India's bin laden
October 1 in Srinagar was not as dramatic as September 11 in the US. But the attack on the J&K Assembly emphasises the reality that India continues to be a permanent victim of jehad, that the author of the blast is the bin Laden of Kandahar vintage.

Reclaiming The Faith
Despite Pakistan's extremist image, the country is home to a wide cross-section of people holding moderate views on religion. After the terrorist attacks on the US, it is this non-confrontationist lobby that is waging a coup against the militant and vocal religious extremists.

Ready To Strike
The US strategy to strike the Taliban includes making use of the Northern Alliance, favoured by Russia and Iran and distrusted by Pakistan. In its military pact with the front, the US should keep in mind the future power equations in Afghanistan.

COVER STORY: TERRORISM

Maulana Masood Azhar
The Ghost of Kandahar Returns

By Ramesh Vinayak in Srinagar and Shishir Gupta in Delhi

Is the familiarity of October 1 in Srinagar being dwarfed by the daring dramatics of September 11 in New York and Washington? The all-American day of towering infamy, goes the near unanimous voice of the commentariat as well as the leadership of the western hemisphere, has changed global tectonics. As if the seismology of terrorism is a science born out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center. As if the bloody endurance of Kashmir is not spectacular enough. The difference is only in the details. Some jehadis reach paradise by flying in hijacked commercial flights. Others settle for terrestrial routes.

	SITE OF SAVAGERY: Policemen remove the bodies of victims of the car bomb blast outside the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly

Srinagar. October 1. 1.58 p.m. A Tata Sumo with the registration number JK01C 1342 speeds towards the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly complex and screeches to a halt at the heavily guarded gate. Three armed men in police uniform, emerge from the vehicle and run into the building, firing aimlessly in all directions. In a deafening moment, behind them, the Sumo goes up in flames, along with the man in the driver's seat. A few minutes of gunbattle later, it is a melange of the charred and the wounded, the dead and the badly burned, smoke and flesh, blood and metal. It is another day in the life of Jammu and Kashmir, one of jehad's enduring-and bleeding-causes. In this drama of death, only the location and action change. The script is the same: Islamic terror. Such a familiar terror.

The mind behind the medieval architecture of a pan-Islamic utopia, the construction of which seems to need raw material collected from the blasted structures of democracy and freedom, is the same-call it Osama bin Laden or Maulana Masood Azhar. In the wake of October 1 it is the maulana, the 33-year-old helmsmonster of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)-Army of the Prophet. This apostle of "AK-47s, pistols, rocket launchers" and, as Srinagar has shown in blood, salvation through RDX, has already claimed the ownership of October 1. That way, he is one step ahead of the more famous bin Laden, who is still "the prime suspect" of September 11. The maulana is proud to be the prime programmer.

Immediately after the blast that took 38 lives, including the four-member suicide squad ordained by the maulana, the intelligence agencies briefed an emergency cabinet meeting about the elaborate links between JeM and bin Laden's Al Qaida network. Hence, the suddenly knowledgeable prime minister's plea to the US President (who, after all, discovered the world on the morning of September 11): don't make the war against terrorism one dimensional, it has to take into consideration the Pakistan-sponsored terror in Kashmir. Then Delhi warned Islamabad, and asked the security forces to launch a "cleaning up" operation. Predictable, justifiable, no doubt. It looked like India discovered the maulana on October 1. Actually, the maulana was revisiting India, not in person, but in spirit.

	THE MASTERMIND: The maulana in Islamabad weeks after his release at Kandahar

The last time India saw him, he was making a grand exit, in the company of Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, after a five-year stay in the Kot Bhalwal prison in Jammu. On the last day of the 20th century, he, along with two other terrorists, were flown to freedom in Kandahar in Afghanistan, where lay the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC 814 with 155 passengers on board. That was more than a day of lives regained, that was a big day of Indian infamy. The maulana himself would write about that day: "The land where the plane landed, everything belonging to it was intensely dear to me ... When I was in prison, I desperately yearned to behold this city ... It was the greatest wish of my life ... Ya Allah, praise be to you indeed! You chose a city from where the rays of Islam were emanating, spreading all over the world. This is the place where your word reigns supreme." The maulana's freedom was part of Delhi's deal with terrorists who don't recognise the existence of India. JeM was born in the liberational afterglow of Kandahar.

Today, it is instructive to read excerpts from the assessment of the security officials who had interrogated the maulana immediately after his arrest in Anantnag on February 11, 1994: "The subject is a fanatic, Afghanistan-trained Pakistani militant of Harkat-ul-Ansar ... had actively participated in the Afghan war. He visited several countries and collected funds to the tune of Rs 80-90 lakh for his outfit. He had travelled to India on a fake passport with a view to accelerate the militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and to coordinate militant movement ... and had put fuel into militancy. The activities of the subject are highly prejudicial to the security of the state ... Recommended to be punished severely and detained under the Public Safety Act for the maximum period...".

Or listen to his first speech after freedom: "My dear friends, today I amback with you again. Holding you as my witness, I am telling (Home Minister L.K.) Advani again, Advani, I have come back. And today an Islamic Emirate has been established in the world. What you wanted to destroy has reached glorious heights today."

The JeM burst into the Valley with a bang on April 19, 2000. That day, a suicide bomber named Afaq Ahmed, a teenaged Kashmiri militant, blew himself up while trying to ram his explosive-laden car into the army's Badami Bagh cantonment, the headquarters of the 15 Corps in Srinagar. Since then, the outfit has claimed responsibility for a series of grenade attacks on Srinagar's civil secretariat, terming them as a "rehearsal" for future, bigger strikes. Of late, JeM has launched a passive recruitment drive, drafting Kashmiri youth into its rank, using both Islam and cash. But much of the recruitment was from Pakistan where Azhar claims to have enrolled six lakh men, 6,000 of them specially for jehad in Kashmir. With its network spreading from Somalia to Saudi Arabia to Britain to several countries in Europe, JeM has its own clandestine communication centre in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK), codenamed "Tuba".

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