IN April 1948, a dapper man in an impeccably tailored traditional suit announced at a press conference that he intended to plant the flag of the Nizam of Hyderabad “on the Red Fort in Delhi”. This was none other than Islamist leader Kasim Rizvi whose Razakar militia battled the Indian troops in Hyderabad in September 1948. Rizvi fought hard to save the princely state’s theocracy-based world – one which the terror groups that carried out last month’s strikes in Hyderabad now hope to recreate. Despite covert backing from Pakistan – candidly documented by its armed forces’ last commander-in-chief, Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan – Rizvi came nowhere near success; but his struggle is still celebrated by Islamists.
Half a century later, another Islamist leader, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the supreme spiritual and temporal head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, promised to succeed where Rizvi had failed. As his Inter Services Intelligence-backed organisation began to unleash a welter of new terror cells on the city, Saeed promised to “unfurl the Islamic flag on the Red Fort”. “The real war,” he promised cadre discouraged by Pakistan’s defeat in Kargil, “will be inside [India].” Soon after, in February 2000, his second-in-command Abdul Rehman Makki, promised to liberate Hyderabad from “Indian rule”.