Who is this Sajan Kapur? Were gunmen paid to create Mumbai terror?

  Who is this Sajan Kapur? Were gunmen paid to create Mumbai terror?

As the debris of the 60 hour long Mumbai nightmare is cleared and the dead are laid to rest and medical fraternity try to save as much of the injured as they can, it is time for questions to be raised. Many have already been raised and more will continue to be raised from all over the world in the coming days, by experts and those on the ground. One is therefore refraining from raising any at this point of time.

But as an informed and interested viewer of the 60 hour drama being played out in front of our eyes, one has been rather hugely intrigued by something one watched in the afternoon of Friday, when the siege was already 41 hours old.  

Switching channels furiously to catch something unusual which can give a new perspective to the happenings in Mumbai, one stopped at Aaj Tak, to find a Virendra Sehwag look-alike, with the shaven head and all, being questioned breathlessly by the unseen anchor.  The caption read--- Sajan Kapur (or Kapoor) --- Taj se chudaye gaye bandhak (hostage released from Taj).

What Kapur, presumably a Punjabi going by the name, but with a rather heavy malayali accent in his Hindi, was revealing was sensational. His story went something like this---

On the night of Nov.26, soon after the gunmen were found firing indiscriminately in several places in Mumbai, and the Taj Hotel siege began, he got a call from the Mumbai Police's ace "encounter specialist", Vijay Salaskar. The cop told Kapur about the firing happening in Taj and instructed him to reach the hotel. His brief was to go in and merge in the crowd and find out what is happening exactly and to report to him (Salaskar). Though this was left unsaid, obviously Kapur was an "informer" of Salaskar who has been used before also for such assignments.

Kapur promptly landed up in Taj and walked in and found himself taken hostage by the gunmen. He along with two others, foreigners, were taken to Room No.630 on the sixth floor and held hostage for several hours. It was not clear for how many hours. But during these hours, what Sajan Kapur saw and heard is nothing short of sensational.

According to Kapur, this room was the operation base of the gunmen/terrorists. He saw so much arms and ammunition there, he was left wonderstruck how they managed to gather all that in a five star hotel room. Now it becomes more interesting. Unlike what we were being regularly fed by the numerous reporters of various TV channels who in turn were feeding from NSG and other security sources, there were not just four or five terrorists in the Taj Hotel. Kapur said with a straight face without any hint of confusion or doubt, that he had seen 17 terrorists! And according to him, they were coming in and going out of room no.630, conducting operations and very interestingly communicating with someone from Karachi. Kapur insists he was a witness to some of these gunmen, who had mobile phones and satellite phones too, were getting calls from Karachi, and were being told what to do, and also about what the security forces were planning and doing outside the hotel. Obviously they were monitoring the Indian news channels.

But what is most interesting about Kapur's story as he narrated on Aaj Tak, was about the conversation he heard among some of the young gunmen. It went something like this---

"Yaar in India ke neta ke pass kitna paisa hain"( hey, how much money these Indian politicians have?), asked one of the young gunmen to the other. The other replied (all in front of Kapur) --- "tere ko kya lene ka—tumhe mil gaya na paisa"( hey, why are you bothered about it, you got your money no).

In fact the excited anchor asks repeatedly if the terrorists were talking of money, and if he felt they were paid for the job. Kapur reiterates and even goes on to say, that there was even a scuffle or verbal fight between the terrorists on the question of money. He also talks about the leader of the gang having been killed in the second or third floor, which also lead to some "fight" between the other gunmen.

Now coming to the intriguing part. Normally an eye witness like this would have been grabbed by all the TV channels. But somehow only Aaj Tak managed to get him and even kept him in their Mumbai studios for a couple of hours almost, during which they kept coming back to him, and he went on giving more and more interesting details. One however missed his take on how he escaped from the clutches of his captors.

However, what is most intriguing is that Sajan Kapur has disappeared after that appearance on Aaj Tak. Not a single newspaper one has seen so far( more than half a dozen) has a word about this most interesting "hostage" who had escaped, leave alone what he claimed on TV channel, that he had seen and heard.

ON the Aaj Tak web site, the clipping of his interview is still available, but not all that he said. Though his claim of the gunmen talking of money and Indian politicians is very much available. Those interested can even watch it by clicking on this link http://aajtak.itgo.in/index.php?option=com_registration&exist=yes&type=1&task=videopage&assignedvideoid=4116&sectionid=21&secid=0 .

Now some questions which invariably crops up and begs for an answer. Who is this Sajan Kapur? Why has no newspaper or other news channels not been able to get him or if they have, not published or telecast what he claims? Are there more to this entire dastardly terror acts than what is generally believed to be at this point of time---- the Lashkar connection and all that?
 
http://indiainteracts.com/columnist/2008/11/29/Who-is-this-Sajan-Kapur-Were-gunmen-paid-to-create-Mumbai-terror/ 

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Muslims must confront the truth about Mumbai

By Yasmin Alibhai Brown
 
In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, wild speculations swirled, furious cyclones that threw up windy and wild theories, charged conspiracies and noisy condemnation. Inevitable perhaps, just human nature responding fearfully to sudden and unspeakable violence. The terrorists cleaved the body, heart and soul of this cosmopolitan, enterprising hub which draws to its bosom the richest and most wretched of the earth. What they did coldly in hotels, cafés and the Jewish centre was as atrocious as the killings in Beslan. But as the panic subsides, it is the duty of all world citizens to confront truths, however inconvenient.
 

Instead we see a scandalous passing of the buck. "Can't be, won't be, not our native sons," say India, Pakistan and Britain as they set about impugning each other explicitly and implicitly. It is a form of post-trauma nationalism that can grip wounded nations and was most vividly manifested in the US after 9/11. Meanwhile, millions of Muslims, also traumatised, habitually revisit sites of conflict – Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq – or list other legitimate grievances to explain away each successive act of Islamist violence.
 
Denial and obfuscation once again stop us from examining who the killers were, why they did what they did, the places and times they pick. It is not to exonerate them or forgive them, but to acquire vital data and a deeper understanding of the international networks and the mental states of the perpetrators – their religious and political ideologies. This essential information cannot be extracted through torture or the outlandish "evidence" of anti-Muslim, neo-con think tanks whose agenda we know all too well.
 
Years on from the al-Qa'ida assault on the US, with two wars still going on, Guantanamo Bay and other rendition centres doing their filthy work, Islamist assassins can still strike in Mumbai. We have no psychological profiling, no dependable evidence to stop the next time. Is that not chilling? As big a problem is the pathological reluctance of nations to examine how their politics and policies bear some responsibility for the support given to men of terror.
Take India. Its people, economy, history, culture and democratic credentials make it a remarkable country. It is also a nation which tolerates shocking poverty, inequality, caste and religious injustice and gender oppression. Some Indian Muslims have done brilliantly well in the last decade or so, too many though are trapped in poverty and have fallen below the lowest of the Hindu castes.
 
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appears sanguine about this Muslim underclass and has done little to bring to trial those responsible for the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat. Nothing is done to quell the physical abuse and oppression of Kashmiris by the Indian security services. Even if the terrorists came from Pakistan – there must be Muslims in India who feel unsafe in their land and so support the unsupportable. Ashok Mehta, a security analyst, says: "Without help, the terrorists would not have known how to enter the hotels or where the exits are. This operation would have been well-rehearsed and there certainly would have been local guides." That kind of talk is taboo in complacent India.
 
Then there are the deniers, who are outraged if you suggest that Pakistan breeds Islamists who terrorise their own country. Ahmed Rashid is one of the world's most authoritative Pakistani authors. His latest book, Decent Into Chaos: The US And The Failure Of Nation-Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan And Central Asia, tells how his country is now increasingly lawless, churning out young people filled with homicidal aspirations. Many in the political and military establishment back the jihadis. I said so on the BBC this weekend and was then forced to shelter from the torrent of abuse from "patriotic" Pakistanis. Sara writes: "Just because these men were Muslims doesn't mean they were the financiers." The men were probably Indian double agents, says another Pakistani. A man from Burnley calls me "a fucking Zionist". Don't ask me why.
 
Here, after some early, irresponsible coverage claimed some of the killers were British, there is now an assumption that there is no connection at all. I think we need to wait and see. The Government still refuses to accept the implicit contribution that our foreign policies have made, and as yet has commissioned no credible, long-term research on radicalisation.
 
After Obama's victory, the world felt optimistic. That India and Pakistan (a democracy again) were at last trying to rebuild trust gave pause for cautious
hope. The Mumbai terrorists shattered all that and once more, we are lost in misinformation and misapprehension.

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So don't rush to conclusions just because the wealthy are the target for once

 by Kanishk Tharoor
 
.....
 
Ever since the 1993 blasts at the Mumbai Stock Exchange, India has weathered a rising tide of attacks. Two years ago, serial bomb blasts on Mumbai's commuter rail system killed about 200 people (a similar body count to last week's atrocities). More recently, Islamist-linked attacks have targeted public spaces in the west, south and far east of the country. Were any one of these outrages to occur in the West, it would be seen as cataclysmic. In India, this sort of terrorism has acquired the resigned air of routine.
This is what makes much of the Indian reception of the attacks in Mumbai so noteworthy and, in its own way, depressing. As the drama unfolded, Indian TV commentators veered towards the sensational, frequently invoking "9/11". Whereas attacks in the past mostly hit the marketplaces and trains of the lower middle class and poor – the "overcrowded parts" of the country, as one news anchor indelicately put it – never before have the more genteel climes of Indian society been so brutally assaulted. Prominent Mumbaikars cluttered the 24-hour news channels, recalling their visits to the famous Taj and expressing concern for loved ones and friends currently trapped in the hotel. For an elite that almost always emerges unscathed from violence in the country, the attack cut close to the bone.
But it reflects poorly on the world's largest democracy that the Indian press suddenly placed the country at a "9/11"-style crossroads.
India has suffered devastating attacks of this kind before. The murder of Indian citizens – no matter what their breeding – should have jolted government and civil society from their slumber long ago.

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India's Leaders Need To Look Closer To Home

By Tariq Ali

28 November, 2008
Counterpunch

The terrorist assault on Mumbai's five-star hotels was well planned, but did not require a great deal of logistic intelligence: all the targets were soft. The aim was to create mayhem by shining the spotlight on India and its problems and in that the terrorists were successful. The identity of the black-hooded group remains a mystery.

 

The Deccan Mujahedeen, which claimed the outrage in an e-mail press release, is certainly a new name probably chosen for this single act. But speculation is rife. A senior Indian naval officer has claimed that the attackers (who arrived in a ship, the M V Alpha) were linked to Somali pirates, implying that this was a revenge attack for the Indian Navy's successful if bloody action against pirates in the Arabian Gulf that led to heavy casualties some weeks ago.

 

The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has insisted that the terrorists were based outside the country. The Indian media has echoed this line of argument with Pakistan (via the Lashkar-e-Taiba) and al-Qaeda listed as the usual suspects.

 

But this is a meditated edifice of official India's political imagination. Its function is to deny that the terrorists could be a homegrown variety, a product of the radicalization of young Indian Muslims who have finally given up on the indigenous political system. To accept this view would imply that the country's political physicians need to heal themselves.

Al Qaeda, as the CIA recently made clear, is a group on the decline. It has never come close to repeating anything vaguely resembling the hits of 9/11.

 

Its principal leader Osama bin Laden may well be dead (he certainly did not make his trademark video intervention in this year's Presidential election in the United States) and his deputy has fallen back on threats and bravado.

 

What of Pakistan? The country's military is heavily involved in actions on its Northwest frontier where the spillage from the Afghan war has destabilized the region. The politicians currently in power are making repeated overtures to India. The Lashkar-e-Taiba, not usually shy of claiming its hits, has strongly denied any involvement with the Mumbai attacks.

 

Why should it be such a surprise if the perpetrators are themselves Indian Muslims? Its hardly a secret that there has been much anger within the poorest sections of the Muslim community against the systematic discrimination and acts of violence carried out against them of which the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in shining Gujarat was only the most blatant and the most investigated episode, supported by the Chief Minister of the State and the local state apparatuses.

 

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

 

Indian intelligence outfits are well aware of all this and they should not encourage the fantasies of their political leaders. Its best to come out and accept that there are severe problems inside the country. A billion Indians: 80 percent Hindus and 14 percent Muslims. A very large minority that cannot be ethnically cleansed without provoking a wider conflict.

None of this justifies terrorism, but it should, at the very least, force India's rulers to direct their gaze on their own country and the conditions that prevail. Economic disparities are profound. The absurd notion that the trickle-down effects of global capitalism would solve most problems can now be seen for what it always was: a fig leaf to conceal new modes of exploitation.

 

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Broken banks put state back in the driving seat

 

 

By Philip Stephens
Published: November 27 2008 19:19 | Last updated: November 27 2008 19:19

 
We are watching a bonfire of the old orthodoxies as well as of the vanities. This week Barack Obama promised to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars to prop up the sinking US economy. Gordon Brown's British government announced it would soak the rich to pay for an economic rescue package.
In between times, the Bush administration all but nationalised Citigroup, the world's largest bank. For good measure it threw another, yes another, $800bn into the effort to thaw US credit markets. Everywhere you look, Keynes's demand management is replacing Adam Smith's invisible hand; printing money, a mortal sin under the fracturing Washington consensus, is the new prudence.
 
Something big is happening. What started out as a series of pragmatic ad hoc responses by governments and central banks is moving the boundary between state and market. Politicians are now overlaying expediency with ideology. Government is no longer a term of abuse.
Things could move still faster in the months ahead. With their myriad rescue schemes and loan guarantees, the US and British governments have nationalised their respective banking systems in all but name. The banks pretend they are still answerable to their shareholders, but it is a charade. They survive only with the explicit financial guarantee of the state.
 
Still, the markets remain frozen, starving business of the oxygen of credit. Unless things change soon, the politicians will have little choice but to take direct control, and quite possibly, ownership, of the banks. Nationalisation could be the first act of an Obama presidency. That at least would put some substance into all those loose analogies with FDR.
 
Either way, the simple fact that public ownership is viewed as a serious option – and Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, said as much this week – tells you how far we have travelled from the liberal orthodoxies of recent decades. What was hailed as the new financial capitalism is making way for old-fashioned state direction. The politicians, meanwhile, are reclaiming some of the language of that earlier age. Higher taxes on the wealthy are no longer taboo; regulation has been rehabilitated; markets can fail.
 
It seems only yesterday that the onward march of the Anglo-American model of liberal capitalism – small government, fiscal prudence, deregulation, flexible and open markets – set the shape and tempo of the global economy. Some European governments fought a long rearguard action against what one of my French friends calls the hyper-capitalism of the "Anglo-Saxons". But to a greater or lesser degree all made their accommodations.
In the US and Britain, the centre-left learned it could win elections only by accepting the Reagan-Thatcher settlement. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, wrote the requiem for big government.
 
In Britain, Tony Blair, aided and abetted by Mr Brown, built New Labour's electoral success on the promise that it was as much a friend of individual aspiration as of social justice. As proof, it promised never to raise the top rate of income tax from the 40 per cent set by the Thatcher government in the 1980s. As for markets, there was no one more scornful than Mr Brown of the continental European model of a more regulated social market capitalism.
That was then. This week Mr Brown said he intended to raise the top tax rate to 45 per cent. This would be the new dividing line with David Cameron's opposition Conservatives. The measure will raise only a fraction of the revenues needed to staunch the haemorrhaging of the nation's public finances. What matters is the political symbolism: for Mr Brown, fairness now trumps aspiration.
 
Until quite recently, it was possible to say that rescuing the financial system was calculated to save rather than sink liberal capitalism. As after past recessions, the system would survive the shock more or less intact.
To a degree the assumption still holds true. I have yet to see a politician climbing on to a soapbox to proclaim the ideological case for nationalising the banks. Mr Obama has promised a Rooseveltian strategy to rebuild America's infrastructure, but he is careful to talk about active as opposed to big government.
 
The leading members of Mr Obama's economic team were among the most enthusiastic apostles of liberal markets during the Clinton presidency. Main street America did not vote to throw out the capitalist baby with the bankers' bathwater.
Even as he tosses overboard the emblems of New Labour, Mr Brown, too, is wary of suggesting that government should take more control over the lives of ordinary voters. After a spate of bad headlines, Downing Street now insists that higher taxes for the wealthy are an "extraordinary measure for extraordinary times".
 
The caution is understandable. Voters want security against wild-west capitalism. They do not want to be smothered by the state.
For all that, the boundaries have moved. Busts always provoke a backlash. More often than not, all is forgotten in the subsequent upswing. But this time it is more than a bad hangover. The consequences of the crash of 2008 will be felt well beyond the eventual recovery.
 
For one thing, the banks are going to be under state administration, if not ownership, for a very long time. The old capitalism (and by that I mean the variety that until this year we called the "new" capitalism) was predicated on a financial system that created an endless supply of cheap credit. It will take more than a cyclical upturn before politicians again allow banks to manufacture money on such an epic scale.
 
That will demand deep structural adjustments in economies kept afloat on the sea of credit. The US, Britain and the other boom-to-bust economies will find the world no longer willing to finance their domestic housing and borrowing booms. Voters, meanwhile, will absorb the message that it is no longer a self-evident truth that ever more liberal markets deliver painless prosperity.
 
The risk is that the recalibration will go too far: that innovators and entrepreneurs will be put in the stocks with investment bankers; and that fettered markers at home will be accompanied by protectionism abroad. Lest we forget, for all its manifest flaws, a liberal trading system has delivered hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty.
 
The market has lost its magic, but we do not know whether Mr Obama can properly rehabilitate government. So the shape of a new settlement is far from clear. What is certain is that things cannot be as they were.

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A different comment on the Mumbai situation - from a blog

 

I will sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there's more to this attack than meets the eye.
 
It looks like the blasts in Cafe Leopold (a cafe frequented by youth and foriegn nationals), Santacruz (suburbs), Mazagaon (congested dockyard area), Colaba petrol pump (congested street) were diversionary tactics.
 
The CST railway station shootings could well have happened unplanned because of some interupption. There are police checkposts (armed) usually in main railway stations in Mumbai. But am not sure.
 
It seems to me that these terrorists were targeting three main locations - The Hotels Oberoi/Trident and Taj and the Nariman House (office of a jewish organization with Israeli nationals). It is very likely that they chose these because of the international attention this would attract. OR IF THEY WERE TARGETING SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR. This is emphasized by the fact that they were heard yelling "We got a bonus" when Hemant Karkare, the chief of the Anti Terrorist Squad of the Mumbai Police was killed. If he was a bonus, who were they after?
 
This is also borne out by the timing of the attack. They started the entire operation around 10.00 pm local time - when most crowds would have left the congested South Mumbai stations and offices would be deserted. If they wanted to cause "maximum damage", as is the usual strategy of South Asian terrorists, they would have chosen probably around 6.00 pm (that's the time of the day when the 7/11 train blasts occured). It also seems they "fired indiscriminately" to divert attention ,or when they were up against a barrier, or when they were trying to make thier way through inside the hotels.
Even after making their way through, they could still have inflicted "maximum damage" while the hotels and the house were still under their control and the Mumbai police was still fumbling and figuring out what to do.
 
But they weren't obviously out to inflict "maximum damage".
 
I don't know what they had in mind, but they certainly have a target. They have planned this, with enough manpower with experience and expertise, for months. According to Tata Group (owner of the Taj chain of hotels) chairman Ratan Tata, they knew the layout of the Taj Mahal hotel (which even our police don't know - I just heard the chief of operations say that on TV!). They seem thave done their homework very very well, and it is likely that they did at least one or two "dry runs" in preparation. I also think they had access to the guest lists of these hotels or the travel itinerary of some guests. The former is more likely.
 
Will we ever get to know the truth? Given our experience with the Indian and the State Government's post-terror attack activities, it may well end up with some cheap political drama which we're all used to, by now.
 
So far our political leaders have been unconventionally restrained, but in tomorrow's papers, the opposition will fire its first salvo. And the predictable statements will begin.
 
For the sake of my country, my countrymen, I hope someone finally makes some sense out of it.
 

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Faith in India's army shaken by blasts

By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - Investigations into recent bomb blasts in India have led to the arrest of several Hindus and for the first time ever, a serving officer of the Indian army.

The arrests have triggered heated debate on whether the arrests indicate the existence of "Hindu terrorism". More worryingly, the probes point to the possibility of the hitherto secular and apolitical Indian army being infected by the communal virus.

Six people were killed and over 80 injured in blasts on September 29 in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon, about 260 kilometers from Mumbai. A few hours later, a bomb went off near a mosque in Modasa town in Gujarat, where Muslims were offering special Ramadan prayers, killing two people.

Investigations have led to the arrest of about 10 people, including Ajay Rahirkar, Sameer Kulkarni, Rakesh Dhawade (all members of the Hindu extremist organization, the Abhinav Bharat), Dayanand Pandey (a self-styled Hindu "guru") Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur (an "ascetic" who is a member of the Durga Vahini - the women's wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad - and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad - the students' wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party - BJP).

These were not members of fringe, underground outfits but people with links to the BJP and its fraternal organizations. Thakur, for instance, is known to be close to BJP president Rajnath Singh and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan. There are photographs of her with these BJP bigwigs. Investigations are revealing that their activities might have been funded by business houses as well.

Neither Hindu extremism nor the involvement of Sangh Parivar (a group of organizations that espouse Hindutva or Hindu supremacy) activists in acts of terrorism is news. Activists of Bajrang Dal and the VHP have engaged in attacks in the past that should have been described as terrorism. They were not. On several occasions in the past couple of years when bombs went off in mosques and Muslim-dominated areas, in shrines and trains, the needle of suspicion did point in the direction of Hindu terror outfits. But investigations into these blasts never led to the arrest of Hindus.

That has now changed with the investigations into the Malegaon blasts. The hand of Hindu right-wing organizations in terrorist attacks in India has now been laid bare.

But even as Indians are heatedly debating whether "Hindu terrorism" exists, another worrying issue has been thrown up by the investigations. Three men arrested in connection with the Malegaon blasts are from the armed forces. They include one serving officer, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, and two retired officers, Major Ramesh Upadhyay and Colonel Shailesh Raikar.

Thirty-eight-year-old Purohit has the dubious distinction of being the first serving officer of the Indian army to be arrested in connection with a terrorist attack. He has been described as the "mastermind" of the Malegaon blasts. He allegedly procured the explosives (he is said to have provided RDX from the army depot) and funding for the blasts, provided training and co-ordinated the blasts. He is said to have arranged for fake military ID cards providing access for Abhinav Bharat activists to army bases. Purohit is said to have worked several stints in military intelligence. His role in several other terrorist attacks over the past few years, including the February 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express or Friendship Train linking Delhi with Lahore in Pakistan, is now under the scanner.

Upadhyay, the head of the Abhinav Bharat's political wing, was Purohit's link with the organization. He is said to have provided training in bomb-making to the blast suspects. As for Raikar, he is said to have allowed the Abhinav Bharat and other Hindu extremist groups to hold training camps on the campus of the Bhonsala Military School in Nashik of which he was commandant.
Reports in the media suggest that more serving military officers could be detained in the coming days. A senior officer is believed to have had prior knowledge of the Malegaon blasts.

The arrest of serving and retired army officers in connection with terrorist attacks has triggered a spate of worrying questions. Have Hindu supremacist and extremist ideologies penetrated the hitherto secular Indian army? Are Purohit and others an aberration or do they point to a growing trend in the Indian armed forces?

Serving and retired army officers - irrespective of their religious backgrounds - fiercely defend the army's secular credentials. "There is no communalism in the army. In my 37 to 38 years of service, I came across just one or two odd individuals who had a communal mindset," retired Major General Afsir Karim recalled in a recent interview. He drew attention to the fact that Indian army regiments are organized along ethnic lines not based on religion and that in the army you are identified by the regiment to which you belong. "Who are you? I will say I am Kumaon. That's the ethos that prevails in army, even now," he said.

"The terrorism-related activities of three army men cannot be taken to be reflective of the entire armed forces or even of a sizeable section," a serving officer in the Northern Command told Asia Times Online. "Soldiers do practice their faith and visit places of worship but their faith is their personal business. The army allows practice of religion but discourages communal sentiments," he said.

This view is echoed by Maroof Raza, an ex-army officer. While the officers' corps has become more representative of the middle class and therefore more "easily influenced by hardline religious propagandists, right-wing sentiments are certainly never aired," he writes in the newsmagazine Outlook. "Those that fall prey to propaganda of the Sangh Parivar and its jingoistic outfits are still ... few and far between in our uniformed forces. ... To paint, therefore, the entire olive green force with a saffron [the color of the Hindu right-wing organizations] brush is rather unfair."

Indeed, the actions of a fringe should not be seen to be reflective of the institution itself. The army has a long and proud tradition of being a secular and apolitical force. Unlike other armed forces in the region, it has stayed away from assuming a political role and its soldiers are known for their professionalism. And unlike the country's police, who are known to have supported the majority Hindus in communal riot situations, the armed forces have always acted as a neutral force, especially in communally polarized situations. Could the presence of officers with links to Hindu extremist outfits - however few these might be - change this?

There have been instances in the past when soldiers reacted to issues as members of their religious community rather than as Indians. The army's storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 to flush the Sikh holy shrine of terrorists who had set up base there triggered an angry response from a section of Sikh soldiers in the army. Their religious sentiments hurt by the army's destruction of their shrine, some of them mutinied. Some are even said to have joined the ranks of the Sikh militants. But even that serious breakdown of discipline did not have long-term implications for the armed forces.

That seems to have changed in the 1990s. That was the decade which saw India plunged into serious communal polarization, riots and terrorist violence. That was also the decade that saw a spectacular rise in the political fortunes of the BJP. There are any number of examples from the 1998 to 2004 period (when the BJP led the coalition government) of the army being involved in the BJP's political/religious activity. A report in the Outlook points out that in 1999, for instance, the 3rd Division of the army "worked overtime to facilitate the Sindhu yatra, an event that was planned and executed by the Dharma Yatra Sangh, an arm of the VHP".

Not only did the BJP draw the armed forces into its politico-religious activities, but in the years since several retired officers have joined the BJP. The presence of ex-army officers in extremist outfits linked to this party was to be expected.

But what of serving army officers? Armed forces the world over are conservative institutions. Their personnel are drawn to right-wing ideas, however apolitical the army as an institution might be. In India, the BJP's "muscular approach" strikes a chord among a section of the soldiers. The communal and hate politics practiced by politicians in India was bound to have its impact on at least a few soldiers. To expect the armed forces to remain completely impervious to the virus of communal politics is rather unrealistic.

Investigations into the Malegaon blasts have revealed the involvement of a handful of serving and former army officers. But to brush this aside as an aberration would be a blunder.

Criticism of the armed forces' violation of human rights in insurgency-wridden areas and of their corruption has often been frowned on in the country. "It will weaken the morale of the armed forces," is a cry that is raised to silence criticism. In the process, rot has been allowed to set in.

The investigations into the Malegaon blasts reveal that the armed forces are vulnerable to communal and extremist ideologies. To ignore this would be disastrous not just for the armed forces but also for India as a secular democracy.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.