well established fact that the process of detection and deportation of foreigners from Assam has been turning into a farce and what is more unfortunate is that the Government lacks the initiative even to seal the Assam-Bangladesh border to prevent fresh infiltration of foreigners into the State as the proposed second line of defence is yet to become fully functional. The material provided by the Border Police wing of Assam police in response to questions under the Right to Information Act (RTI) by The Assam Tribune clearly exposed the lack of proper initiative on the part of the Government in sealing the international border to prevent fresh infiltration of foreigners into Assam.

A decision was taken in a tripartite meeting held between the Central and State Governments and All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) on March 18, 1999 to create a second line of defence behind the Border Security Force (BSF) to check infiltrators who might sneak past the BSF posts. But unfortunately, the second line of defence is yet to become fully operational because of the failure of the Government to sanction required posts and to provide the basic infrastructure even after nine years of taking the decision to create the same.It was decided in the meeting that 28 border outposts (BOPs) and three tactical headquarters of the second line of defence would be created behind the BOPs of the BSF in the districts of Dhubri, Cachar and Karimganj having international border with Bangladesh. It was also decided that one thousand personnel from the existing forces would be deployed temporarily to the BOPs of the second line of defence by thinning out personnel from the posts already sanctioned in other districts till regular posts are sanctioned.

However, unfortunately, till date, only 12 BOPs and two tactical headquarters of the second line of defence became functional in temporary accommodation and without required logistic support. Proper accommodation in the BOPs is still not available and a proposal for construction of 28 BOPs and three tactical headquarters is pending with the Government. Moreover, the Government is yet to sanction a thousand posts for the second line of defence and the present strength of the force is only 23 sub-inspectors, 19 head constables and 55 constables. Border Police admitted that the second line of defence would become fully operational only when infrastructure, logistic support and one thousand personnel are made available by the Government.

It may be mentioned here that the Border Police force, now being headed by an officer of the rank of Director General of Police, has a sanctioned strength of 4002 personnel. The main tasks assigned to the force include, detection and deportation of illegal migrants, prevention of infiltration of foreigners by maintaining a second line of defence, joint patrolling along the international border with the BSF, maintenance of law and order in the international border areas etc. The personnel of the force are deployed in 159 watch posts in 17 districts of the State.

There are six immigrant check posts in the districts of Dhubri and Karimganj to check people coming with valid documents and a proposal has been submitted to the Government in 2006 to strengthen and upgrade the posts. The border police personnel have also started joint patrolling along the international border in the districts of Dhubri and Karimganj along with the BSF personnel.

BSF installs new gadgets at Tripura border

Agartala, Aug 6 : Border Security Force (BSF) has installed sophisticated gadgets including Thermal Night Vision Device (TNVD) and Telescopic Guns to stop infiltration along 856 km area of Tripura-Bangladesh border.

BSF officials here today said that it had already enhanced the security deployment on the borders in Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam following the instruction from the Ministry of Home Affairs, after the reports of growing influence of Bangladeshi fundamentalist groups started pouring in.Agartala, Aug 6 : Border Security Force (BSF) has installed sophisticated gadgets including Thermal Night Vision Device (TNVD) and Telescopic Guns to stop infiltration along 856 km area of Tripura-Bangladesh border.

BSF officials here today said that it had already enhanced the security deployment on the borders in Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam following the instruction from the Ministry of Home Affairs, after the reports of growing influence of Bangladeshi fundamentalist groups started pouring in.
Three frontiers of North East- Tripura-Cachar-Mizoram, Assam- Meghalaya-Manipur and Nagaland have become vulnerable following the movement of the members of HUJI and Jamat-e-Mujah-e-deen Bangladesh, said a senior official of BSF in Tripura Frontier, adding the arrest of Sagam Ali, a suspected ISI agent and Mamun Mia, a hardcore HUJI activist from Agartala was a clear indication that fundamentalist groups had been using the border as safe corridor.

After the recent serial blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, and intelligence reports, the ministry of Home Affairs had asked BSF to strengthen the security on Indo-Bangla border to intercept terrorists before entering into Tripura.

Mid-day meal for Mizo upper primary schools

Aizawl, Aug 6 : Mizoram Government, under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), on Saturday launched mid-day meal for 48,309 upper primary schools in the State while 1,07,000 primary school students in the State enjoyed the scheme since 2006.

Launching the mid-day meal scheme for upper primary schools, School Education Minister, Dr R Lalthangliana said that each student is provided with 150 grams of rice and Rs 3 per day.Aizawl, Aug 6 : Mizoram Government, under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), on Saturday launched mid-day meal for 48,309 upper primary schools in the State while 1,07,000 primary school students in the State enjoyed the scheme since 2006.

Launching the mid-day meal scheme for upper primary schools, School Education Minister, Dr R Lalthangliana said that each student is provided with 150 grams of rice and Rs 3 per day.

the desi jihad

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Terror now sports an Indian face with ISI training and Taliban indoctrination. It has made the task of weeding out terrorists from locals all the more tough.

plausible deniability—a political doctrine that originated in the 1950s allowed the US president to deny the covert operations and assassinations carried out by the a. The word is as applicable to the shadowy terror games being played out in the subcontinent as it was to the skulduggery of the Cold War. It can, for instance, help explain the new gameplan of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (isi) to spread terror throughout the hinterland yet denying any knowledge of it. Ahmedabad was the newest and deadliest in a series of attacks, over the past few years, having claimed about 53 lives and the reappearance of a new group, the Indian Mujahideen.

“While continuing giving financial aid, training and arms assistance to the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), isi is encouraging it to depend for its operations in Indian territory on Indian Muslims only,” says terrorism expert B. Raman. Welcome desi jihad. While usual suspects like LeT and the Jaish-eMohammed (JeM), which carried out attacks on Parliament and in Ayodhya, have been lying low, the focus in the past few months has now shifted to the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islam (HuJI), a shadowy Bangladesh-based jihadi organisation that first shot into prominence with blasts on the Shramjeevi Express and in Varanasi. The explosives used now comprise locally available ammo- alum nitrate and gelatin sticks instead of iiux that is easily traceable to Pakistan. The Gujarat blasts are believed to have been planned by HUJI and executed by the Indian Mujahideen, which, investigators say, is a new name for the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (siMfl. isi is believed to have encouraged HUJI to set up a separate India- specific organisation with recruits solely from the Indian Muslim community.
Secretary of US Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff believes the next attack on the US could be carried out by “clean skin” terrorists—European nationals who could fly under the radar. Are the Indian Mujahideen, a purely Indian organisation with no overt Pakistani or Bangladeshi involvement, the “clean skins” the isi has coveted?
For starters, this is a group that believes in assiduously clahning credit for its misdeeds, always through an email and sometimes with proof and signed by a mysterious “Guru al ilindi”. Their voluble 14-page email sent after the Gujarat attack bizarrely requested “LeT and other organisations not to claim the responsibility for these attacks”.
Almost 24 hours after the blasts in Jaipur in May, two rv channels in Delhi had received an anonymous email on behalf of the Indian Mujahideen. Significantly, the message included an auth‘entic picture of one of the cycles alleged to have been used in Jaipur (the number was readable), leading to the possibility  that the Uttar Pradesh and Jaipur blasts were carried out by the same group.
What is the composition of these groups? Following the 2002 Gujarat riots, some of the more radical elements in the DeobandTablighi Jainaat and AhIe Eladis tanzeeins in Gujarat vowed vengeance. As many as two dozen students, most of them, of course, Kashmiris whowere studying in Deobandi madrasas in south Gujarat, fled the madrasas for arms and explosives training in Pakistan soon after the riots. Twelve of these were students of the Deobandi  madrasa at Kantharia  near Bharuch called Darul Uloom Arabiyyah Islamiyyah. (These madrasas have now stopped enrolling Kashmiri students following police pressure). It is possible that the blasts were the work of these new recruits. one of the most notorious com manders of iiwi and Leader of its Auragabad Javed Kashmiri, who is eluding Maharashtra Police, had his religious education in a similar madrasa near Bharuch. The 101- year-old Deobandi madrasa at Dabhel near Surat,
which is the oldest Deobandi madrasa in Gujarat, has also been accused of spreading radicalism.
At least two maulvis charged with terrorist acts have studied in Dalihel. In Gujarat, almost all those arrested in rela
tion to terror acts following the post-Godhra riots. including the infamous Akshardham attack andthe lesser known bus bomb blasts in 2002 in which 13 people were injured, were Deobandis.
So, it came as no surprise last week when the police arrested a radical AhIe Hadis maulvi, Abdul Halim, within hours of the Ahniedabad blasts.

Halim faces an old but unsubstantiated charge that he had sent some boys to Pakistan for arms training following the Gujarat riots.
The emails follow a recurnng theme—that Indian Muslims had decided to take the offensive way to waging a jihad. They refer to the severe penalties awarded to the accused in the Munibal blasts of March 1993, lack of action against Ilindu police officers who allegedly comniitted atrocities on Muslims, the Gujarat riots of 2002, the assault on arrested Jest suspects by some lawyers and, that the criminal justice system treated the Muslims severely but was lenient with the Hindus.
How to identify terrorists without hurting the community—recruitment aspect for terrorists—is a challenge before law enforcement officials. One officer who had mastered this technique after acquiring sound knowledge of the working of the Wahhabi tanzeems was Gujarat Police DIG D.G. Vanzara, who was in- charge of the state AntI-Terrorist Squad (ATs). lie had reportedly made life miserable for the ultra radical Wahhabis in Gujarat during his tenure. This process screeched to a halt when he was arrested in the Sohrabuddin encounter case along with two other n’s officers and 11 other policemen in June 2007.
Though controversial, Vanzara had, on the basis of his knowledge and skill, raised his own intelligence network within the Muslim community by roping in the moderate elements even in the Wahhabi tanzeems. I-Ic used this information to monitor the tanzeems. One of his unorthodox techniques was keeping the relatives of absconding terror act accused under his personal custody till the accused presented himsell’before the police. Unorthodox measures they may have been, but they succeeded in keeping radical Islamic elements on a tight leash. Vanzara’s acts, though, were often interpreted as harassment of the Muslim community, while in effect these were necessary measures to prevent terror attacks, say police officials. Many see last week’s attack as a result of a big intelligence lapse on the part of the state police, since a very large number of locals are believed to be involved.
The absence of Vanzara was clearly visible even in the Ahmedabad blast investigation last week. Despite suspecting the involvement of a large number of locals in the terror act, the police picked up only Ilalim.
As a police official puts: “Following such incidents, the net has to be cast wide. The unwanted fish can be released back into the lake while retaining the wanted ones.” Clearly, for law enforcement agencies, caution is the new watch word.•

what india can do

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The country will have to improve its border management policies, take a leaf out of laws on terrorism in the UK and the US, apart from beefing up its intelligence network.

As India becomes a prime target of a cocktail of terrorist groups, the country needs to take a radical relook at the anti- terror laws which leave much to be desired. The pitfalls in the legal system have allowed the accused in the transistor bomb blasts in Delhi to go scot free even after 23 years.

With cases like the Mumbai blasts and the Delhi serial blasts stifi unsolved, terrorist groups feel emboldened and have continued to strike Indian targets without fear. “Terrorists have unified command and control system while India’s response is scattered and sometimes absent,” says an intelligence official. Though India has been at the forefront seeking a comprehensive UN convention on terrorism—wanting action against countries providing financial help and harbouring terrorists—differences on the definition of terrorism have grounded progress.

The abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (P0TA) in 2004 and the politicisation of its anti-terror response has left India with no effective Central law to counter terrorism. Worse, five states, which have lobbied for their own legislations, have found their bills gathering dust in the judicial division of the Home Ministry. Gujarat’s case for an organised anti-terror law has been pending since 2004, Rajasthan has not heard from the Centre since January 2006, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have seen their anti-terror bills pending since last year.
The lack of an effective anti-terror legislation is worsened by an abysmal police-population ratio of 126 per 1,00,000 (as against Western ratios that vary between 250 and over 500 per 1,00,000); Gujarat has a ratio of 152 per
1,00,000 (above the national average, but well below the 222 per 1,00,000 recommended internationally for peacetime policing). Moreover, policing is primitive in comparison to the modem resources that have been committed for law enforcement in the West. There are deficits in police staffmg levels of between 10-40 per cent in various states.

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Globally it has been accepted that terrorism cannot be treated as a simple law and order problem, and with terrorists becoming more advanced and many functioning with active help of countries that harbour them, it requires an extraordinary response to tackle them.
The USA Patriot Act of 2001 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate ‘fools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) has allowed the US security agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial and other records and eased restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States. The US experience of creating a Department of I lomeland Security with the avowed objective of protecting the country from terrorist attacks needs to be replicated in India with the Central Law Enforcement Agency to fight terror.

Countries like Australia have given, stop and search” powers to their police, which allows the police to stop and search people. The country also has a “Control order”, that allows the police to approach a closed court and ask for restrictions to be placed on someone who poses a terror threat. The restrictions can limit who the suspect can talk to, where the person can go and what devices the suspect can use (phone and Internet). The UK’s new Counter Terrorism Bill extends the pre-charge detention of terror suspects from 28 days to 42 days.
Even Bangladesh has implemented new terror laws creating special tribunals to hear terror cases and clear these in six months with a provision of death penalty for terrorism and financing of terrorism. India, meanwhile, careens from blast to blast.
“India’s police and intelligence forces—with tiny exceptions—remain overwhehningly undermanned, under-resourced and primitive in their day-to-day functioning. India has failed even to create a national database on crime and terrorism—despite a mandate to create it and support organisational structures, including the Multi-Agency Centre and the Joint Task Force on lnteffigene in the Intelligence Bureau, that dates back to 2001,” says Ajai Sahni, executive director, institute for Conflict Management.
India needs to take out a leaf from global laws to tackle terrorism besides re-arming its human inteffigence network which Is important to ward ofi’ terror attacks. it also has to set up a
real-time information sharing system with key
intelligence agencies to avert terror attacks. Another important aspect is to work on its border management and control policies,
because ineiThctive monitoring of its porous herders with Bangladesh and Nepal has made these into safe transit points for terrorists. While India will have to fight its own battle against terror, it will have to ensure that its laws have teeth, with checks and balances, to combat the scourge of terrorism.

The Nation That Failed

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India displays its shameful lack of political will to confront the growing threat of radical Islam even as it becomes the easiest target of jihad

 

So it is yesterday all over again, and the sameness of the savagery only adds to the legendary Indian sense of sangfroid. Two spirited cities of India, 23 blasts, more than 50 dead, humireds maimed, and the predictable Day-After theatre of politics feasting on cadavers strewn across the streets of the world’s most
state. This overwhelming banality of horror tells one simple truth: we can take a lot more, we can shed a lot more blood, we have a lot more people
to spare... Enterprising jthadists are welcome, and the incentives you get in the great democratic republic where no terrorist worth his nthiiistic fantasy is denied the right to kill under an equal opportunity scheme is greater than what you can get anywhere else in the world, may be with the exception of Iraq. It should be now official: India is a dangerous place to be in, unless you are a god’s mercenary for whom this wretched country is the easiest battlefield in the war against infidels or an honourable member of the political class that has already abdicated its responsibility to protect the nation.
The frequency of the attacks and their magnitude say a lot about the jihadist and the victim. The killer is precise; he chooses his target for maximum effect; and he seems to enjoy the kind of freedom that is denied to his brotherhood elsewhere. Ahmedabad comes just two months after Jaipur which was preceded by Hyderabad 2007. Mumbai 2006. Dethi 2005 and the audacious attack on Parliament in the afterglow of 9/11. Come to think of it: the most favoured nation for those who want to invest in jthad is not the United States or Israel any longer. It is India.

Not that Washington and Jerusalem have ceased to be less satanic for jthadists. India does not have the political will or consensus to identify the threat of radical Islam and confront it. It does not have that necessary iron in the nationalist soul to ensure that life is not disposable at the diktat of a coward trapped in the make believe of a scriptural Caliphate.
What we have got is an apparition in funereal white floating in Ahmeclabad, mouthing platitudinous inanities as if it is just another routine mission for him in just another death zone. The enormity of our national shame cannot be reduced to the size of the Union Home Minister, but the gentleman is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with those who have the political mandate to act. “We have information but it is not proper for me to disclose that information at this point of time or blame any organisation because it has implications.” It is Shivraj Patil post-Alimedabad, and it is as enlightening as what he had said about the threat to national security iii a television interview immediately after taking over: “The disease within the body is more dangerous”—whatever it means. Effete and evasive, he is the home minister in a Government that can do nothing but cry “ml” in utter exasperation whenever it is under attack. We don’t expect from this Government a department of homeland security or an Indian version ofAmerica’s Patriot Act or extraordinary rendition or, for that matter, a Gitmo in the Andamans for the higher cause of national security. What about an alternative to the “draconian” Prevention of Terrorism Act (P0TA)? State governments like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are not even given the permission to pass their own anti-terrorism laws while Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat are awaiting presidential assent to their bills against terror. A government that allows a terrorist condemned to the gallows to become a living symbol for the perennially disenchanted but the vote-rich minorities is unlikely to identify radical Islamism as a threat to India. So it wifi go on triangulate in politically correct malarkey, with the home minister as its bumbling interlocutor.
And India will continue to be savaged. Today, in the post-9/11 statistics of terror, India, a ltheral democracy, is second only to post-Saddam Iraq, liberated but at war with itself. This terrifying truth magnifies the failure of the state—and the entire political class which is never united by grief or fear. Sadly, even when the new generation faces of Kashmir—one of the oldest datelines of Islamic terror—went eloquent about ‘Being Indian’ in Parliament, the war against India in the Valley found no place in their nationalist script. As long as India refuses to shed its shameful political expediency, we can only wallow in our victimhood. We deserve better.

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Female observers will fly in the Tu-142

Women Submarine Hunters

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The Indian Navy has versatile aviation arm, unlike the air force, it not have any women flying its array of helicopters and surveillance aircraft. But that is set to change very soon. The first of two women observers are currently undergoing training at the naval academy INS Zamorin in Kerala and will join the navy next year. The navy plans to train them as observers to detect hostile submarines and launch attacks on enemy surface and aerial targets. “Women will serve on our Tu-142 maritime patrol aircraft and could soon be flying our P-81s (a long range maritime patrol aircraft to be acquired from the US),” says navy chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta.
Women have been flying transport aircraft and helicopters in the iAi since the early 1990s but do not fly fighter aircraft, Naval observers operate onboard long range maritime patrol aircraft like the hulking Tu-142s and IL-38s which operate offshore bases and hunt submarines and interdicting enemy surface vessels and anti-submarine warfare helicopters which fly off warships. They are the principal warfare officers in an aircraft and handle aircraft weapons like torpedoes, bombs and missiles, and deploy sonabuoys to detect enemy submarines. As a senior naval official puts it, they are “in the thick of action”. The training is the first stage of ‘confidence building’ before women can fly naval aircraft.