» Topic:  Terror Shadow Stalks India's Booming Tech Industry

» Added by:  Y.P. Rajesh, Reuters

» Date:  2.1.2006

  A suspected militant raid on one of India's top science universities has confirmed fears that the country's booming information technology sector could be a new target for terror groups, officials and analysts said.

A professor was shot dead and four other people were wounded last week when an unidentified gunman drove on to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus in the southern city of Bangalore, India's tech capital, and opened indiscriminate fire from an automatic rifle outside a conference hall.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack on what security experts said is a "soft target."

But the nature of the attack—the use of a Kalashnikov rifle to open fire randomly and the recovery of unexploded grenades and cartridges from the site—points to anti-Indian Islamist militant groups, they said.

"Whatever information is coming out of Bangalore shows that one of these groups is responsible," said B. Raman, a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency.

"Although the damage was not much, it was a very daring attack. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, I would believe this is the work of jihadi groups," he said, referring to Muslim militants fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir.

India has been a victim of separatist violence for decades and Kashmiri militants have struck regularly in the disputed Himalayan region as well as at targets in northern India, including in the capital, New Delhi, since the 1990s.

India has long accused arch rival Pakistan—with which it is locked in a decades-old dispute over Kashmir—of aiding the militants and sending them across the border. Islamabad denies the charge.

While southern India has largely been peaceful during this period, intelligence agencies have warned over the past two years that Islamist militants were making inroads in the south, setting up cells and recruiting sympathizers.
Bangalore and the rival tech centers of Hyderabad and Chennai were prime targets as they were symbols of India's technological might and economic progress, analysts said.

A city of 6.5 million people, Bangalore alone is home to more than 1,500 technology and back-office companies, among them dozens of global giants such as Intel, Motorola and IBM, and is now known as "India's Silicon Valley."

The companies account for a third of India's $17.2 billion software industry and employ about 1 million people. Several Indian defense, space and scientific research institutions are also based in Bangalore.

"The country is waking up to a new reality—its success in IT and concomitant economic boom has excited malice in certain quarters, who would like to attack symbols of that success," the Times of India wrote in an editorial on Friday.

"Within the frame of this inchoate rage against modernity, an international conference of scientists is also a target," it said, referring to the shooting at the IISc.

While hard targets such as government offices and defense establishments are well protected, security at technology companies and institutions is in now way comparable, experts said.

Following the Bangalore shooting, IT companies would need to boost "physical security" at their facilities while government agencies should strengthen intelligence gathering and destroy militant cells before they could strike, they said.

"The Indian IT industry ... already has in place many security measures," the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the leading industry body, said in a statement after the Bangalore shooting.

"This incident emphasizes the need to review and upgrade these. NASSCOM and the IT industry will work, in collaboration with the police and government, towards tightening security measures to create a safer working environment for the industry," it said.

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