They buried Syed Abdul Karim’s hand in a shallow grave under an Acacia tree on the highway outside Rajasthan’s Tonk: The pot-bellied carpenter’s demonstration of his new, easy-to-produce muzzle-loading gun had ended in disaster. From then on, Karim would be known to the small army of jihadists he tried to raise, as well as intelligence officers hunting him down, by the derogatory nickname ‘Tunda’, or ‘Cripple’. Karim hoped to unleash fire and blood across India; but lacked both the means and the men to do it.
Earlier this week, millions of Indians celebrated the opening of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. This is the forgotten story of the men who hoped to use fire and blood to stop it from ever being built, assembled from legal and intelligence records that ThePrint has obtained, as well as interviews with officers who investigated the cases.
Eighty-three-year-old Karim had given up on his jihadist project long before the temple began being built. In 2005, he married a new teenage wife and began running a seminary for small children in Karachi, the Mahadud Taaleem ul Islam-e-Darul Funoon, which still remains in operation. Thrice arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate on suspicion of being an Indian spy, however, Karim returned to India.
Karim has been in prison since 2013, when he was arrested by the Delhi Police; Acquitted in three terrorism-related cases, he faces trial in three more.
Karim’s Lashkar-e-Taiba assigned trainer, former Pakistan Army Special Services Group commando Abdul Qadir, gave up on jihadism, too. Qadir began a practice as an exorcist, instead, and has acquired a reputation for being a skilled practitioner of the arts of removing evil spells.
The jihad financier who backed the project, Arif Kasmani, retired to his lavish home at B-32, Tipu Sultan Road, Karachi. Kasmani’s sons, Karim told intelligence interrogators—in the testimony which, under Indian law, cannot be used for the purpose of his trial—were highly Westernised, and showed no interest in carrying on their father’s jihadist legacy.
Abdul Rahman al-Dakhil, a committed jihadist who volunteered to train the army of Indian jihadists Karim promised to raise, drifted away to the glories of war in Iraq, where he was arrested by United States troops.
The dismal end of Karim’s jihad against the temple at Ayodhya, though, was not inevitable and holds important lessons.
The carpenter’s war
Born in the crowded lanes of Gali Chhatta Lal Mian in Delhi’s Daryaganj, Karim grew up in Pilkhuwa, Uttar Pradesh. He studied at a local English medium school until Class VII but was compelled to drop out after the death of his father. Then, he began working casting metal at brass works, in Firozabad’s glass-bangle foundries, and as a carpenter. “I developed a wish to explore India and to see the places which I read about in my school history book,” he told one intelligence officer.
Even that wish was not easy to realise: In mid-1959, Karim and a friend, Jitendra Mochi, were detained by a ticket inspector when they attempted to travel from Firozabad to Agra without a ticket. Lacking money to pay the fine, Karim had to repair the railway station’s furniture, while Mochi polished the ticket inspector’s shoes.
The 1985 riots in Ahmedabad, chronicled by the scholar Ornit Shani, sparked off Karim’s ideological radicalisation. Muhammad Zafar, one of his in-laws, was burned alive along with seven others, Karim told his interrogators. A local cleric, Wali Muhammad, introduced Karim to the idea of jihad. Karim spent several weeks studying Quranic verses on resisting oppression.
Lacking any practical means to act on his new-found beliefs, Karim began experimenting with crude bombs made from bleaching powder and other easily obtained compounds. He also met with others inspired by the idea of jihad, including the convicted Maharashtra doctor-turned-jihadist Jalees Ansari and Hyderabad gangster and Islamist activist Azam Ghauri.
The men set up a new organisation to wage jihad. The emir of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Rajasthan, Abdul Alim, offered to raise volunteers for the group, Karim said. The loss of his hand in Kota, though, made clear the group needed more than Karim’s dubious skills.
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Gemstones and blood
In 1989, Karim began a new business, dealing in gemstones that he sourced from Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The business flourished, and he made two visits to Pakistan. Ahead of his third visit, the editor of an Islamist magazine published from Varanasi, Maulana Saif-ur-Rehman Mubarakpuri, gave him a letter of introduction to an eminent jihadist in Pakistan. The man Karim was to meet was Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Earlier, in 1986, a district judge had ordered the gates of the Babri Masjid’s inner courtyard to be opened for Hindu worshippers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party began a campaign to build a Ram temple in its place. The campaign culminated with the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists in December 1992.
Karim told his interrogators that he discussed the large-scale communal violence that broke out after the demolition of the mosque with Saeed. Though criminal cartels like that of Dawood Ibrahim had the means to stage retaliatory violence of the kind seen in Mumbai in 1993, a much larger insurgency needed to be stoked, Karim argued.
Ansari, the doctor Karim had met, had successfully set off bombs after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The group followed up by planting bombs on several trains on the first anniversary of the mosque’s demolition. Ansari’s cell, though, struggled to obtain explosives, the doctor would later tell police investigators, and lacked the knowledge to make effective devices.
The Lashkar commander seemed interested in Karim’s plans for a larger jihadist project and offered to train him at the terrorist group’s camp at Kunar, just across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Karim, however, told his interrogators that he found himself physically unable to meet the rigours involved.
Late in 1994, Karim returned to Pakistan, this time travelling through Bangladesh on a fake passport. Instead of training Indian nationals for jihad, the Lashkar had decided to use Karim’s networks to station its own operatives.
The Lashkar’s plans, though, came to nothing. Lashkar’s resident agent Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan’s Jhelum district, obtained an Indian passport and even married a local resident, Momina Khatoon. Ishtiaq, however, was arrested before he could do real harm.
Ghauri, meanwhile, returned to India to support the Lashkar’s project. He was, however, slain by police soon afterwards.
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A failed campaign
Karim’s jihadist project collapsed among mutual recrimination. The carpenter accused Hafiz Saeed of misappropriating funds meant for the jihad in India. Saeed, in turn, alleged that Karim was an agent for India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). Later, Karim would be tapped by Khalistan groups operating from Lahore to infiltrate their operatives into India through Bangladesh. This effort, however, came to nothing, after Karim revealed he had no assets in place to guarantee success.
In 2000, Karim said, he began a property trading business in Karachi, called Nadeem Housing Enterprises, selling plots on the city’s new northern bypass route to Balochistan. Karim also ran a perfume business outside Muridke, the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
From his interrogation records, it is clear a small circle of new expatriate jihadists began to emerge in Karachi towards the end of the decade. Karim told investigators that Abdul Aziz, a Hyderabad jihadist, and his friend Amir Reza Khan, for a time shared an apartment in Karachi. Following arguments between their wives, though, the two men took new homes. Three boys from Bijnor, he revealed, also arrived for training.
Though Karim did not know it, he was witnessing the birth of the Indian Mujahideen—which would stage the most successful urban terror offensive in Indian history. Emerging from the ranks of the Students Islamic Movement of India, a new generation of jihadists would work with the Lashkar to successfully stage the kind of attacks Karim had hoped for.
For its part, the Indian Mujahideen failed to inspire the large-scale Muslim insurgency against the Indian state it sought. Few Muslims outside its closed networks were drawn to the idea of violence, and sources for the flow of weapons needed to sustain large-scale violence did not exist. The second jihadist wave failed, albeit after claiming far more lives than the first one.
The ghost of Karim’s hand, though, still casts a grim shadow over India’s charged communal landscape. The deep springs of resentment the early jihadists drew on still exist, and new Islamist forces like the Islamic State are drawing small numbers of Indians to their ranks. Lacking any movement toward communal reconciliation, some could still be driven to seek revenge.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)