Two recent acts of terror in Russia and the U.S. carry ominous signs for India. The first one was the attempt to murder Salman Rushdie, the famous author of the controversial 'The Satanic Verses', at an event in Upstate New York. He had been under constant police protection for years after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a veritable death warrant, against him in 1989. So much time had lapsed since that threat that security services relaxed their vigil, and then, a previously unknown terrorist got to him for words he had written 34 years ago.
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Mr. Rushdie is recovering but it is alarming that fanatics have such long memories. Terrorists driven by religious fanaticism are daring, suicidal and vengeful individuals and their fanaticism has no expiry date.
A second incident took place in Moscow on August 20 when the 29-year-old Darya Dugina, a nationalist and outspoken daughter of a conservative ideologue of Russia, Alexander Dugin — who is a supporter of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — died in a car bomb explosion. Russian State security services have already released details of a suspect, a woman, who they claim had arrived from Ukraine, rented an apartment and escaped into Europe through Estonia. Immediately after the attack, the Ukrainian government called the claim a “fiction.” There is reference to a Ukrainian website which is termed as a “hit list” by Russian State security officials in which several pro-Putin journalists’ and writers’ home addresses and personal data are listed. Darya Dugina was on that list, and her name was crossed out as ‘eliminated’, moments after the explosion.
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These two incidents involve prominent personalities and should worry the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The attack on Mr. Rushdie was the handiwork of a 24-year-old “sleeper”, an unregistered offender who was not on the FBI records as a terror suspect. The FBI should be hugely worried because of the considerable time interval between the fatwa issued by Iran’s religious leader and its execution.
The high value targets
An enormous investment has been made by the U.K. and the U.S. in protection of high value targets such as Mr. Rushdie. The question is whether the American security establishment has slipped into complacency or whether it is simply impossible to protect a target because terrorists can melt away and integrate in the maze of ethnicities of the United States and emerge only to kill.
The U.S. has seen erosion of several human rights and privacy in an attempt to identify fanatic “needles in a haystack” that pose a terror threat. The U.S. agencies sift through volumes of personal data of citizens and people around the world and deploy tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify terrorists or their sympathisers.
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Similarly, the Moscow incident puts a question mark on the efficacy of Russian intelligence and the law enforcement agencies. The incident involving Daria Dugina is either due to Russian overconfidence or helplessness in keeping track of all threats, or both.
Spying democracies
What these two attacks tell us when it comes to terrorism is that there is no difference between the rigours of a security apparatus in a democracy and in a heavy-handed security state. Democracies and autocracies are known to use the same tools of spying on citizens, listening to conversations, sifting through petabytes of online data using AI to find patterns or abnormalities that might lead to someone who might be part of a terrorist organisation. The recent attacks on prominent public figures make a mockery of all security drills and knowledge that has been accumulated by security agencies over the years.
Against this background comes the disconcerting report from Russia that a suspect has been apprehended there, who is alleged to have been preparing to enter India and harm an unnamed dignitary. The individual is said to owe his allegiance to an Islamic terror group. It may be invidious to name names but the contours are clear. Even in the chaotic and rumbunctious democracy of India, leaders of all hues must therefore be mindful of their words, lest they become terror targets.
Infiltration of security agencies by terror groups has always been a nightmare to governments across the globe. In the last decade, technology, software and tools for eavesdropping on all kinds of communication are deployed to tackle infiltration. But it is obvious they offer no guarantee of pre-emption and early detection. Only alert vigilance in physically defending critical infrastructure, buttressed by international collaboration can keep the determined terrorist at bay.
R.K. Raghavan is a former CBI Director. Ajay Goyal is a security analyst based in Europe.