Mumbai Attacks: some arguments
From : Letters to the Editor section, Published in The Dawn, Pakistan,6 Dec 08
READING Qamar Iqbal's letter, 'Mumbai: India blames Pakistan', and the several reports titled,
(i) 'India sending top official to US',
(ii) 'The misplaced hype about Faridko't,
(iii) 'Gunmen spoke Hindi with strong Punjabi, north Indian accent' and
only strengthened my earlier conclusions.
Going by some of the past actions of the Indians, I had already suspected that the attacks on Mumbai had been engineered by New Delhi in order to ward off the immense and increasing pressure it has been coming under on two accounts.
First,
the peaceful and massive uprising in Kashmir in recent months has caught the Indian establishment and even the independence-minded Kashmiri leaders by surprise. What is worse, some Indian intellectuals and rights activists, too, are now demanding of their leaders to give freedom to Kashmiris.
Second, and perhaps even more worrying for New Delhi seems to be the apparent intention of American President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers to take concrete steps to resolve the 60-year-old Kashmir dispute. Its impact on the Indian ruling elite can be judged by the frantic efforts on several fronts not only to influence Mr Obama's thinking but, preferably, to keep the US and other western countries away from any mediation. The recent weighting in by Paris as well in favour of a Kashmir resolution has increased the panic in India.
Therefore, the best way out for the South Asian power would be to divert attention away from Kashmir and also to badly malign Pakistan as the instigator of the most audacious assault not just on the Indians but also against American, British and Israeli visitors.
In this way, there would be no doubt left in anyone's mind the work wasn't undertaken by any Indian organisation but by Muslim militants originating from, if not actually backed by, Pakistan.
Here are some supporting arguments:
1) As noted by Mr Iqbal, Leopold Café's cook told the BBC that the terrorists had consumed liquor just before initiating action (as was done by the Indian operatives in the killing of 36 Sikhs in Kashmir during Mr Clinton's visit). This proved that Muslim extremists couldn't be involved.
2) The only terrorist to be arrested gave his name and place of origin, but investigation by the police and media personnel looking for such a person in Pakistani villages named Faridkot revealed there was no such person known, as shown in report (ii) cited above.
3) Report (iii) says that the gunmen spoke Hindi with a strong north-Indian accent. I, too, had noticed that, being a Punjabi myself. Besides, it was also being said that a group called the 'Deccan Mujahideen' had claimed responsibility for the operation. But, upon listening to the telephone conversation of the person, I had immediately realised that it wasn't a Hyderabadi (Deccan) accent at all.
Therefore, the call seems to have been made as a decoy to pre-empt any suspicion falling on the Indian establishment and divert it towards the Muslim militants, although, conveniently enough, it was a name never heard before.
4) The story at no. (iv) quotes the owner of the Taj Hotel, Ratan Tata, as saying that the management had been warned it was a possible target. So, they had taken some protective measures such as keeping cars away from the hotel's front entrance and using metal detectors.
However, he said the extra security measures were eased shortly before the attack. Also, the terrorists used the rear entrance of the hotel, Whereas the security arrangements were only at the front. This shows that the attackers knew this beforehand and terrorists from villages or cities in Pakistan couldn't have been aware of such recent developments.
Only insiders very familiar with all the sites in Mumbai as well the hotel's security measures could have bypassed the impediments and moved from place to place with remarkable ease. Furthermore , that some of them even hijacked police and private vehicles and drove around easily, supports my argument.
5) Pakistan's naval chief had clarified the other day that of the two ships, M.V. Alpha and Al-Kabir, alleged to have been used by the terrorists to reach Mumbai from Karachi, our navy had none with such names and that M.V. Alpha belongs to Panama. Apart from that, the KPT website showed these did not use Karachi recently.
Finally,
report (i) says that India's foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon is being hurried to Washington to persuade Mr Obama to pressure Pakistan for cracking down on terror groups. Also, that India is concerned over the Obama administration's keen interest in resolving the Kashmir issue.
This shows India's great alarm about Washington's impending move, but why it should fear a powerful, honest broker is not hard to guess.
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