The Chief Justice of India made an important comment last week that went unnoticed except by the Indian Express. While announcing his decision to move the Srinagar sex scandal case to Chandigarh because no lawyer in the state of Jammu & Kashmir was prepared to defend the suspects, Justice Y.K. Sabharwal reprimanded the J & K Bar Association for its decision to deny legal aid to the defendants and for saying that the sex scandal showed the ‘entire world the real face of India in Kashmir.' Justice Sabharwal said, ‘It is only in India that despite these comments you are being heard. In no other democracy will it be heard'.

With this comment the Chief Justice becomes the first high official in India to acknowledge that our home-grown Islamists are taking advantage of Indian democracy to propagate unacceptably retrograde views on a wide range of subjects. Views that maybe acceptable in Saudi Arabia or in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan but should have no place in a secular country like ours.

Yet, we have Muslim priests routinely telling Muslims which songs they can sing, what clothes they should wear and even whether a woman should stay with her husband or not. The atmosphere of Islamist orthodoxy thus created results in ordinary Indian Muslims identifying with pan-Islamism to such an extent that thousands took to the streets of Mumbai to protest against George Bush's visit to India but it was hard to get even a hundred into the streets to condemn the bombings that killed nearly 200 people on Mumbai's commuter trains in July.

Since 9/11 the pan-Islamic identity manifests itself mostly as a sense of persecution and this is beginning to dangerously influence the way Indian Muslims see themselves and most high officials in our ‘secular' government in Delhi have responded by encouraging the sense of grievance. The Prime Minister did just this last week when he told Chief Ministers that the terrorist threat was so serious that our nuclear installations could be targeted but quickly added that Muslims must not be targeted as a community. Think of the message that goes to the police? Does it not indicate that the Prime Minister wants them to continue fighting only a defensive war? This is all they have done so far and yet there is a deep sense of grievance in the community that is being fed constantly by sympathy from high officials in Delhi. So when twelve Muslim businessmen were detained recently by Dutch authorities for dangerous behaviour on board a Northwest flight the first reaction of our Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was to charge the Dutch government with racial profiling. It was only when it was revealed that the twelve men were carrying sixty mobile phones and using them to call each other in flight that the MEA exercised discretion.

Meanwhile, the media portrayed the twelve businessmen as victims and interviewed family members who aggressively demanded that the Dutch government apologise for detaining their relatives. They were only doing some ‘masti' said family members on nationwide TV and they would not have been detained if they were not Muslims. Anybody who has taken a flight in recent times knows this to be complete nonsense. As a frequent flier let me say that I have a fit every time a fellow passenger tries using a mobile phone after the doors are shut.

Coming up as we are to the fifth anniversary of 9/11 next week and in view of the recently foiled plot to blow up transatlantic airliners mid-flight, by using mobile phones to detonate liquid explosives, what basis do the twelve businessmen have for behaving like victims? It is because of Indian democracy that they have been able to project their side of the story and it is because of the ‘secular, liberal' nature of our media that not one TV reporter asked the detainees why they had used mobile phones on a flight in defiance of orders from flight attendants.

We need to ask ourselves if we are not carrying things too far. We know that the bombers on Mumbai's trains were all Muslim. We know that they would have taken shelter in one of this city's Muslim areas, possibly even in mosques, but when the Mumbai police started detaining Muslims for questioning, we in the media spoke in one voice against the ‘targeting of a particular community'. The cry was taken up by Muslim MPs in Parliament and last week Mumbai's Police Commissioner, A.N. Roy, wrote a letter virtually apologising for his law enforcement measures to such patently Islamist organisations as the Raza Academy and the Dar ul Uloom Mohammadiya. Even if bodies like this are not directly involved in terrorist acts they are responsible for propagating the religious orthodoxy that spawns them. Instead of apologising for his actions the Police Commissioner would have done better to stand up, as the Chief Justice did, for Indian democracy and remind Muslims that the reason why they have more rights than they do anywhere else in the world is because of Indian democracy.

Indian Muslims need to recognise that the world faces a terrorist problem that is at the moment entirely Islamic in nature. The ‘jehad' is being fought against us infidels in the name of Allah, it is funded by Islamist countries like Iran and Syria, and the soldiers and suicide bombers of this supposedly ‘holy war' are all Muslims who believe they are doing God's work.

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