K’taka arrests were made before a crime was committed. The police would thus have to establish criminal intent and conspiracy, and this is not easy.
The arrest in Karnataka of 11 young men on Thursday, on the strong suspicion of planning dramatic terrorist actions, will be seen as a major blow for the prevention of terrorism in the country provided the police does not fail to establish its case before the judiciary. Given the background of those arrested, it reaffirms the belief that increasingly those pushing the “jihad” line internationally, and its leadership, are typically men from educated backgrounds who come from reasonably affluent homes. This was seen to be the case of several young men from north Bihar, one of whom — an engineer — mysteriously went traceless and is thought to be in the custody of the Saudi authorities on terrorism charges.
Six arrests were made in Bengaluru and five in Hubli. This makes it a module of very well-educated young men who the police says are linked to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and the Harkatul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), both well-known terrorist outfits that espouse an extreme brand of Islam, with the LeT closely tied with the Pakistani military establishment, in particular the ISI. Its members included a junior scientist at DRDO, a journalist of a well-known Bengaluru English language daily, a doctor and a management graduate. The police claim their instruction-suppliers are based in Saudi Arabia and Dubai though their nationality is not known at this stage.
Outfits such as these have typically operated in India through the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), whose offshoot — the Indian Mujahideen — sought to advance the same cause after the banning and disruption of SIMI and the arrest of some of its key leaders. It is not clear how long the Karnataka police, with the aid of national police organisations, has been on the trail of the men arrested. But this is quite possibly the largest single group to be arrested at one shot. More pertinently, in this case arrests were made before a crime was committed. The police would thus have to establish criminal intent and conspiracy, and this is not easy.
When terrorism modules are in a corner, before or after a crime (as in Delhi’s Batla House encounter), civil society groups, and sometimes parties, complain of fake encounters or communalisation of the police. The police sadly is not free of these troubles. However, some people bank on this and, in effect, seek to furnish alibis to extremists and terrorists. Let the courts decide a case, not sundry do-gooders.
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