Cracking Abu Salem's network
In 1997 and 2001, the CBI had botched the job in Sharjah. Salem was twice let off for want of evidence. Now, the CBI has zeroed in on only eight of the 54 charges pending against him, for which there's strong evidence.
Two other factors helped in Salem's extradition: liaising by Indian diplomats with the Portuguese authorities; and post-9/11 United Nations resolutions, which mandate states to deny safe havens to those charged with terrorist crimes.
The CBI faces a three-fold challenge: to prosecute Salem diligently; extract as much information as possible about the Dawood Ibrahim gang and other terrorist outfits; and bring as many of them to justice as possible.
To do this, the CBI must exercise the utmost restraint and resist the temptation to make media leaks, which might compromise the trial.
Salem's trial is extremely important. This is the first time that someone accused of a gory terrorist act in India is being tried. Most perpetrators of such acts escape, or are killed by the police in genuine or staged encounters. In either case, little evidence is gathered.
Cracking the conspiracy behind the 1993 bombings, and documenting the links between the concerned individuals' motives, is imperative. This will establish the charge that most recent terrorism in India is attributable to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
Such proof will influence global opinion and strengthen the case for the deportation of other terrorist-criminals like Dawood Ibrahim.
It will also establish the way in which the vicious cycle of violence-counter-violence operates, in which communal acts provoke revenge or backlash. This can help us understand how to combat terrorism effectively, without using draconian means, which violate human rights.
All terrorism involves the killing of innocent civilians for political ends. It must be condemned without ifs and buts. Terrorism violates the sacrosanct principle of non-combatant immunity. Neither governments nor combat groups have any business to do so. India has lost thousands of lives to terrorism. So we shouldn't be lackadaisical about bringing the culprits to book.
However, we must also ask, without ever justifying violence, who or what breeds terrorism and the conditions under it evokes some support from aggrieved groups.
Abu Salem, Chhota Rajan, and Dawood Ibrahim didn't fall out of thin air. They were petty criminals, to start with, but got transformed into gangsters, mafia dons with interests in real estate, films, cable-TV and extortion rackets, and eventually became supporters of religio-political terrorism.
Three factors explain this metamorphosis. First, the criminalisation since the 1970s of entire industries in Mumbai such as Bollywood and construction. With Nariman Point, real estate prices skyrocketed, and black money flooded construction.
Builders carried cheating to new heights, exceeding the sanctioned construction area by 35 percent. This inevitably involved collusion with politicians and the police, undermining their integrity.
The film industry has always run on a cash-only basis. But with big-budget films like Sholay, the volumes of money increased phenomenally. Failures meant huge debts, to collect which financiers hired big-time gangsters.
Another new element was the infusion of heroin into illicit commerce through Afghanistan-Pakistan. This expanded black money -- and mafia power.
This new mafia put into the shade earlier big-timers like Haji Mastan, Ratan Khatri, and Karim Lala, who indulged in victimless crimes. Its clout grew dramatically as builders used its muscle power to grab prime land by evicting poor chawl and jhuggi residents. The mafia became a huge crime conglomerate.
A second factor operative since the early 1980s was violence in labour-management disputes attributable to the pro-employer Bharatiya Kamgar Sena. The Shiv Sena itself was created as an anti-union force by industry 40 years ago, with a "sons-of-the-soil" agenda.
To combat workers' struggles -- e.g. the textile strike of 1982-85 -- employers used a combination of the mafia and the Sena. The combination's importance rose as Mumbai's textile mills closed down -- giving builders new business opportunities.
An even more important third factor was communal politics symbolised by the anti-Babri movement in the mid-1980s. This mobilised nativistic hatred and primordial chauvinism. It also provoked vicious reactions.
Muslim members of the mafia were caught in this vortex -- partly as Muslims, and partly because they had become vulnerable to Islamic-extremist influences like the ISI's.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. What gave a decisive turn to this was the December 1992 Babri demolition and the subsequent butchery of Muslims by the Sena in Bombay and Gujarat.
Mr Bal Thackerary directed this violence on a daily basis through his Saamna editorials. As Muslims were burned alive, speared and raped, the government watched. The Army was deployed, but not ordered to act firmly. The anti-Muslim pogrom provoked hatred, revenge, and retribution.
It's in this super-charged atmosphere that the March 1993 bombings happened. They were followed by a campaign of Muslim harassment. The detention of hundreds of innocents under the draconian TADA created an Islamic politics of revenge -- the obverse of the BJP-Sena's politics.
The explosions were calculated to produce an anti-Muslim backlash. So no agency with real concern for Muslims could have perpetrated them.
Meanwhile, the Bombay police was penetrated so deep by the mafia that the CBI kept it in the dark about Salem's arrival last week. This is a frightening comment on what used to be one of India's finest forces.
Abu Salem was a relatively junior functionary of the Dawood gang in 1993, but is believed to have valuable information about its activities, contacts and links with the police.
His interrogation, and cross-corroboration of evidence, could generate invaluable clues and insights. These must be used to analyse the functioning of terrorist networks, punish their leaders, and address terrorism's root-causes.
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