NEW DELHI -- Given the grim levels of violence to which Indians have become accustomed in recent years, the Sept. 19 attack on tourists at New Delhi's historic Jama Masjid mosque was almost trivial. Two men riding on a motorcycle fired from a 9-millimeter automatic weapon, injuring two journalists from Taiwan, before disappearing into the alleys around the mosque. Minutes later, a bomb went off inside a car parked nearby -- but fizzled because of errors in its fabrication.
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In a letter emailed to newsrooms an hour after the assault -- the latest in a series of similar warnings released to the media -- an organization called the Indian Mujahideen took credit, casting the attack as retaliation for the killings of protesters by police in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. The letter castigates the international community for "lending outright support for Indian idol-worshippers' massacres of the innocent people."
"We will now rightfully play Holi with your blood," it warns Indians, referring to a Hindu spring festival during which revelers throw colored powder and water on one other.
The Jama Masjid attack was a far cry from the sophisticated November 2008 massacre in Mumbai, but it suggests that India's jihadi movement can no longer be ignored. It also demonstrates the durability of the Indian Mujahideen, whose bombings claimed hundreds of lives between 2005 and 2008, and raises the prospect that it is regrouping. In their email, the militants threatened to disrupt the Commonwealth Games, scheduled for next month in New Delhi. India's various failings in planning for the high-profile sporting event have garnered all the headlines, but a larger, more successful attack -- if demonstrated to have been carried out by a terrorist group linked to Pakistani jihadi groups -- could spark a regional crisis between two nuclear powers.
Much of the Indian Mujahideen's leadership is drawn from the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) -- a banned Islamist student group founded in 1977 by Jamaat-e-Islami, India's largest Islamist political party. From the outset, SIMI made clear its belief that the practice of Islam would remain incomplete until a caliphate was established. SIMI's strident Islamism soon led the Jamaat to distance itself from the organization.
SIMI appealed to an emerging class of educated, middle-class urban men who felt economically marginalized and politically disenfranchised by anti-Muslim chauvinism in India. By 2001, when the group was outlawed, SIMI boasted more than 400 ansar, or full-time workers, and 20,000 ikhwan, or volunteers. As scholar Yoginder Sikand has noted, the organization provided "its supporters a sense of power and agency which they were denied in their actual lives."
After December 1992, when Hindu extremists smashed a mosque in northern India, SIMI's polemics became increasingly bitter. In a 1996 statement, SIMI called on Muslims to follow the path of the 11th-century warlord Mahmood Ghaznavi and avenge the destruction of mosques in India. At SIMI's 1999 convention, the language was inflammatory. "Islam is our nation, not India," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad -- one of several SIMI-linked operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani jihadi group, who was arrested in 2005 for smuggling in military-grade explosives and assault rifles for a planned strike in the state of Gujarat.
The idea of the Indian Mujahideen was born, as it were, over tea and biscuits, at weekend SIMI meetings in Mumbai attended by three of the network's key organizers: Sadiq Israr Sheikh, Abdul Subhan Qureshi, and Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri. The three men, frustrated by SIMI's failure to turn its ideological position into a concrete program of action, turned to organized crime networks within India, and through them Lashkar-e-Taiba, to set up the Indian Mujahideen.
Born in 1978 to working-class parents from the North Indian town of Azamgarh, Sheikh had grown up in the Cheeta Camp housing project in Mumbai. His parents had a troubled relationship, and the family struggled to survive; still, he made his way through middle school and became certified as an air-conditioning mechanic. But Sheikh never found a regular job, and he felt cheated of a share in the economic opportunities emerging around him.
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