When India’s leaders travel the world to spread the good news about the emerging modern India, high on the list of advertised achievements is the absence of any al Qaeda activity within its borders.
Speaking to CNN during a visit to Washington exactly a year ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh highlighted the well-worn point. “I take pride in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of al Qaeda or participated in the activities of Taliban,” he said.
The argument was repeated by the leader of Congress Sonia Gandhi in Brussels earlier this year. More recently still, a cabinet minister, Kapil Sibal, reminded listeners at home that India had “the second highest Muslim population in the world, and yet you will not find even one Muslim joining international terror networks”.
With ties between India and the United States growing closer, even George Bush has occasionally taken up the refrain. So the news that Kafeel Ahmed, the man who mounted a failed attack on the Glasgow airport last month, is an born and bred Indian national who spent most of his life in India’s flagship IT city, Bangalore, has triggered profound unease among politicians and security officials.
Newspapers reflected national alarm. Beneath images of the car in flames driven by Ahmed outside the airport entrance, one asked: “Made in India?”
Another headline demanded: Has the global jihad arrived in India?
With Ahmed and his younger brother Sabeel, much remains unclear. No evidence of al Qaeda affiliation has been presented, and, crucially from the perspective of Indian analysts, it is still not certain whether the brothers began to be radicalised in their home city or while they were living abroad.
However, the incident has shaken India’s leaders from their comfortable conviction that Indian nationals would never sign up to the international terrorist cause. The logic behind this certainty was simple: India’s flourishing democratic system would always act as an effective shield against the development of a serious terrorist threat.
Uday Bhaskar of the Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses said: “It was not a question of if this would happen, but when”. There was also some sophistry in the claim that India was completely free from global terror networks. There may have been no significant involvement of Indian Muslims in terror activities outside the country, but internally India has been the victim of a rising wave of terror attacks.
India’s government has consistently blamed terrorist organisations based in Pakistan for the violence, rarely entertaining the idea in public that home-grown activists have been involved in any of the recent attacks, neither in the bombings of Mumbai’s commuter train network nor in the attacks on Delhi’s shopping markets.
Recent reports that Kafeel Ahmed’s father had turned to an extreme form of Islam while the family was living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s have been seized on with relief as evidence that this was not a transformation which took place within Indian mosques, and thus not, at root, an Indian problem.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already shifted the tone of his rhetoric and is no longer publicly commending India on the absence of international terrorist cells on its territory, but taking the line instead that terror is a global phenomenon which knows no borders.
IHT
