You don’t have to wait for intelligence agencies to release their trademark identikit pictures to know the faces behind Mumbai’s serial blast. Those fuzzy, looks-like-everyman sketches can’t tell you anything what Abdul Razzaq can. Or what Mohammed Waliullah can. Razzaq and Waliullah are not foreign mercenaries. They are from here. They are the faces of India’s very own homegrown jihadi network. They tell the story of how astonishingly unprepared our internal security establishment is, of how the UPA’s politics is not allowing a committed policy against terror.

Razzaq was trained by Lashkar-e-Toiba in Muzaffarabad last year. His mission was to target his country — India. He had decided however to take a detour: fight the Americans in Iraq first before going back to his native city, Hyderabad. His contribution to Iraqi insurgency — he fought near the Iraq-Iran border — over, he came back home and was picked up.

Waliullah, a Phulpur cleric and a HUJI activist, is an accused in the March 7 Varanasi bomb blast case. When asked during interrogation why he bombed the Varanasi station apart from the Sankat Mochan temple, Waliullah replied the station architecture reminded him of a temple. But religious symbolism isn’t what grabs these jihadis most. They want the country they are citizens of to suffer, lose its bearings. Hence reports of LeT reconnaissance on the Ajmer Sharif dargah. Hence the bombs targeting Mumbai’s lifeline.

But the Intelligence establishment under the UPA is in denial. The comfortable theory about terrorism is that it is imported into this country. And that is still true. But the UPA, it seems, simply can’t accept that jihad now has a domestic manufacturing facility. Shivraj Patil wants us to think of boys gone astray. But his men have done little about massive recruitment by banned SIMI splinter groups, which head-hunt for jihadis by using Gujarat riots as a motivational tool.

... contd.