Sreenivasan Jain: Looking beyond the usual suspects

With Holey Artisan Bakery, Bangladesh's creaky edifice of denialism has come undone

To understand our eastern neighbour's faltering attempts at coming to terms with new forms of Islamist violence, it is illustrative to recall its handling of the first attack in Bangladesh for which ISIS claimed credit: the shooting to death in September last year of Cesare Tavella, an Italian aid worker. Discarding the ISIS claim as bogus, the police arrested and charged seven local men for Tavella's death, including a member of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the country's main opposition front, casting the killing as a conspiracy by Sheikh Hasina's rivals to discredit the country. By sticking to the political conspiracy motive (rolled out as a response to almost every instance of targeted violence predating Tavella) the government seemed to have ignored, deliberately or otherwise, the shift signalled by the killing of the Italian - it was the first time in Bangladesh's wave of targeted attacks of the past three years that a foreigner had been killed, and that a gun had been used to commit the crime. (Till the Tavella murder, the targets were in most cases Bangladeshi-origin secularists or atheists, hacked to death with cleavers.)

And yet, even after ISIS went on to claim credit for eight more attacks since the Tavella incident, not to mention claims by an alleged Bangladeshi affiliate of Al Qaeda for a parallel set of killings pre- and post-dating the Tavella attack, the government's response, both in its rhetoric and in arrests, showed no signs of budging. In every case, blame was placed on the usual suspects - either the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) or another home-grown outfit called, interchangeably, Ansarullah Bangla Team or Ansar ul Islam; the "inspiration", it was alleged, came from the BNP.

Until a week before the Holey Artisan Bakery attack, the Bangladesh government used this template as the basis of close to 6,000 arrests nationwide (some reports suggest a figure closer to 10,000). Where the government saw in those staggering numbers proof of its determination to crush Islamist extremism, experts worried over whether high volume was being used to paper over weak evidence. (Sheikh Hasina's rivals saw political vendetta - close to a third of the arrests were opposition members, according to the BNP). Even so, until Holey Artisan Bakery, the modus operandi of the supposed ISIS or Al Qaeda inspired attacks offered the government a shred of plausible deniability - gun or knife, foreign or local victim, these were still targeted killings, lacking the element of spectacle favoured by global jihadist groups. Moreover, until Holey Artisan Bakery, ISIS and Al Qaeda claimed credit for their Bangladesh attacks retrospectively, a strategy which around the world has led to the suspicion of post-facto opportunism by jihadist outfits, rather than kills directed by handlers in Syria or Iraq.

But with Holey Artisan Bakery, Bangladesh's tottering edifice of denialism came undone, literally in real time. As the attack raged and police sources fed the local media familiar suspects (JMB! Ansarullah! Both acting in tandem!) ISIS-linked handles and online platforms were posting gruesome images of the carnage from inside the restaurant. By the next evening, soon after the police released pictures of the dead attackers, matched with a clutch of bogus-sounding first names ("Akash", "Badhon", "Bikash", "Don" and "Ripon"), the same ISIS platforms would release smiling pre-attack images of the killers in Islamic State garb; in turn, those young men were "outed" on social media as alumni of Dhaka's most privileged schools. Official denialism runs so deep that - and I may be wrong here - to date the Bangladesh police has not formally corrected its wrongful identification of the Gulshan killers; they have at best acknowledged their elite background. This does not indicate a willingness to turn the lens of suspicion away from traitorous opposition groups towards more private forms of violent radicalisation, away from fishing-trawler style arrests towards an approach grounded in surgical precision.

The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7