INDIA: Temple Attack Shows Vulnerability to Suicide Attacks

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Sep 25 2002 (IPS) - India’s vulnerability to suicide attacks has again been exposed by a 12-hour siege of a Hindu temple that ended Wednesday in western Gujarat state, carried out by a two-man ‘jihadist’ squad armed with automatic weapons.

Military commandos stormed the temple and killed the two gunmen who held the temple overnight, but not before at least 31 people, including two commandos, lay dead and 100 were injured.

Despite the casualties, India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, who flew to Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, late Tuesday to supervise the commando operation, declared it a success. It was a “sign that India was winning its continuing war against terrorism,” he said.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee cut short a visit to the Maldives and was on his way to the Swaminarayan temple in Gandhinagar.

According to news reports citing eyewitness accounts, the gunmen, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and grenades, casually walked their way to the cavernous 10-storey Swaminaravan temple, located in the heart of city within two kilometres of the state’s well-guarded seat of government.

A higher death toll was prevented by the fact that priests, alerted by the sound of gunshots, managed to swing shut the massive doors to the main temple, set in a 16-hectare complex.

Bullets penetrated the thick wooden doors and injured people inside, but the gunmen were ultimately confined to a smaller prayer hall where they took a last stand.

Brigadier Raj Sitapathy, who led Wednesday’s assault, referred to notes the militants were carrying and suggested they were members of a group called Tehrik-e-Kasas (‘Movement for Revenge’).

Some reports said the militants had carried notes written in Urdu, the language Muslims speak in the subcontinent, and speculated that this shows a possible link, out of revenge, to a bloody anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat that swept the state for two months after Feb. 27 this year.

That round of communal violence, India’s worst religious violence in a decade, 2,000 people dead and 150,000 others homeless.

Other reports mentioned the Urdu notes but said the identity of the attackers remained unknown.

Advani, regarded as a hawk in the pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that rules India’s central government, blamed the attack on Pakistan.

He said it was the latest incident in what he frequently refers to as a proxy war being carried out by Islamabad to secure possession of India’s Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, where state assembly elections are ongoing.

But the Pakistan foreign ministry issued a statement condemning the attack, saying “such attacks do not promote any cause and are indeed aimed at heightening tension in the region”.

But the immediate concern for India’s central government is how to prevent the attack on the Swaminarayan temple from triggering off a fresh round of communal violence.

The authorities here do not want a repeat of the events of Feb. 27 and thereafter, when a group of Muslims in Gujarat set ablaze a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from the temple town of Ayodhya.

As a precautionary measure, an army brigade of 3,000 soldiers has been ordered sent to Gujarat.

Indian officials said Pakistan was bent on disrupting India’s achievement in carrying out elections in disputed Kashmir, where the second part of the four-staged poll was held Tuesday.

Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has called the elections “farcical” and “yet another attempt to give a mask of legitimacy to India’s illegitimate occupation of the state”.

‘Jihadist’ groups based in Pakistan have vowed to disrupt the election and have issued death threats to candidates and voters to discourage participation. However, an average 47 percent of voters cast their ballots in the first phase of the elections on Sep. 16, and the second phase on Tuesday recorded a 42 percent turnout.

Advani said the Gandhinagar attack was the direct result of the success, so far, of the elections in Kashmir and Musharraf’s goading of militant groups through his “unnecessary” mention of the Gujarat pogrom at the U.N. General Assembly on Sep. 12.

In his speech to the assembly, Musharraf demanded “accountability” for the “2,000 innocent Muslims massacred in Gujarat with the complicity of BJP state leaders,” referring to accusations even in India that state officials did not do enough to stop the violence and even aided it. Vajpayee had said he was ashamed by the communal violence in Gujarat.

Musharraf complained to the assembly about the deployment of a “million troops in battle formation against Pakistan,” which India has deployed on the Line of Command, which runs through a divided Kashmir, in response to an attempt by a four-man suicide squad to blow up its parliament on Dec. 13 last year.

Television cameras recorded the attack on parliament, in which the ‘fedayeen’ or suicide squad exchanged fire with police outside the main building. This resulted in the deaths of seven constables after the explosive-laden car in which they arrived failed to go off.

Another attack in May by a suicide squad on the Kaluchak barracks outside Jammu city in Kashmir left 35 people, most of them the wives and children of soldiers, dead.

On Aug. 6, gunmen opened fire on a camp set up by Hindu pilgrims on their way to the cave shrine of Amarnath in Kashmir, killing nine people and injuring 40 others.