Terror's road map to south India: Infiltrate, migrate, aggravate

These terror groups come into the southern states, mingle with the migrant population including the Rohingya Muslims, and then overstay with a larger agenda

New Delhi, July 26: A highly radicalised person associated with a terror group was arrested by the Bengaluru police on Sunday night. The arrest of Akthar Hussain Lashkar, a resident of Assam, led to the arrest of his associate Zubair from Salem in Tamil Nadu.

The police said that Hussain who was working as a food delivery executive was using his job to understand the topography of the city. He was also in the process of setting up meetings to plan attacks in Karnataka. Now that the Tamil Nadu angle has come up, the police will work closely with the central agencies as there are inter-state ramifications to this case.

The arrest comes just a month after the arrest of Talib Hussain a member of the Hizbul Mujahideen in Bengaluru. He was arrested from the Okhalipuram area and the police said that he had fled Jammu and Kashmir with his wife and children after the hunt for him had intensified.

Hussain had taken shelter in a mosque in the city and would deliver sermons during the Friday prayers.

In 2019 when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) probed a case relating to the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Bangladesh (JMB) it had found that Bengaluru had become a happy hunting ground for these terrorists.

Links between the operatives of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala were not uncommon and a pattern was found. Operatives would come in from the north- eastern states after infiltrating from Bangladesh. They would often land up at a migrant camp in Kerala and then enter into states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

In 2019 following the arrest of JMB terrorist Habibur Rehman, the NIA learnt that he had traveled from Bengal before going to Bengaluru, Kerala and Chennai. Rehman came to Bengaluru in 2015 and took up a job as a contractor. Prior to his arrest he ha moved to the outskirts of the city to avoid arrest.

Looking at the modus operandi and the investigation files, it has become clear that these persons had a common way of operating. They would come into the southern states, mingle with the migrant population including the Rohingya Muslims and then overstay in the southern states with a larger agenda of carrying out terror attacks.

In August 2019, one Ejaz Ahmed alias Taufique Raza, the emir of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Bangladesh was arrested. His team had persons outside Bengal and even set up modules in Bihar, Karnataka and Kerala. He had mainly targeted migrant labour in these places and roped several of them into the module, officials, part of the investigation, also said.

A statistic of 2013 showed that there were around 2.5 million migrant workers in Kerala. Most persons were eager to take in the migrants for work as the labour costs in Kerala is too high.

On 16 March 2017, the Kerala police arrested seven Bangladeshi nationals employed at a plywood factory and charged them with illegal immigration. This is just one of the many cases that was reported from Kerala over the years where several lakhs of Bangladeshis live illegally.

It becomes important to discuss the Kerala scenario in the wake of an Intelligence Bureau report stating that there would be more influx of illegal immigrants into South India after the NRC was published by the Assam government. There are already reports that suggest that the touts in Kerala are already active and would look to facilitate the entry of more such persons into the state.

Officials tell OneIndia that the route into south India would be through Kerala, following which attempts would be made to infiltrate into the other southern states such as Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. They would be brought in as estate labour like has been done in the past, officials say.

Data with the Ministry for Home Affairs states that Kerala has issued nearly 62,000 registration cards to migrant workers. Moreover no real effort has gone in to sort out the illegal immigrants including Rohingyas from the migrants, officials in the Home Ministry say.