We still don’t know enough about the specific Islamic experience of Bangalore doctors Sabeel Ahmed and Mohammad Haneef. But the clichéd Indian boast that ‘there isn’t a single al Qaeda operative who is Indian’ is already being mocked by those whose politics wants Indian Muslims to be tarred by the same brush as the Saudis. On the other side, the apologists are doing everything to deny that any one of ‘them’ could be Indian. Doctors of Asian descent — already besieged by the UK’s announcement of ‘preferring’ European doctors to Indian and Gordon Brown’s latest statement urging more detailed ‘background checks’ on immigrants — are fearful. According to the General Medical Council register in the UK, of 90,000 overseas doctors, the biggest contingent of 27,588 is from India.

Information is power, and in this case, we are still powerless. But a few questions need to be articulated. First, there is the shock at well-educated men from Bangalore ‘taking to this kind of thing’. But is this an irony at all? As scholars Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey revealed last year about the WTC bombings in 1993, African US Embassy bombings of 1998, 9/11, Bali bombings in 2002 and the London train bombings in 2005, “all those credited with masterminding the five terrorist attacks had a university education and none of them had attended a madrassa.” Within the sample, the scholars found that 54 per cent had attended university (only 52 per cent of Americans have!) So to look at the uneducated and undernourished as the sullen perpetrators of violence has been discredited as an explanation.

... contd.