By Amelia Gentleman
NEW DELHI:

When India's leaders travel the world to spread the good news about the emerging modern India, high on the list of advertised achievements (along with the booming economy and flourishing democracy) is the absence of any Al Qaeda activity within its borders.

Speaking to CNN during a visit to Washington exactly a year ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh highlighted the well-worn point.

"I take pride in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of Al Qaeda or participated in the activities of Taliban," he said.

The argument was repeated by the leader of the governing Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, in Brussels earlier this year. More recently still, a cabinet minister, Kapil Sibal, reminded listeners at home that India had "the second highest Muslim population in the world, and yet you will not find even one Muslim joining international terror networks."

With ties between India and the United States growing closer, even George Bush has occasionally taken up the refrain. Introducing Singh to his wife, Laura, on the sidelines of Group of 8 summit meeting in Moscow, he is reported by bystanders to have remarked something along the lines of: Meet the prime minister of India, a country with a population of 150 million Muslims but not a single Al Qaeda member among them.

So the news that Kafeel Ahmed, the man who mounted a failed attack on the Glasgow airport last month, is an born and bred Indian national who spent most of his life in India's flagship IT city, Bangalore, has triggered profound unease among politicians and security officials.

Newspapers reflected national alarm. Beneath images of the car in flames driven by Ahmed outside the airport entrance, one asked: "Made in India?" Another headline demanded: "Has the global jihad arrived in India?"

With Ahmed, his younger brother, Sabeel, and his cousin, Mohammed Haneef, still being investigated, much remains unclear. No evidence of Al Qaeda affiliation has been presented, and, crucially from the perspective of Indian analysts, it is still not certain whether the brothers began to be radicalized in their home city or while they were living abroad.

However, the incident has shaken India's leaders from their comfortable conviction that Indian nationals would never sign up to the international terrorist cause.

The logic behind this certainty was simple: India's flourishing democratic system would always act as an effective shield against the development of a serious terrorist threat.

Explaining why Indian Muslims had not signed up to Al Qaeda's campaign, Singh said in the same interview in Washington: "Being a secular democracy where all religions are free to practice their respective faiths without fear, without favor. I think that's something which has prevented that sort of eventuality."

Security analysts point out that India has long maintained this complacent position in the face of growing evidence to the contrary.

Uday Bhaskar of the Delhi-based Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses said: "It was not a question of if this would happen but when."

There was also some sophistry in the claim that India was completely free from global terror networks. There may have been no significant involvement of Indian Muslims in terror activities outside the country, but internally India has been the victim of a rising wave of terror attacks.

India's government has consistently blamed terrorist organizations based in Pakistan for the violence, rarely entertaining the idea in public that home-grown activists have been involved in any of the recent attacks - neither in the bombings of Mumbai's commuter train network nor in the attacks on Delhi's shopping markets.

"It is a complete fiction that India has purveyed for years that every act of terrorism is perpetrated by individuals from Pakistan, and that none of its own people is involved," said Ajai Shukla, a security analyst in Delhi. Ongoing anger over the killings of 2,500 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, for example, had led to the recruitment of many Indian Muslims in that state to terror cells, Shukla said, a fact the government refused to recognize.

Although police investigations are still under way and largely concealed from public scrutiny, terrorists behind the recent attacks in India appeared at the very least to have had support from local fundamentalist groups, said Ashok Mehta, another independent security analyst. "It is true that there was no direct involvement of Indian Muslims in terror activities outside India, but there is no doubt that fundamentalist groups like SIMI - the Students Islamic Movement of India - have been active here," he said.

Brahma Chellaney, professor in strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, said the Bangalore connection had "shattered the Indian belief that democracy is a deterrent to radicalization."

Indian politicians have been monitoring the progress of the Glasgow investigations closely, with acute attention directed to the question of where the radicalization process happened.

Recent reports that Kafeel Ahmed's father had turned to an extreme form of Islam while the family was living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s have been seized on with relief as evidence that this was not a transformation which took place within Indian mosques, and thus not, at root, an Indian problem.

The idea that these were globalized individuals, one-offs, fighting for a global ideology, rather than Indians protesting at domestic injustices like the Gujarat murders is more palatable to the Indian government.

There is an undercurrent of pragmatic realism entering into the government's line on terror, with officials recognizing that within a population so large, such exceptions to the rule are inevitable. With this approach, they hope the Bangalore link will not scar India's reputation as a broadly Al Qaeda-free zone.

The U.S. position is that this was a unique and isolated incident and that India is still "to be congratulated" for having avoided significant radicalization of its Muslim population. Sources added, however, that U.S. officials would heighten their awareness of individuals from India with ties to the Gulf.

Meanwhile there has been a frenzied scurrying to tweak the standard government speeches on this theme.

Singh has already shifted the tone of his rhetoric and is no longer publicly commending India on the absence of international terrorist cells on its territory, but taking the line instead that terror is a global phenomenon which knows no borders.

"Labelling Indians as terrorists or Pakistanis as terrorists is best avoided. Terrorists are terrorists. They don't belong to any community or religion," he declared.