Home-grown Militants Are Prime Suspects

The Mumbai attacks are unique in the history of recent violent militancy, Islamist or otherwise. As Indian security agencies race to work out who was behind them they will be negotiating a maze of conflicting clues.

On the face of it, the perpetrators seem obvious enough. A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed the operation. The name indicates a local group - the Deccan is the central Indian plateau - and a probable link to the Indian Mujahideen who started a bloody bombing campaign a year ago.

It is this group, too, that threatened the people of Mumbai with "deadly attacks" two months ago and have credibly claimed responsibility for the series of attacks in recent months.

Their texts are full of references to early Islamic history and key thinkers who are characteristic of modern Jihadi ideology. In the local version of the global Islamist militant discourse, the Crusader-Zionist alliance has been expanded to become the Hindu-Crusader-Zionist alliance.

Most analysts believe the Deccan Mujahideen are a loose and fragmented movement of Indian Muslims, often young and well-educated. That such a movement has formed among India's 150 million-strong largely law-abiding and moderate Muslim population seems almost inevitable given the similar phenomenon seen from Indonesia to Morocco.

If there is a link to al-Qaida it seems likely that it would be ideological rather than organizational, though this will take some time to become clear.

Certainly, the style of the attack - more a mass guerrilla assault on a series of soft targets in a major city than the standard spectacular and suicidal blasts that we have come to associate with strikes linked closely to the al-Qaida hardcore - seems to indicate a group that was at best an affiliate of Osama bin Laden's organisation.

Hotels have frequently been a target, but the use of boats - the attackers used inflatable dinghies to arrive in Mumbai - is rare. An exception was the strike on the American warship the USS Cole in 2000.

Hostage-taking, too, is not a usual feature of core al-Qaida attacks nor the targeting of theatres. The mass assault has been seen before, in Saudi Arabia in 2004, but the guns and grenade style is more reminiscent of operations of militant groups in Kashmir (and elsewhere in India) or more recently in Afghanistan. Tourism has also been targeted elsewhere, notably in Indonesia and in Egypt.

Putting together this jumble of tactics and the targeting of an Orthodox Jewish centre and the apparent singling out of UK and US citizens would seem to indicate a home-grown local Indian Islamic militant outfit, though with al-Qaida's continual evolution it is difficult to be sure.

New Delhi reflexively blames Islamabad for any such activism - perhaps with good reason following its experience in Kashmir during the 1990s. Indian diplomatic sources yesterday spoke of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammedi, both based in the Pakistani province of Punjab, as potential suspects.

One source recalled the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July, an attack which both US and Indian officials linked to Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan militant chief with a longstanding relationship with Islamabad's spy agencies.

The Kabul attack, the raid on the Indian parliament in 2001, the Pakistan-provoked war in Kargil in 1999 and the Mumbai atrocity occurred during periods of relative detente between the neighbors.

One hint to the inspiration of the attackers is a theological point. Whereas in the Middle East suicide attacks tend to imply certain death of the participants, in Kashmir militants see themselves as fedayeen: those who risk death but do not kill themselves, which could be seen as attempting to usurp God's will. The Mumbai attackers seem to fall into the latter category.

The "external links" mentioned by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, could mean Pakistan or al-Qaida, a no doubt intentional ambiguity.

Over the last 10 years nations have repeatedly looked to external bogeymen to explain appalling attacks on their own soil, thus avoiding difficult and painful introspection.

Even if it there is some involvement of an element, rogue or otherwise of the Pakistani security establishment, autonomous Pakistani jihadi groups or a more direct link to al-Qaida, it will have been alienated and angry young Indian Muslims who heeded the call. But for the moment, the investigation has barely started.

Who could have done it?

Deccan MujahideenSix hours after the attack, Indian media received an email from this unknown group, claiming responsibility. Experts are sceptical. An Indian news channel reported the email's sender was traced to Russia.

Indian MujahideenRecent bomb attacks on cities including Ahmedabad and Delhi were thought to be this group's work. But analysts believe the IM does not have the resources to conduct the Mumbai operation alone.

Crime syndicatesMumbai's most notorious crime boss, Dawood Ibrahim, has been accused of masterminding the March 1993 blasts in Mumbai. At that time he lived in Dubai, but later moved to Karachi. Indian intelligence alleges he is holed up in the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan.

Pakistani terror groupsAl-Qaida-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba has been active in fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir since 1993. In the past, LeT was alleged to have close links with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But from what is known so far, few believe Pakistan played a role in the Mumbai attacks.Maseeh Rahman