Hafiz Saeed wants India to be declared a terrorist state

NEW DELHI :  Home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde's claim that BJP and RSS were running terror camps in the country has given a handle to the Mumbai 26/11 mastermind in Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed, to make demands like declaring India a 'terrorist state' and a ban on BJP and RSS.

Saeed wrote on Twitter that India's home minister had finally 'spoken the truth' and the world should take notice and declare India a state supporting terror on its soil, after Shinde's 'candid confession'. "Pakistan should raise this (Shinde confession of BJP and RSS terrorist camps) in UNSC and OIC. It is imperative to note that an organisation that has been sworn in government previously is maintaining terror camps and killing Muslims. The world should take immediate notice in an unbiased manner and ban these terrorist organisations," Saeed wrote on Twitter.

Later in the day, he held a press conference where he said that the Indian 'propaganda' against Pakistani organisa-tions of spreading terror stood 'exposed' and alleged it was Indian organisations which were behind all kinds of terrorism in Pakistan. "India tried to involve us in the Mumbai attacks but after a passage of five years, nothing has been established against us in the courts," said Saeed, against whom US declared a bounty of $10 million for his involvement in terrorist acts, including the 26/11 attacks.

The Jamat-Ud-Dawa, which Saeed heads, also praised Shinde for his comments and said he had dared to speak what was 'obvious'.

Shinde ,however, did not retract his comments. "I have already said yesterday (Sunday) what I had to say," Shinde said. A source in the National Investigation Agency, probing all right-wing extremism cases, however, said there was no concrete evidence to suggest that BJP or RSS had directly run any terror camps in the country. The source said that there was a terror camp organised by an ex-RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi in Bagli village near Dewas in Madhya Pradesh in the early months of 2006, where many right-wing extremists like Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, Rajendra Chaudhary, Kamal Chauhan and Dhan Singh were trained in making IEDs. All these men were later involved in bomb blasts in Malegaon in 2006 and blasts in the Samjhauta Express, Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad and many of them have been arrested by NIA.

"However, there is no clear proof to suggest that RSS or BJP ran or backed these camps. But this is true that the persons trained at these camps were former RSS cadre or still associated with RSS, when they underwent training," a source in the NIA told ET. A home ministry official said Shinde's statement should be read in the context that he was attempting to say that terrorism in India is not just the handiwork of Islamic radicals but right-wing extremists as well. "When Shinde said that Islamic fundamentalists were wrongly blamed for the blasts in Malegaon, Samjhauta Express or Mecca Masjid, he is stating a fact that these blasts were actually engineered by right-wing radicals, under arrest now. We have informed Pakistan officially that right-wing extremists in India were behind the Samjhauta blasts that left 67 Pakistanis dead,"

A home ministry official said. However, the official added that Shinde should have avoided mentioning the term 'saffron terror' as Congress had earlier decried the use of such a term by former home minister P Chidambaram. Also, the government is now finding it difficult to back with proof Shinde's claim that BJP and RSS have run terror camps.

Source : India Times