Terror vs Knowledge
By Balbir K. Punj

"Most of the Christian men had degrees that decorated their walls, but all the degrees in the world cannot defend you when an enemy is facing you with a gun, wanting to kill you by what your enemy believes is an order from God."

Ms Brigitte Gabriel, a survivor of the jihad against Lebanese Christians, and a Middle East expert, in a FrontPage magazine interview on August 11, 2005

India’s proud contentment about its "knowledge base" is the real casualty in the murderous jihadi strike on Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore. In it one discerns the echo of Will Durant’s ruing about Islamic invasion of India: "...Civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown from without and multiplying from within…" (Our Oriental Heritage, p. 459).

From the analysis of the modus operandi, the attack on IISc appears to be a fidayeen attack. The assailants escaped only because there were no security personnel to engage them in gunfire. The choice of the venue and victims is tellingly symbolic. Though the attack was not directed against any nuclear scientist, Gerald Bull-kind of "supergun inventor" or space scientist in particular, nonetheless, it should be construed as an attack on the scientific community. These cerebral assets of India are what Pakistan envies. India’s IITs, which are also reportedly under jihadi threat on the line of the IISc, have no counterparts outside the West, at least nowhere in the Islamic world.

The attack also presages how jihad is getting networked in India’s IT-capital Bangalore in particular, and southern India in general. Cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad in Deccan, like Pune in the west and Gurgaon in the north, have emerged as service sector dynamos especially for IT-BPOs. These have helped reshape India’s image and self-image in the last one decade. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, during his recent visit to India, announced a $500 million investment for Bangalore; Cisco plans to invest $800 million, and Intel another $750 million in the second phase of its investment. Bangalore and Hyderabad have 2,000 plus IT firms which generate huge revenue through outsourcing or end-to-end solutions. These are projected as the shinning face of 21st century India. Thomas Friedman incorporates this BPO-phenomenon in his latest book, The World is Flat.

To neutralise India’s techno-economical forte in this era of globalisation, is the Pakistan-based jihadis’ immediate agenda. General Pervez Musharraf is trying to build an international quality IT-sector with the back-up support of China. His envy of Indian BPOs was unmistakable when sometime back, he claimed that Pakistan could become a better BPO hub because "Pakistanis speak better English than Indians." And one destructive way to scare off international investment from India is to wage a proxy war against its IT sector.

Bangalore could have been a trailblazer to its IT rival Hyderabad. The Hyderabad police, on the morrow of Christmas, arrested a Hizbul Mujahideen operative, Mujeeb Ahmad, who spilled the beans on plans of terrorism. Mujeeb and his gang could have spelt mayhem by attacking the Indian Science Congress, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, or the AICC plenary session scheduled for January in Hyderabad. Mujeeb was arrested in Hyderabad following a tip-off by the Rajasthan police which detained a fellow Hizb terrorist, Shabbir Ahmed, with three AK-47 rifles, 15 detonators, and 299 live cartridges in Ajmer. Shabbir had brought these weapons, destined for Hyderabad, from Kashmir in a truck.

Are our Infosys’, Wipros, Sifys, and HCLs under threat of terrorist attack? Mounting evidence should warn us that Bangalore and Hyderabad are on the terrorist radar. Documents seized from three Lashkar-e-Tayyaba activists shot dead in southwest Delhi on March 5 last had divulged elaborate plans of multiple suicide attacks on Bangalore software firms, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. A while ago, a Lashkar network which had done a reconnaissance at IISc and various IITs, was unearthed in Srinagar.

In July, an AMU-educated engineer who worked with HAL, was arrested. Maps of HAL facilities in Kanpur and Bangalore were recovered from him. A few days ago, the special cell of the Delhi police arrested three operatives of Harkat-ul-Jihad, the Bangladeshi counterpart of Pakistani Jaish-e-Mohammed, in connection with a blast in the Special Task Force office in Hyderabad on October 12 last. The police came to know that they were planning to attack the DIG office, the Hi-Tech city, markets and bus stands in Hyderabad as well as the residence of Indra Sen, former MLA from BJP. The unsavoury aspect of their revelation, by no means a best kept secret, is that Bangladesh is emerging as a mega-base for Islamic terrorism on the subcontinent under the supervision of Pakistani Army generals. Bangladesh is acting as a jihad BPO; and it’s bad news for India that they have a large recruiting base.

This article will appear on the other side of New Year Day that might appear decisive for Bangalore. At the time of writing this article, the local media in Bangalore received a fax saying three explosions at Grand Ashok Hotel and two suicide bombings directed at chief minister Dharam Singh would usher in 2006. The fax-sender identified himself as Moinuddin and claimed that six Al Jihadi ultras were already in Bangalore, and demanded that everybody from Grand Ashok and Chief Minister House be evacuated.

I earnestly hope it would turn out to be a hoax like the email on Parliament and US consulate bomb on December 17. The Parliament e-mail sent from insallah@sify.com in the name of Al Qaeda could be traced to Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu, a hotbed of Al Ummah, associated with the Coimbatore blasts in February, 1998 in which L.K. Advani had a providential escape. These indicate that jihad has come to roost in southern India also. Dharam Singh’s act of getting a "communal" Uma Bharti arrested in the Hubli flag hoisting case seems to make him no less a kafir to Islamic extremists.

Thus, there is no southern comfort to derive from the proliferation of jihadi sleeper cells. The long shadow of Pakistan-Bangladesh Islamic nexus encompasses India’s South also. The exercise is part of the revival of Islamic Caliphate advocated by Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad against Crusaders and Jewish People. India remains the only "kafiresque" obstacle between the Islamic lands from Morocco and Indonesia.

Resuscitation of the Caliphate about which we read in history books — abolished after World War I — might appear incredulous to many (I am sure most young Indians don’t know what a Caliphate is), but is a recurrent theme in contemporary Islam. To the youth of this country, the BPO-IT generation, I beseech, to read the golden words of Brigitte Gabriel that have been quoted above. The BPOs, the IT sector might be the new policy statement of a globalised economy, and career choice for young people. But their swanky mobiles, trendy laptops, lucrative pay packages will not provide defence against jihad. In the 21st century, it has become as mandatory to understand jihad as much to learn to operate your computers. The West, which they try to emulate in glitzy malls, IT parks, PVRs, also erroneously thought that jihad had become an anachronism. When the techno-economic might of America came crashing down on 9/11, they realised the truth to be otherwise.