Word: indianism
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...trial of Sabahuddin Ahmed for his work in facilitating last year's Mumbai massacre reveals an uncomfortable truth about India. Unlike his fellow accused, the Pakistani gunman Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, Sabahuddin is Indian and for five years he was an alleged one-man sleeper cell hiding in plain sight. Even though he was arrested almost 10 months before the Mumbai attack, Sabahuddin had allegedly managed to provide enough information in terms of directions and diagrams to allow the terrorists to launch their assault with "absolute precision...
...crossing from Kashmir to Bangalore - even as he was bringing a cache of weapons in by train. When he ran out of money, his handlers arranged to have funds sent to him through India's unregulated network of cash-transfer, or hawala, traders. For the equivalent of $2, an Indian, who had bought the right to smuggle jackfruit across the Bangladesh border, arranged for him to cross without documents to that country's capital Dhaka, where he met with agents of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group believed to have planned the Mumbai attacks. (See TIME's video "Mumbai...
...year since the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government has taken several steps to tighten security. It has improved co-ordination between the state and central intelligence agencies, devoted more men and equipment to security services and put intense diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to crack down on LeT and other jihadist groups. But there has been little discussion of how pervasive, low-level corruption can compromise national security. The various brokers and middlemen who helped Sabahuddin never knew he was involved with a jihadist group; he appeared to be simply another young man living in the gray margins of Indian society...
Given the size of the Indian bureaucracy, with 18 million public employees serving more than a billion people, "you can never create a foolproof system," says Ajay Behera, an assistant professor at Jamia Millia Islamia who has written extensively about regional security. But in such a porous system, he says, a small group of relatively uneducated people can organize a major operation. "Almost anyone can do anything here," Behera says. "It doesn't require that high a level of sophistication...
Making India harder for would-be terrorists to penetrate would require reform not just of the bureaucracy but also the police. Local and international human-rights groups have exhaustively documented the crisis in Indian policing, criticizing the Indian police for everything from taking bribes to engaging in torture and extrajudicial killing. Eight national commissions have also recommended wide-ranging police reforms, few of which have been implemented...