Meanwhile, Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has gone out of its way to encourage a sense of grievance among moderate Muslims through efforts like the Sachar committee. At the end of its grand tour across the country to seek out aggrieved Muslims, the committee recommended that in districts with large Muslim populations officials and policemen should be selected with Islam as their primary qualification. If Narendra Modi did this in reverse in Gujarat, he would be vilified and branded.

But, it’s all right for ‘secular’ leaders to use religion as a job qualification because they occupy the high ground. So the prime minister had no compunctions last week in accusing Modi of a ‘holocaust’ in Gujarat without noticing that he would then need to apply an even bigger word for what happened to the Sikhs in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister.

Dr Singh needs to choose his words more carefully and now that elections are no longer imminent he needs to recognise that his government has done nothing towards winning the fight against terrorism. If he does not recognise this, it is only a matter of time before we see in India the sort of attack on a political procession that happened in Karachi last week.

It will happen if we do not deal firmly with our home-grown Islamists. Moderate Muslims who inadvertently promote the Islamist cause by pretending that there is no terrorism in the name of Islam can be persuaded that they are wrong. All it needs is political will.