DOCTORED DETENTION

"Would you lend a SIM card to a cousin of yours?" It seemed like an innocuous question, coming from my panel producer. "If you were leaving a country and if there was plenty of talk time left in it?", he continued. "Why not?", I retorted. "And if your cousin went on to plot a terror attack, with you having no clue about it, would that also make you guilty of terror?" I knew what he was getting at. Whichever way you look at it, that's all Mohammad Haneef is guilty of. Of lending a SIM card to his cousin just before he left the UK for Australia, thanks to a new job. Does that make him a terrorist? And does that warrant solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a dark prison cell? I'm not so sure.

There are a couple of myths about terrorism that are being bandied about in the aftermath of this botched up attack.

One of the most oft-asked questions is this. How can educated Muslims do this? After all don't most terrorists fall under the blanket of misguided youth from conflict prone regions who have no access to education? Aren't they the ones who become easy pawns for evil terror mongers? Nothing could be further from the truth than this. Osama bin Laden, the world's most dreaded terrorist is himself a civil engineer. His number two man Ayman al-Zawahiri is a doctor from Egypt. Some of the main conspirators and exponents of 9/11 studied in Hamburg University. In fact they were referred to as the Hamburg Cell, which constituted the core of the perpetrators, Mohammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehi and Ramzi Binalshibh. Education was and will never be an insurance against terror. Terrorism of the Al-qaeda variety is a clash of two different worldviews. It's an ideological battle. Not a battle of deprivation.

The other recurring question is this. How can boys from Namma Bangalore be involved in this? How can a city which symbolises the best that globalisation and what the western world can offer, produce advocates of terror? Honestly, the Bangalore bit in this case is just incidental. These boys could have been from Gumidipoondi or Bagdogra or Dharamsala. Territorial boundaries cannot stymie the flow of terror. The global jihad does not recognise local identities and cultures. The unifying force is just a distorted vision of religion. How else can a boy brought up in Bangalore empathise with a war-torn Palestinian or a battered Iraqi? He probably won't even be able to identify Palestine on a map of the world.

The only way that terror can be stopped is by winning the war of ideas. Today the al-Qaeda is not just a dreaded terror machine. It's much more than that. It's a powerful idea that's prompting hundreds of thousands of young Muslims to give up all, and walk into the throes of death. The problem is that the so-called torch-bearers of the western world are bankrupt of ideas.

Eighty years ago, there was a similar battle of ideas. At that time it was against colonialism. A frail, be-spectacled, old man, wrapped in a loincloth and with a walking stick in hand, found an idea that could take on imperialism. Maybe therein lies the answer.