And from our lovely Pamela Constable, comes this gem on Indian Muslims. Now then, she would have us know that in contrast to the accounts in the times or the guardian, the islamic citizens that are being targeted with suspicion are not those in Britain, where the terror plot was uncovered, or in the US where the planes were headed, but in India! What a journalistic scoop! Way to go WP editors!
This of course is in contrast to the account published only a day ago by her colleagues, Kevin and Joshua (see earlier post below), but then maybe Pamela didn't get the WP sunday edition delivered to her hotel in India.
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This from another blog:
In an email posted from Delhi, Pamela Constable, a high-flying foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, put it this way:
“I did not go to journalism school because I thought it was more important to get started in the real world, and I never looked back.”
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In interviews she comes across as shallow but eager to glorify herself as a "westerner in foreign lands" "a woman" "a christian" under difficult if not dangerous situations. An adventuress!
But its clear to those of us from those difficult regions that she belongs to the "air conditioned, five star hotel" journalists that live in their little cocktail circuit, ocassionally foraying into the regions beyond exploiting local aqauintaces - she does not even speak the local languages - before retreating to her priveliged environs.
She wrote a book - "Fragments of Grace" - here is an extract from the Telegraph in Calcutta:
"Fragments of Grace documents the turmoil and mayhem in south Asia, but also provides a glimpse of the lives of ordinary individuals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. But through it all, Constable remains an outsider for whom the religious, cultural and social life of this part of the world is unintelligible, hard, backward, dull and dirty. Let alone Afghanistan, even New Delhi is for Constable sweltering...full of wheedling beggars and haughty clerks and gloppy food and infuriating traffic?."
Here is another review of her book.
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She also finds that Pakistan practices a "reasonable" form of Islam.
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Muslims in India 'Targeted With Suspicion'
Residents of Thriving Bombay District Describe Rising Tension in Wake of Train Bombings
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 14, 2006; A07
BOMBAY -- At first glance, the Nayanagar district of Bombay could be a showcase for the rising prospects of India's long-struggling Muslim minority. It features wide, clean streets, brightly painted high-rise apartments and a populace that includes doctors, engineers and real estate agents.
But in the wake of the devastating July 11 train bombings in Bombay, in which more than 200 people were killed, residents here say they feel fingers of suspicion and hate pointing at all Muslims, not just jobless slum youths and bearded students from Islamic radical groups.
"We are law-abiding citizens, but the whole community is being targeted with suspicion now," said Azimuddin, 40, a physician who with dozens of neighbors rushed to help victims of one bombed train that had just pulled out of Nayanagar station. "Every one of us is a question mark."
Tensions have intensified in the past week, with warnings of further terrorist attacks in Bombay and New Delhi during India's Independence Day celebrations Tuesday. The U.S. Embassy has warned all American citizens in India to remain off the streets during the next week.
On top of that, the alleged bomb plot thwarted in Britain has added to the jittery sense of vulnerability across India, with all airports and military facilities on high alert. With most of the suspects in that case of Pakistani descent, the Times of India newspaper Saturday portrayed India as "truly in the arc of terror."
The cumulative impact on Muslim communities such as Nayanagar's is palpable. In a dozen conversations, residents barely contained their anger and bitterness as they traced a history of growing discrimination, ostracism and violence, punctuated by Bombay's Hindu-Muslim riots of 1993 and a worse rampage of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat state in 2002.
"Of course I'm angry. I'm 52 years old, and I grew up in a Bombay of friendship and compassion. That's gone now," said Abdul Majid, who owns a small construction company. "We are all against terrorism, but how are terrorists born? If you torture people and deny them jobs and education long enough, you create terrorists."
Government officials have noted with relief that Bombay's heterogeneous population pulled together quickly to restore normality to the huge, fast-paced seaside city that is home to both India's financial center and its powerhouse Bollywood entertainment industry.
But police investigations have led to the arrests of 13 Muslim men, including a Bombay physician and a software technician, all with alleged links to a banned Islamic students group and some with suspected ties to the Pakistan-based radical organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. There have been late-night raids in a dozen Muslim communities in Bombay and unusual security checks of Muslims traveling abroad, including several irate members of the pampered Bollywood set.
"This Islamophobia is being imported from the West and filtering like a poison into India's bloodstream," said Mahesh Bhatt, a Bollywood producer who complained that when his film crew flew to Dubai for a shoot last week, the sole Muslim, a choreographer, was singled out by police for questioning about his passport and travel.
Police officials here declined several requests for interviews, but in public statements and letters to newspapers last week, they insisted that Muslims in general are not being targeted because of the bombings. They also denied Indian press reports that the government had ordered special scrutiny of Muslims who travel abroad, including white-collar employees of multinational companies.
Some human rights activists in Bombay said the behavior of the police had been largely professional and not abusive after the bombings, despite the fact that they are under enormous pressure to solve the crimes and that most evidence so far has pointed to militant Muslims. Officials have met with Muslim community groups, called mohalla committees, seeking cooperation and promising restraint.
A senior government official in New Delhi, who spoke on condition he not be named, said it would be a grave error to tar India's 140 million Muslims with the terrorist brush. He said that despite occasional flare-ups of religious violence, radical groups seeking to exploit religious tensions have failed because India's secular democracy has been able to address Muslims' grievances and absorb them into Hindu-dominated society.
"To say that Indian Muslims are becoming terrorists, nothing could be a more dangerous assumption," the official said. He noted that to date, no Indian Muslims had been found to be involved in al-Qaeda. "There is a fundamental ethos shared by the majority of Muslims and Hindus," he said. "At the end of the day, the vast majority of both groups see through the game."
For years, however, activists have pointed out that Muslims, who make up about 15 percent of the populace, comprise only a tiny percentage of police, army officers, public servants and public university students. They have long blamed systematic exclusion by the Hindu-dominated government and society, and some have pressed for job and education quotas similar to those reserved for other Indian minorities.
Until recently, Indian officials tended to play down the problem, while some militant Hindu groups such as Bombay's Shiv Sena have denounced Muslims as self-defeating, religiously insular and untrustworthy because of their roots in Pakistan, the Muslim-ruled neighbor and rival nuclear power that broke off from India in 1947.
Now, there are signs that the establishment is belatedly recognizing the problem of Muslims being left behind. Outlook, a major newsweekly, ran a cover story last week on a 15 percent literacy gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. It described the high number of Muslim youths who quit school and become jobless as a newly "frightening" and "ominous" phenomenon.
There is also a growing realization that globalization, which has thrust India into a proud new era of information technology and international business development, has beamed a different message into its long-scattered and isolated Muslim communities. Instant access to information has raised their awareness of conflicts from Iraq to Lebanon and increased their identification with aggrieved Muslims elsewhere.
"It feels like the whole world is against Muslims," said one young man, checking his BlackBerry as he headed for Friday prayers at a mosque in Mahin, a lower-class Muslim district in Bombay where several hundred youths were rounded up and questioned after the train bombings.
Most people interviewed said they believed the bombings were the work of sophisticated international terrorists, not the result of homegrown, pent-up Muslim frustrations. But as Indian media reports this week described webs of connections between banned Indian Muslim groups, Pakistani radicals and pan-Arab militant groups, the line suddenly seemed to blur.
A variety of Hindus said they had good personal relations with neighbors or colleagues who are Muslim, and some said they felt confident India's secular fabric would survive the current specter of Islamic terrorism. But others confessed it was hard not to succumb to negative stereotypes and ill wishes toward the Muslim minority in the wake of so much mayhem and bloodshed.
"There is fear now in the Bombay psyche," said Ashok Seth, 45, a pharmacist who works near Nayanagar. "I am a Hindu and I sit and eat together with the Muslims in the next shop. They are not terrorists, they are my friends. But I'll be honest, there is a growing feeling that there is a fight in the world between the West and Muslims. And even here, some people say it's good if Muslims are being killed; the fewer left the better."
In the alleys of Mahin on Friday, clean-cut young men in jeans mingled with bearded religious students in skullcaps as hundreds of Muslims headed for the mosque. In 1993, Mahin was at the epicenter of religious rioting that convulsed Bombay and led to a series of bombings after Hindu radicals demolished a historic mosque.
But on July 11, as in wealthier Nayanagar, residents of this shabby district rushed to help victims of a bombed train that exploded near Mahin station. Everyone interviewed in the community said they condemned the train bombings, and several said they feared such acts made it even more difficult for Indian Muslims to achieve acceptance and success.
"Some brand this as a terror spot, but they should have seen how people came out with bedsheets to carry the wounded and the dead," said Deepak Talwar, 46, a lawyer in Mahin. "Of course Muslims' sentiments are hurt when they see gory images of Lebanon, but no one here wants to be a party to all that. Islam preaches harmony, and that is the only way for us all to survive."
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