Watch out for Gulshan ripples in India

Dhaka’s Gulshan is a combination of New Delhi’s Connaught Place and Diplomatic Enclave. On the evening of July 1, seven young men sporting checked Arab kaffieyeh and armed with weapons, including an AK-22, a low-cost, locally manufactured, sub-calibre “lookalike” of the iconic AK-47, stormed into the Holey Artisan Bakery. They barricaded themselves inside with hostages, including an Indian girl. All efforts at negotiation by the police were futile and finally they were eliminated by Bangladeshi forces which used BTR-80 armoured personnel carriers as battering rams to breach the restaurant’s walls. When the smoke and dust cleared, the body count at was 29 dead — including six terrorists, 20 hostages and two policemen. Four of the dead terrorists were identified by the Bangladesh police counter-terrorist unit as Akash, Bikash, Don and Badhon, typical Bangla nom des guerre reminiscent of the violent Naxal era of Kishanji in West Bengal.

The IS never claimed responsibility for the Gulshan attack, which media reports suggested were carried out by cadres of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), that was already on the radar of the Indian intelligence agencies over the Khagragarh bomb blasts in Burdwan district in October 2014. The ripples from the Gulshan attack will impact India as well. Any major metropolis, with a dense population, and police forces, generally undermanned and inadequately equipped, is the ideal urban jungle, where problems of law and order are imposed on social unrest. In eastern India, Kolkata, located not too far from the Bangladesh border and with a substantial floating population of visitors from that country fits this profile admirably. Bangladeshi criminals on the run from the police in their country have been known to exploit densely populated Kolkata for hideouts. This heightens the possibility of JMB trying to seek sanctuary in WB.

The security of India’s borders is the task of the Government of India, but in practice this must be an integrated working arrangement between the Central and state governments, with the state police and intelligence agencies giving backup to Central forces in the first tier of integrated border management. Management of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border follows the same organisational format, though in the overall perception at the national level, the threat levels across India’s eastern borders with Bangladesh are a relatively lower priority in contrast with the western and northern ones adjoining Pakistan and China. This is not surprising as India has fought four wars with Pakistan since 1947. The focus briefly shifted eastwards during the Bangladesh operations in 1971, but the priorities were pulled back towards the western border after Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 and then, much later, after America intensified its operations in the Af-Pak region.

The liberalism brought to Bangladesh by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, after the victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war, was deliberately eroded after his assassination by a series of military regimes that took over and was replaced by ultra-radicalised Wahhabi Islam, with major financial incentives for propagation of jihad provided by Islamic charities based in Saudi Arabia. A network of mosques and madrasas have been built with Saudi funds in India too, and also, disturbingly, in the Terai belt on the India-Nepal border.

The Gulshan attack in Dhaka by terrorists is a warning that India can ignore only at its own peril. The spread of Wahhabi Islam in Bangladesh is a danger signal to the entire subcontinent, and calls for a major politico-military effort by Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. India must continue to fully back Sheikh Hasina and her government. Things are fluid in Bangladesh, and New Delhi must constantly review its policy options there. All varieties of radical religious sentiments are unacceptable in the secular Indian milieu. Aberrations like violence over caste, beef-eating, and cow slaughter have the potential to metamorphose into full-blown security crises if they are allowed to ferment. Puritanical opposition to so-called “symbols of Western decadence” like Holey Artisan Café reveals a medieval mindset that has no place in any modern society.