Bajrang bomb ticking

The ongoing anti-Christian attacks are not isolated. The Bajrang Dal is slowly but surely growing into a deadly, bomb-making radical group. Team DNA finds out.

The recent attacks on churches in Orissa, Karnataka and elsewhere in the country are not isolated acts of the Bajrang Dal, the Sangh Parivar’s vitriolic fringe that has helped create several leaders for the BJP and other Parivar fronts.

In fact, the Dal has been stealthily mastering the deadlier art of mayhem, including bomb-making, in recent years, investigators and intelligence sources say.

With a low-profile leadership and near-complete impunity, the investigators say, Dal cadres have been unleashing violence across India for the past several years, targeting minorities.

In recent years, the cadres have successfully planted bombs in a few mosques in Maharashtra. The Dal may not be as sophisticated a network as Islamic terrorists, but it is for sure a serious threat to the nation’s domestic security, evidence shows.

The evidence regarding bomb-making is, however, limited to Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Maharashtra. In rest of the country, the group still prefers mob violence.

Investigation agencies attribute at least two major bomb blasts to the Bajrang Dal, the August 24 incident in Kanpur, where two of its members were killed trying to make bombs, being the latest.

The probe into the April 2006 bomb blast in Nanded, Maharashtra, had shown that Dal cadres were involved in at least three mosque bombings in 2003, besides the Kanpur explosion.

“There’s been a steady but intermittent flow of information about their (the Dal’s) violent activities,” a senior officer in the security establishment said.

Of all the inputs, the most worrying is their “ability to make bombs, especially ammonium nitrate ones”.

None of the investigators was willing to say Bajrang Dal cadres may have had a role in any of the recent major blasts, but at least one source told DNA that inputs showed the possible involvement of a Hindu fundamentalist in the 2006 Jama Masjid bomb blast in Delhi.

The officer not involved in the investigation any more was, however, not sure if it had reached its “logical end”.

Growing strength
VHP’s national spokesman Surendra Jain  does not reveal the membership of his organisation. They have “no permanent membership and it is given every year and hence, it differs from year to year”.

The numbers can be “five lakh one year and may shoot up to more than 11-12 lakh another year, depending on how actively a membership drive is carried out. The main thing is the following of the Bajrang Dal, which is constantly growing,” Jain, an ex-Dal president, says.

In Orissa, where it has been leading attacks against churches, the group has nearly 20,000 active members, mainly from the middle and lower-middle classes.
In places such as Pune, there is a massive army of cadres. According to official estimates, the Bajrang Dal Pune prant (region), which includes Pune city, Baramati, Chinchwad and six other districts, boasts of a membership of 90,000.  Vinit Mahajan, the organisation’s Pune coordinator, says in the city alone, they have 12,000 to 14,000 cadres.

The group is organised from the village level to the top. At the bottom is a branch, then the khands. For a region with a population about 5 lakh, they have a prakhand. Pune has 36 prakhands, the Dal’s local leadership claims.

Officially, the Bajrang Dal is the youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).
Pune’s Mahajan says, “All major decisions are taken by VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders together.” But he quickly adds, “There has been no occasion for the Bajrang Dal to resort to violence.”

A few hundred kilometers from Pune, Nanded Police are not ready to buy the peace claim. They claim to have clinching evidence of Bajrang Dal cadres bombing at least three mosques in 2003 — in Parbhani, Purna and Jalna. In 2006, two members of the group died trying to make bombs in Nanded, they say.

Mahajan refutes that. According to him, his group has been assigned three tasks — sewa (service), suraksha (protection) and sanskar (imparting values).
One of the tasks is to protect the religion (dharma raksha), which includes doing everything to repel and retaliate for attacks on Hindutva. And that might justify the violence against churches involved in large-scale conversions.

An insider in VHP’s UP unit told DNA, “VHP is increasingly withdrawing to specific matters relating to the Hindu religion, such as ban on cow slaughter or building a Ram temple in Ayodhya. Matters which require aggression or hard-line posturing are being left to the Bajrang Dal.”

Recently, at a village gathering in Jhansi, this new, more aggressive and “sophisticated” face of the Bajrang Dal was visible. At the meeting, several Dal cadres openly brandished guns as aggressive speeches rented the air through the public address system.

They are not alone
Not just the Bajrang Dal and VHP, but a host of other Hindu groups have been at the forefront of sowing communal seeds.

UP Police have repeatedly said the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) headed by fiery BJP MP Yogi Adityanath has been fomenting communal violence in eastern parts of the state. Recently in Azamgarh, now the focus of serial blasts probe, HYV resorted to violence and arson after Adityanath’s cavalcade, traversing a Muslim-dominated area, was stoned.

Police reports say even the October 2005 riots in the remote east UP district of Mau were instigated by the HYV and the Hindu Mahasabha. In January 2008, a bomb blast at the RSS office of Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu was tracked to members of Hindu Munnani.
There have also been hilarious twists that show the sinister side of the fringe group. On August 30, senior VHP leader Ramvilas Vedanti lodged a protest with Ayodhya Police saying he had received death threats from Simi and al-Qaeda. When his phone was placed under surveillance, it was found that his own supporters had issued the “threats” so that their Guruji gets Z-class security. 

(With inputs from Rajesh Sinha and Josy Joseph in Delhi, Deepak Gidwani in Lucknow, Shailendra Paranjpe in Pune and Subhashish Mohanty in Orissa)