Quotes of the Day

Homegrown terrorism is a chill ing idea. No country likes to believe that violent mayhem has taken root in its backyard. After all, foreign killers can be weeded out; domestic terrorists draw strength from, and corrupt, their native soil.

That was the disquieting reality India awoke to on July 27, after a coordinated series of bomb blasts rocked Ahmedabad, an elegant, ancient city in the western state of Gujarat. Coming just a day after eight blasts hit Bangalore, the center of India's thriving technology industry, the attack seemed, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said during a visit to Ahmedabad, to target India's cosmopolitan, secular social fabric. The whole country seemed to sense the threat, as India's major cities immediately set up checkpoints and metal detectors. At least 17 more unexploded bombs were defused on July 29 in Surat, a global diamond hub halfway between Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The possibility that the terrorists may themselves have been Indian suggests that the sectarian anger boiling beneath the nation's modern veneer has taken on a new and bloodier tenor.

Terrorist attacks have become distressingly familiar in India. Since 2005, more than 520 people have been killed, and hundreds more injured, in 12 major bombings around the country. Claims of responsibility are rare, and Indian defense and intelligence analysts have long assumed that large-scale, coordinated bombings like the Ahmedabad attack are the handiwork of international, or Pakistani, terror networks. But experts are now coming to accept that the volume of recent attacks would not have been possible without a significant number of local recruits. "They are increasingly acquiring their own expertise," says B. Raman, former head of counterterrorism for the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external-intelligence agency.

The Ahmedabad bombings indeed appear domestic in origin. Minutes before the first of 22 bombs went off, a group called Indian Mujahideen sent a 14-page manifesto to Indian news organizations asserting that the attack was "planned and executed by Indians only." They claimed "sole responsibility" for the bombs, which have killed more than 40 people so far, and, as if offended at the idea that they needed outside help, admonished groups with links to Pakistan "for the sake of Allah, not to claim the responsibility for these attacks."

Indian Mujahideen has claimed credit for two previous attacks: blasts in the tourist hub of Jaipur in May, which killed 63 people; and bombings in the northern cities of Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow last November, which killed 16. Their attacks follow a similar pattern: numerous crude bombs timed to go off in sequence in bus stations, temples and markets. The latest attacks used explosives delivered in the most mundane possible ways — on bicycles left casually near a fruit stand, or in a stainless-steel tiffin carrier, the ubiquitous lunchbox of Indian commuters, left under the seat of a bus. But, in Ahmedabad, the terrorists were also more ambitious than in previous bombings, striking at many more sites than in any other recent attack.

Wherever their hardware is coming from, Indian Mujahideen's demands are intensely local. It wants the release of members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India, who are suspects in earlier bomb blasts. It criticizes a lawyers' group in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for failing to take cases brought by Muslims. And it warns that it will target states where the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power.

The group's biggest grievance by far, however, is the unresolved business of the 2002 anti-Muslim violence centered in that same city, Ahmedabad. After an attack on Hindu pilgrims in another part of the state, up to 2,000 Muslims were targeted and killed, many of them tortured, burned or raped, according to reports by local and international human-rights groups. The Chief Minister of the state, a BJP hard-liner named Narendra Modi, was widely criticized for failing to stop the attacks. Modi has denied those claims, has never faced any charges and, despite the criticism, has twice been re-elected as Chief Minister.

The Gujarat riots, and Modi in particular, have become a rallying cry for extremist groups, who have drowned out the voices of moderation among India's Muslims. "We have a completely extraordinary situation post-2002 in Gujarat," says Harsh Mander, a former civil-service officer who works with victims of the riots. Other spasms of sectarian violence in India have been followed by "some kind of healing process," he says, with official remorse and legal action. But six years after the Gujarat riots, only a handful of cases have led to convictions. The Indian Supreme Court forced the state's government in 2004 to reopen nearly 2,000 cases that had been thrown out for lack of evidence. Mander adds, "We have reduced an entire population to second-class citizens."

The festering anger over Gujarat serves as irresistible fodder for extremist groups who direct their message to India's increasingly disaffected Muslims. A federal report released in 2006 found that the country's 138 million Muslims are poorer than other Indians, less educated and vastly under-represented in India's largest employer, the railways, and its civil service. While many political parties pledge to defend India's Muslims against Hindu nationalism, they rarely deliver promised roads, jobs and schools. "The disaffection of Indian Muslims is not any different in its quality from the disaffection of other parts of the underclass, whether Muslim, Christian or Hindu," says Bharat Karnad, a professor of national-security studies at the New Delhi – based Centre for Policy Research. The difference is that well-funded, radicalized madrasahs reach out to this part of India's underclass, Karnad says. "The government and its 'secular-minded' politicians are unwilling to accept this."

Indeed, critics say, India's government is ill-prepared to prevent domestic terrorism arising from religious extremism. The country has just 126 police officers per 100,000 people — the U.N. recommends 222 — and the Intelligence Bureau, which handles internal security, has a mere 3,500 field operatives for a country of 1.1 billion. In response to the growing threat, the central government is considering setting up a new federal agency to investigate major terrorism cases and is devoting more money to local intelligence-gathering.

But, thus far, Indian politicians haven't offered much beyond pro forma calls for calm. India is a proudly secular state, and acknowledging the friction between Hindus and Muslims could offend the millions of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist groups, domestic or otherwise. "Our politicians are still in denial mode," says Raman, the counterterrorism expert. "To be able to solve this problem, they have to understand its real nature." The rift between India's Hindus and Muslims is real. Until India acknowledges that fact, the country can't begin to mend it.

• Jyoti Thottam/New Delhi