The Threat from the Sky

ON A SABBATH NIGHT IN April 1979, four Pales­tinian terrorists took a rubber boat from Lebanon and landed in the seaside Israeli town of Nahariya. They made their way to Smadar Haran’s house where she lived with her husband and two children. As they entered, Haran got a whiff of it and hid with her daugh­ter, two-year-old Yael, in a little space above their bedroom. Her husband and another daughter, Einat (four), were grabbed by the men and taken to the beach. They shot the husband first and then one of them placed Einat on a rock and smashed her head with a rifle. Haran kept her hand over Yael’s mouth so that she would not make any sound; outside, the terrorists, suspecting that there were more people, kept looking.

Once it was over, Haran came out with Yael, but realised that she had ended up smothering her child.

More than 20 years later, the American journalist Richard Ben Cramer went to meet Haran who had remarried since but still lived on the same beach. As Cramer sat with her at her kitchen table, her new husband, Yaacov, a psychologist, hovered around. At one point, he intervened as Cramer and Haran were talking and asked the former a question: “Do you think it is possible that we [Jews] are unconditionally hated?” Cramer responded but Yaacov brushed it aside and broke into another monologue. He said that to Hitler Jews were the appetiser. “We are still the appetiser—now for radical Islam,” he said.

Let us keep aside what Israel has done to the Palestinian people and whether history is on the side of the Israelis or the Palestin­ians. But what Yaacov told Cramer that day on a kitchen table is ominously true for India. The country will continue to be a battle­ground for radical Islamists. India has already witnessed what people who get off boats to kill (Mumbai) can do. Even if we ignore how the global Islamist jihad in many ways works as a monolith, they also learn from each other. “From turning stone-pelting into a weapon to building tunnels, the Islamist radical groups have drawn inspiration from the Palestinian groups,” says Lt General (retired) Satish Dua, who was General Officer Commanding of the Indian Army’s Corps 15, responsible for military operations in Kashmir Valley. Dua says the other lesson India must take from the recent at­tack on Israel is to never get complacent about security. “In Kashmir, after the abrogation of Article 370 [in 2019], things got better. Schools are running, tourists are coming, and we have a robust security grid in the hinterland. But we really have to keep our guard up,” he says.

There is clarity now on how Hamas diverted Israel’s attention towards the West Bank and how in the last few years it had laid low, deluding the Israeli government into thinking it wasn’t inter­ested in any new confrontation. That myth was shattered when its armed terrorists attacked Jewish settlements, resulting in the death of 1,400 Israelis.

“If you see, currently, there seems to be a lot of calm in India as far as Islamist organisations are concerned,” says Sushant Sareen, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, “but we have enough evidence in the past that calm does not mean terrorist organisations are not working, they are not preparing.”

Sareen points out that even Hamas could not anticipate that its attack would result in so many casualties. That is something the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed also did not anticipate when it orchestrated the Pulwama suicide attack in 2019. It was revealed during the investigation that the casualty figures in the attack had surprised Jaish. It forced India to retaliate with air strikes on a Jaish training camp in Balakot. “It has acted as deterrence. But how much deterrence is deterrence really if we go by the Israeli example?” Sareen asks.

Experts point at how Israel was distracted by internal politics that Hamas took advantage of. Former director-general of the Bor­der Security Force (BSF), Prakash Singh, says Pakistan-based terror groups could take advantage of political bedlam in India, especially during large events like the upcoming General Election, to carry out a sensational attack. Dua agrees. “Like the Jewish settlements next to the fence in Gaza, we have minority [Hindu] pockets along the Line of Control (LoC) in places like Rajouri and Poonch,” he says.

On October 5, during the third anti-terror conference organised by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Union Home Minister Amit Shah urged states to adopt a “ruthless” approach towards ter­rorism. However, Singh says calling the response to terrorism ‘ruth­less’ is not appropriate. “Look at how countries like the US, the UK and France have codified their response. So, in the event of a terrorist attack, there are guidelines that will be followed in the order of how they have been laid down,” he says. This lack of a blueprint leads to a failure in command that delays response and leads to chaos like the way it happened during the 2008 Mumbai terror attack. The same was repeated during the 2016 terrorist attack on the Pathankot Air Force station. “Our response to terror attacks must remain the same, irrespective of which government is in power,” says Singh.

In the last few years, drones have become a big threat, considering their increased use along the International Border (IB) for dropping weapons and drugs deep into Indian territory. Not only that, two years ago, in June 2021, two explosive-laden drones hit the technical area of the Air Force station in Jammu, 14 km from the border, causing minor damage. It revealed the extent of what terrorist groups could achieve with the new technology. Last year, BSF reported sightings of 268 drones along the border, a 100 per cent increase compared to the previous year. In April and May this year, in a terror attack in Poonch that killed 10 Army personnel, it is believed that the weapons were dropped by a drone. In the last few years, Pakistan has heavily invested in drones that it procures from friendly countries like Turkey and China. It has already used them in active military operations. The way drones were used by Azerbaijan against Armenia, tilting the outcome, is well known. This is a shortfall India is yet to address properly. “It is shameful that even a country like Turkey is so far ahead of us. We should have been thinking about such technology, but somehow, we haven’t,” says Prakash Singh.

In the Hamas attack, paragliders were used, taking the world by surprise. But as early as 2010, Indian intelligence agencies had warned about Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) experimenting with paraglid­ers. Intelligence agencies found that it had procured about 50 such gliders from Europe. It prompted the government that year to turn the Delhi’s VIP area into a no-fly zone ahead of Republic Day. This was later confirmed by a terrorist operative, Sayed Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, one of the handlers of the terrorists who carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008. In 2012, Ansari, who is originally from Maharashtra’s Beed district, was deported from Saudi Arabia. He told interrogators that in 2010 he had visited LeT’s command centre, codenamed ‘Jumbo Jet Room’. It was first set up in Muzaffar­abad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), but after the Mumbai at­tack, was shifted to a bungalow in eastern Karachi. Ansari revealed that he had seen around 150 boxes of sealed parachutes that Lashkar commanders told him would be used for attacks on Indian cities.

It has not happened so far, but with paragliders becoming the new symbol of ‘Islamic resistance’, experts say the possibility of their use in attacks is now greater than ever. Are we prepared? “We cannot rush the National Security Guard (NSG) everywhere. Our first line of response has to be the police,” says Prakash Singh. That, he cautions, is problematic because there have only been what he calls “cosmetic improvements”. “You go to a thana, any thana, and you will realise that the police force has become hollow from in­side,” he says. Singh points out that the police have been used by governments to meet their political agenda. In the absence of any real change, real reforms, the police will never be equipped to deal with something as dangerous as a terrorist attack.

That sounds ominous for a country that is not only an appetiser but also the main course for jihad.

Abu JundalHamasLashkar-e-ToibaParaglidersSmadar Haran’s houseterrorism