Southern discomfort rises

BANGALORE: Hyderabad blasts have only strengthened the belief of police and intelligence agencies that southern states are not only increasingly becoming safe havens for terrorists but also soft targets for attacks.

In a trend that began in the mid-90s and picked up in recent years, foreign Islamic jehadis have found Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala strategically convenient and important not only for recruiting future terrorists but also to blow up select targets.

“The universal Muslim anger over Babri Masjid demolition and the more recent US policies only came in handy for them to exploit,” says an Intelligence Bureau officer in Bangalore.

“The south has become more prone to terrorism for a variety of reasons,” admits Karnataka’s inspector-general of police RP Sharma.

He says one reason is that south became an easy destination for subversive cargo to reach even by sea after increased vigilance in the north.

Picking south for this bloodbath is both a numerical compulsion and a strategic necessity for terror perpetrators, according to some experts.

South-East Asia, always a fertile place for recruitment of terrorists, has a good number of south Indian Muslims to pick from and the more radical of them become easy prey.

To India’s political capital Delhi and commercial capital Mumbai, IT capital Bangalore was the first to be added from the south. And the historic links between subversive elements in Hyderabad and those in South-East Asia and elsewhere promptly turned that city into another terror hotspot. The traffic of people between Hyderabad and Pakistan has always been high since partition.

“Their design was also to attack the social and economic fabric of the country by attacking prosperous cities such as Bangalaore and Hyderabad,” points out KP Raghuvanshi, chief of Mumbai’s anti-terrorist squad.