Renaming %u2018Muslim Indian%u2019 Tuesday August 7 2007 13:32 IST S GURUMURTHY
An interesting story and instructive too. Kafeel Ahmed, an Islamist Jihadi - who, along with his brother, Dr Sabeel Ahmed, planned to blow up the Glasgow airport - has succumbed to the burns he inflicted on himself to do what he intended to but fortunately failed to.
Indians, particularly Muslims among them, are rightly indignant that the two Bangaloreans have trashed the reputation of Indians as peace-loving people and also added the Muslims in India to the list of global terror suspects and Al-Qaeda sympathisers. Yes, for their acts which have done irreversible damage to Muslims in India and outside as much as to Indians and India, they are rightly demonised. But without sounding perverse, can it be said that what they have done has also the potential to do good to India, to its Muslims? How? Read on.
First, to partition India and its people, Mohammed Ali Jinnah divided the people who were just Indians into %u2018Indians%u2019 and %u2018Muslims%u2019 and got Pakistan exclusively for Muslims who refused to be Indians, leaving the mainland India as the motherland for the rest of Indians including Muslims. So, at the dawn of freedom, it was Pakistan for Muslims and India for Indians. Next, post-freedom, national political leaders divided Indians into vote banks, classified them according to their faith and identified an Indian national who was a Muslim as %u2018
