India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has several times publicly complimented his country on "not having a single member of al-Qaida despite having the second largest Muslim population in the world." India, with 156 million Muslims, is beaten only by Indonesia's 189 million.

After an Indian doctor rammed a jeep into a structure at Glasgow's international airport, this claim is no longer tenable. In fact, the amalgam of groups loosely referred to as "al-Qaida" has had a significant presence in India since 1995. Recruitment moved beyond Kashmir to the hinterland after 1998, the year the Kashmir jihad began losing steam due to public disillusionment within the state's Sunni population.

Since then, several hundred thousand Sunnis have migrated from Kashmir to other parts of India, setting up families and businesses that have erased their separatist impulses. However, less because of Pakistani influence than the presence of Palestinian students enrolled in engineering, medical and other professional colleges, several hundred Sunni youth in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi have secretly been recruited into the numerous front organizations of the Wahabbi International, in particular the Students Islamic Movement of India.

A steady flow of mainly Saudi funds into Sunni groups, such as the Tablighi Jamaat, have resulted in the overshadowing of moderates by extremists. They are usually ignored by local police if they confine themselves to "foreign" causes such as Palestine, Chechnya or Iraq.

Despite frequent assertions about the "universality" of terrorism, India -- in common with other democracies -- has tended to adopt a softer standard against those plotting harm to locations outside the country's borders, and to focus on locating and neutralizing groups such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islam, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad, all of which are headquartered in that much-praised ally in the "war on terror," Pakistan.

The bombings in Britain showed this policy to be as myopic as U.S. policy toward Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These two countries are at the hub of the Wahabbi International, barring a thinning pro-Western crust that is either ineffective or unwilling to take action against terrorist groups operating under cover of social, cultural or human rights labels.

Fortunately for incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Indians have shown themselves to be incompetent in executing terrorist attacks, in contrast to the far more effective Pakistanis, Saudis and Palestinians. Hopefully, the lower level of indoctrination and motivation that such incompetence reveals will continue to be a feature of the Indian component of al-Qaida. Since the government strives to treat Muslims a cut better than it does high-caste Hindus, few Sunnis in India take seriously the rants of Palestinian and other foreign students urging them to take a frontline role in operations against the occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan -- although hatred for U.S. and NATO policy runs high.

Thanks to Iraq, for the first time since the 1920s -- when a group of Indian Muslims took up cudgels on behalf of the deposed Caliph of Turkey -- foreign policy has become an issue dividing Muslims from the rest of the Indian population in a way that Pakistan or the jihad in Kashmir never did. The destruction of life and property in a large Muslim country such as Iraq has been taken to heart by Muslims worldwide, even more than Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Because the majority of the population there is Shiite, there is the further danger that Iraq will ignite a Shiiite jihad against the West and its allies. Events in Lebanon since 1982 have made Israel the only non-Sunni Muslim country to face Shiite terrorists.

Sonia Gandhi, who may accurately be termed the "owner" of India's ruling Congress Party, is partial towards NGOs, and has accommodated several within the freewheeling higher echelons of the current administration. This preference is shared by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who astonished the world a week ago by publicly expressing sympathy not for the intended victims of the latest terror attack in Britain, but for the perpetrators and their families, whose plight, in his words, "caused sleepless nights."

This empathetic approach to terrorists has infected his administration, resulting in a significant increase of jihadi morale after a decade of defeats at the hands of a well-motivated security infrastructure. In the insurgency-wracked states in the Northeast and Kashmir, the Congress-led governments have shown a willingness to turn the other cheek -- resulting in a rapid increase in terrorist capabilities. Ironically, this soft approach has been endorsed enthusiastically by both the United States and its military allies, who have performed a miracle in Iraq and Afghanistan by discovering "moderate Sunni extremists" in the first and "moderate Taliban" in the second.

Today in India, what may be termed the "Norwegian" approach to terrorists -- viewing them as misguided idealists who only need encouragement to abandon violence -- has been carried to such lengths that President Abdul Kalam could not find time to meet the families of the victims of the December 13, 2001 Parliament House attack, but spared an hour for the wife of one of the masterminds.

In Sonia Gandhi's India, it is once again fashionable to defend terrorists and condemn the security services as "brutal fascists," which could lead to a sharp and sudden fall in morale. The Indian prime minister's reaction to the British terror attempt has been to focus not on the act itself or the culpability of the perpetrators, but to clutch at excuses for their conduct.

In March 2006, Sheikh Osama bin Laden publicly began lumping Hindus together with Jews and Christians as infidels needing to be sorted out by the use of force. Although such an addition to the Wahabbi pantheon of devils is scripturally unsound -- there being considerable daylight between the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) and the more easygoing Hindus -- it has been mandated by the fact that the Sheikh needs the protection of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to continue to elude capture by NATO forces. Within the International Islamic Front Against the Jews and Crusaders formed by bin Laden in 1998, only the Pakistan-based outfits include India in the list of target countries, a choice not endorsed by any other group, including those based in Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa and the Middle East.

Despite the expansion of jihadi networks in India since Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral first began to replace the mailed fist with the velvet glove in 1997, India's jihadi base is still statistically small in both absolute and relative terms. More than for the West, the "doctors' plot" that has unfolded in Britain has been a wake-up call to the government of India to once again invest time and effort in uncovering jihadi networks. Should Manmohan Singh fail, and the "al-Qaida" network in India continue to expand and menace the international community, he would be putting at considerable risk India's future as an equal and steadily prospering partner of the Western democracies.

(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University.)

Courtesy: www.upiasiaonline.com, July 9, 2007