New Delhi: The 10 November Red Fort blast has reminded Delhi of an era it thought it had finally come out of — a time in the 2000s when every siren carried the fear of terror.
The perpetrators have been traced to Kashmir. The Modi government, over the past decade, has repeatedly claimed that all is well in Kashmir and that a new era has begun after the abrogation of Article 370.
Nearly 3,000 kg of explosives and other ammunition, stockpiled over the last 18 months, were seized by the police. The J&K’s Nowgam police picked up on a series of Jaish-e-Mohammed-linked posters that had suddenly surfaced on Srinagar’s outskirts, a sight that hasn’t been uncommon in the valley since Article 370 was revoked.
For the security agencies, this is just the beginning of a long and deep investigation that also requires them to examine the communication lapses. The Delhi blast comes barely seven months after the Pahalgam attack, upending the relative calm India experienced over the past decade. Terror has returned with a fresh wrinkle—this time, it is made of an interstate network involving white-collar perpetrators. And this is why the Delhi blast is ThePrint’s newsmaker of the week.
Unanswered questions
It was an impressive operation by the Jammu and Kashmir police to thwart a bigger tragedy. But Dr Umar Un Nabi, who allegedly organised the blast, did slip through. Not just from their hands but also from their Haryana and Delhi counterparts.
Chatter in the security circles says that Delhi Police’s Special Cell, an anti-terror unit, barely had any idea about the possible movement of a terror suspect who had already slipped past J&K and Haryana units. Or if they were informed, then it raises a far more uncomfortable question — how did he enter Delhi, and roam around the city as if no one had the remotest clue about his identity?
Investigators had the name of Dr Umar Un Nabi, the man who allegedly drove the explosive-laden i20 near the Red Fort metro station before blowing it up, intelligence sources told ThePrint. Yet the accused managed to switch off his phone, plunging the investigation into darkness.
Many, including senior journalist and commentator Vir Sanghvi, have expressed their frustration.
“I know that it has become the Indian way of responding to every incident of terrorism, but I am getting increasingly tired of the chorus of ‘Intelligence Failure’ that follows each bomb blast,” he wrote in a column for ThePrint.
The second question: where was Nabi hiding since the arrest of his friend Dr Muzammil Shakeel on 31 October? Did it take too long to break Shakeel, a resident of Koli in Pulwama?
While initially there was some confusion about when Shakeel was arrested and if his arrest followed Dr Adil Rather’s, also from Kashmir, who worked at a UP hospital, Faridabad Police has repeatedly said that the former was arrested first. This is significant because it was in Shakeel’s rented accommodations that the explosives were found during the 8 November raid.
There are many more questions, like how and when Nabi loaded the car with explosives.
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Red line breached
Investigators have now detained several individuals, including doctors, to get to the roots of the Delhi blast, and early findings point fingers at Pakistan. The module was allegedly acting on the instructions of a Pakistan-based handler, the probe has suggested so far.
Senior journalist Praveen Swami, who has tracked national security for decades, said in a Cut the Clutter episode with Shekhar Gupta that in the meetings between NSA Ajit Doval and his Pakistani counterpart in 2015, both sides had reportedly agreed on a ‘red line’. The Red Fort blast marks a clear rupture of that understanding.
Perhaps even security agencies did not anticipate that this “white-collar” terror module with doctors from Kashmir would dare conceive something so sinister in Delhi-NCR. India did teach JeM a lesson through Operation Sindoor in May this year, and there were threats of retaliation. Now it is revealing itself.
A Kashmir-centric network, coupled with renewed push from Pakistan-based terror groups, has finally spilled over. And once the red line has been breached, the fear is that it may not hold again.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)