India's Great Divide

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Indian politicians blamed Pakistan for last Monday's Bombay bus explosion that killed 3 and injured 42 (bringing the toll from five blasts since December to 17 dead and hundreds injured). But the police in Bombay have little doubt that Umar's organization was the real culprit. Javed notes that the attack occurred in Ghatkopar, an area of eastern Bombay that's home to many migrant Gujaratis and that was also the place where Umar initiated his Bombay bombing campaign on Dec. 2, when an almost identical bus bomb killed two and hurt 28 others. Issuing a high alert across the city last week , Javed said the "element of continuity" from the previous blasts was undeniable. A senior officer from India's intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), confirms that a hard core of fundamentalists drawn from SIMI's ranks has switched from backroom support to frontline terror in the past few months; he also says they were responsible for the assassination of former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya on March 26. The officer from raw adds, "Let's not have any doubts as to what caused this [Muslim backlash]. If I was a Muslim and people from my community were mowed down like they were in Gujarat, do you think I would stand by and do nothing?"

Umar, for one, has no intention of standing by and doing nothing. "We will continue," he vows. "There is no limit on our actions ... Even to kill children is good—you stop the generation there, at the beginning."

For law enforcers like Javed, the worry is not so much the ruthless fury of an extremist like Umar as the extent to which such rage has spread within more respectable parts of the Muslim community. When Bombay suffered a series of Islamist bomb attacks in 1993, they were carried out by the city's Muslim-dominated underworld, men who had long departed the mainstream and for whom violence was already a way of life. But Javed's right-hand man, deputy police commissioner (and Hindu) Pradip Sawant, is finding today that even some whom he'd expect to be India's least marginalized Muslims are heeding the call to jihad. "Of the 21 we've caught and charged [over the recent Bombay bombings]," says Sawant, "two are doctors, six are computer specialists and two or three more are university graduates in other disciplines." Outside Bombay, too, the police have broken up terrorist cells in places like Bangalore, Kerala and New Delhi over the past six months and have been shocked to find that a high proportion of cell members were university graduates and professionals. "It is a matter of serious concern," says Javed, "when people who are so qualified choose a path which means throwing everything away. It tells us that there is a new sort of thinking circulating in the community."

That new thinking was evident when Javed's men descended upon the prosperous Muslim suburb of Borivili in April to arrest former SIMI national head Saqib Nachan, 44, as the suspected ground commander for the Bombay bombings. Javed's officers were forced to withdraw by a crowd of 300 local residents who assembled outside their stucco mansions and barred the way. Later, after Nachan surrendered and confessed his role as a terrorist commander, the police announced the discovery of two AK-56s, four pistols, four revolvers and 250 homemade bombs hidden in the village well. Nasir Mullah, whose 26-year-old bank-manager son is a former SIMI member and was also arrested, says the weapons were to protect Borivili from a Hindu-dominated police force that has since been censured in an official state report for conducting "ad hoc arrests of the innocent, torture and forced confessions" there. "Nachan and the other SIMI people are role models here," says the 55-year-old timber trader. "People need to defend themselves."

Although he, too, is angry about Gujarat, Javed refuses to concede any common bond with Umar. To Javed, there is no contradiction between his dismay over Gujarat and his job, which requires him to hunt down self-styled Muslim avengers. "There's a world of difference between being upset by Gujarat and being a committed militant," he says. Wrath is not the only emotion sweeping India's Muslim community, he adds. Progressive Muslims like Javed are increasingly expressing alarm at the dangers of radicalization among both Hindus and Muslims. And in the past year, a growing number of such moderates have called for Muslims to modernize and show the flexibility needed to begin bridging India's bitter division. In her steadfast refusal to see Hindus as the enemy, Sheikh personifies this progressive outlook. "I just don't understand these old hatreds," she says. "I could never live like that."

But with the rhetoric of intolerance likely to drown out moderation in the run-up to a general election as little as six months away, Javed and his officers see more bloodshed coming. "I fear this is only the beginning," says deputy commissioner Sawant. Indeed, flushed with success, Umar has no intention of renouncing his terror campaign. "We regret nothing," he says. "We enjoy this work."

Javed, meanwhile, scans the cityscape's middle distance, as if for signs of his quarry. "We will have more strife, and the situation will get more difficult," he predicts. He pauses. "But there is hope for Muslims in India. There has to be. If Muslims lose hope, then what?" Then Umar and his Hindu enemies will have won.