India Terror Arrests Shock Nation

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From 'TIME': Having suffered a dozen lethal terror attacks this year, Indians have almost stopped reacting to terror incidents with shock and horror. But recent news of the arrest of 10 people linked with two relatively small terror attacks earlier this year has created a national furor, and is likely to skew political parties' calculations ahead of next year's general elections.

The arrests by the Anti-Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra police have shocked India for two reasons. The nine accused are all Hindu right-wingers, confirming, for the first time, suspicions raised by political and security analysts that the Hindu extremist fringe has been organizing for terror attacks. Second, among the accused are a serving lieutenant colonel and a retired major of the army, an institution so far considered impervious to communal elements.

For years, Indian security and investigation agencies have had a trite, almost comically knee-jerk explanation for terror attacks — they have been blamed on Islamist fundamentalists aided by "foreign elements," meaning mostly Pakistan and China. Even where the majority of victims have been Muslims — such as the May 2007 blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, the attack on an Indo-Pak train in February 2007 and the April 2006 twin blasts at New Delhi's Jama Masjid — the first murmurs of suspicion have named Islamist groups. Investigation trails in these cases have led nowhere, yet no one has dared ask if non-Muslims, or more specifically, Hindu fundamentalists, could be responsible. The recent arrests point to either the security forces' inefficiency, or an implicit anti-Muslim bias, or both.

The 10 people arrested by the Maharashtra police have been charged with murder and conspiracy in a bomb blast during the month of Ramadan. The blast at a hotel near a mosque killed four people in Malegaon city near Mumbai. Among the accused is a Hindu nun with links to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its various sister organizations. The investigation is already uncovering a seemingly larger network of Hindu extremist activity in western India's urban centers of Nagpur, Indore and Pune that could help unravel unsolved terror strikes. "Let us not forget history," says political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan. "Mahatma Gandhi's assassin was a Hindu extremist."

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