Disrupting India's economic progress through engineering terror attacks is very much its prime focus, but what has changed is how it proposes to go about the task.
The Intelligence Bureau says terror outfits are upset that they have not managed to garner mass support from Indian Muslims. With the number of increasing terror strikes, many influential Muslim organisations have slammed the terrorism as un-Islamic, and this has been causing concern to the outfits waging war in the name of Islam.
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To counter this, the IB says the Indian Mujahideen has put together a twin strategy. Its primary aim is to take the heat off SIMI and to give jihad a more Indian orientation.
The IB says the second plan, which is more worrisome, is to garner support from local Muslims. IB sources say the intercepts reveal that the intention is to get many Indian Muslims to support its cause. As this has proved to be difficult in the past, with the community at large rejecting any overtures and the law-enforcing authorities cracking down on sections of the community in the wake of the violence, the Indian Mujahideen has come up with a diabolical plan to crack both these hurdles.
The Bureau says if the Indian Mujahideen claims responsibility for any terror strike, the tendency is to round up several Muslim youth across the country. The IB says terror outfits want more and more Muslim youth to be arrested so that it will lead to unrest among the community, which would in turn pose law and order problems as well as produce a fresh crop of disgruntled youth.
Further, IB sources add, the resultant backlash against the law-enforcing agencies would make the system unstable, which is exactly as per the script agreed upon by Harkat ul Jehadi Islami and Lashkar-e-Tayiba leaders at their meeting in Kotli, Pakistan occupied Kashmir, in May.
