Our twelve countrymen who faced a traumatic experience in Amsterdam last week are not the first to be labeled potential terrorists: I was at the receiving end of American security officials at Frankfurt on December 7, 1989, soon after my brush with terrorists in the Punjab!

On December 5, I was traveling to Bucharest via Frankfurt to take up an assignment as our country’s Ambassador in Romania. The Air India flight to Frankfurt from Delhi was delayed; I was to connect with a Lufthansa flight to Bucharest but missed it because of the delay. On the morning of December 7 Air India put us on the next available flight to Bucharest. The airlines was Pan Am.

One of its planes had been blown up some months earlier by suspected Middle East terrorists. This sent the Americans into a tizzy and turned all brown-skinned people into suspects. My wife and I, our attendant and two Indian sailors were the only brown-skinned persons on that Pan Am flight.

One of the airlines’ security men was an African-American, the other a white. Though I told them I was going to Bucharest to take up a diplomatic assignment, they would have none of it. We were referred to a German agency that they had hired and put us through a grueling two-hour search.

Was this racism? Was the treatment of the 12 Mumbaikars racism? Maybe, maybe not. We in India are guilty of many biases ourselves - including casteism and communalism.

... contd.