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They were revenge killings, said the police and district officials. They presented the deadly street battle as the result of personal enmity between two groups, but no one was fooled. The Wahabbi takeover of the Islamic community in the southern district has been obvious and menacing. The district has roadway connections to nearby Kerala -- which obtained a notorious new image with Frederick Forsythe's bestseller "Afghan," from tourist hotspot to hotbed of terrorism.
One need not read "Afghan" to know of the dark metamorphosis of Kerala. The families of the more than 60 victims of the 1998 Coimbatore bomb blast can testify to the Kerala jihadi connection. In a telling interview available on YouTube the father of a 15-year-old boy tearfully describes his only son's death in the bombing. As compensation for the loss, the father was given the post of attendant at a government hospital. This became an inhuman ordeal when he was told to look after Abdul Nasser Madhani, one of the accused in the bomb blast case.
This father -- no saint or philosopher but an ordinary man on the street -- exhibited extraordinary forbearance in caring for Madhani. At the end of the day he showed Madhani a photo of his dead son. The father says that Madhani admitted he had arranged for the explosives. (See the Tamil interview at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=VzHbyvejy0I). "I did not take revenge on him but I believe the judiciary will give us justice by giving him the death sentence," the father says.
On Aug.1 Madhani, for whom both the ruling regime of Tamil Nadu and the Kerala Marxist regime have a soft spot, was cleared of all charges, even though the High Court and Supreme Court had found the evidence strong enough to deny him bail while he awaited trial for the past nine years.
In a curious paradox, even during his long stay in jail he was often out of jail, with the local government arranging at taxpayers' expense expensive massages for Madhani, with 10 masseurs and four senior doctors costing almost Indian Rs 50,000 (US$1,200). Even while he was in jail police suspected his gang of planning acts of terrorism. For example, in 1999 police unearthed a plot to kill the Kerala chief minister. The police suspected the hand of Madhani's People's Democratic Party in that plot.
That Madhani remained active and uncontained by jail bars became evident when Thomas P. Joseph, a sitting judge investigating a massacre of Hindus in Kerala in 2003, sought a meeting with Madhani -- in Coimbatore jail -- to discuss his organization's involvement in the cold-blooded massacre of Hindu fishermen on Kerala beaches by Islamic fundamentalists.
Now that such a man is free -- thanks to friendly gestures by the governments of two southern states that span almost the complete coast of India -- the Wahabbi terrorist outfits are jubilant. The results may be seen in the once peaceful streets of Tamil Nadu. The streets today are calm -- a deadly calm mixed with fear and terror.
The current cycle of violence in Tamil Nadu is not completely unexpected. As early as August 2006 the "Indian Express" quoted unnamed police officials predicting trouble. It reported that the state government had ordered cases to be dropped against 12 Muslim fundamentalists, all followers of Kichaan Buhari, an al-Umma sympathizer accused in the Coimbatore serial blasts. The report said that senior policemen in Thirunelveli were shocked by the government's "blatant sympathy" for the Muslim fundamentalists.
The fears of the police were prophetic. Soon there were attacks on Hindu leaders and also on liberal Muslims. There were Taliban-style public executions of Muslim women who did not wear a veil or adhere to Muslim rules of dress and behavior. The Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam -- one of the organizations proscribed by the Interior Ministry from receiving funds from abroad and the darling of the state government -- went on record demanding that the medieval law of stoning women to death be implemented in modern secular India.
To understand why the state government gives in to Islamic fundamentalists, one has to understand the psyche of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party, which adheres to the pseudo-scientific colonial idea of race theories and conspiracy theories. In the ideological view of the DMK -- often camouflaged under the rhetoric of social justice -- Hinduism is nothing but a Brahminical conspiracy to subjugate the native dark-skinned Dravidians, as the Brahmins themselves are descendents of barbaric Aryan invaders. Thus Hinduism in the view of the DMK is nothing but a 3,000-year-old conspiracy.
This racist view and pathological hatred of Brahmins are an inverted image of the Nazi vision of Aryan supremacy and the hatred of Jews. The present DMK leader has an exceptionally vehement hatred for Hinduism -- he openly declared at a public function that Hindus are thieves. Every time the DMK comes to power -- by dividing society along caste lines and riding the anti-incumbency wave -- Tamil Nadu becomes a haven for jihadi elements. The last time the DMK was in power it literally let the bomb blast happen at Coimbatore, despite frequent warnings from the intelligence bureau.
There are ominous signals. On the eve of New Year's celebrations, New Delhi police foiled an attempt by jihadis to bomb the festivities. The terrorists were planning to leave for Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Subsequent investigations proved they had been operating from a base in Madras and establishing overseas contacts. Just months before, a suspected terrorist of Pakistani origin arrested in Karnataka was discovered to have obtained his fake driver's license in Madras. Investigations revealed that he and another Pakistani terrorist were planning to establish a base in Kerala for money transfer operations. Again arms trafficking between Kerala, Tamil Nadu and overseas was accidentally uncovered by police this year. There has been a spurt of these accidental discoveries. For example, in January this year freshly minted assault weapons numbering above 150 were discovered accidentally in a parcel addressed to an Islamic fundamentalist. Further interrogation revealed a base where a police raid recovered another 150 weapons.
Navy officials, during a chance inspection of a shipment of furniture cartons to Kerala on a Pakistan-bound ship from Dubai, discovered assault rifles and Holy Koran books. Indian Navy Admiral Sureesh Mehta, addressing the closing session of an international seminar on maritime trade and security in the Kerala port city of Cochin, said this was just the "tip of the iceberg as far as these nefarious activities are concerned."
These isolated events surfacing in the twin states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu are indicators of a larger picture. It is a picture of jihadi terrorism fueled by Wahabbism spreading its menacing tentacles into the relatively calm southern states of India. The politically motivated release of terror-linked masterminds like Madhani is a betrayal of the very people the system is supposed to protect. The arrival of arms, the setting up of money transfer bases and the release of the kingpin of Kerala jihad, Madhani -- it all fits together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now the southern district of Thirunelveli -- where Islamic fundamentalists are setting up not just a base but practically a parallel government -- is logistically linked with Kerala via Thenkasi, where the gruesome murders took place.
There is no room for chance as these dark steps are being taken. Unfortunately, these two crucial states -- targeted by jihadi terrorists for strategic reasons -- are ruled by political leaders who lack the moral and political will to protect their own people against the forces of terror, with whom they have entered into the contract of vote-bank politics.
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
