Asif Khan Inc.

Airborne terror, contd.

Sunday morning (though its past noon now, but its the early part of Sunday for me), and its been a fairly fulfilling weekend till now.

In continuum with my previous post, I must say that the stand taken by the Indian govt. on the inhuman treatment meted out to the hapless souls aboard the NW Airlines, Flight # 42 is laudable. But what doesn’t enthuse me in the least is the fact is that the Dutch govt. has still not issued a formal apology for this action, although their Indian ambassador has apparently conveyed ‘deep regrets’. (In diplomatese, there is a difference between regret and apology). All this after subjecting these men to inhuman conditions, no access to the Indian embassy, or their families…asking them questions about ‘why do you grow a beard’ and ‘who taught you the Quran’…has it come to this now that any sanely practising, Allah fearing adherer of Islam would be questioned on the very basis of his faith? And to top it all, which of course doesn’t come as a surprise, is the US govt’s justification of this act. Mistakes do happen, but then you should have the courage to gracefully accept them and apologize. Would this have been accepted by the Western world, had we Indians subjected a Westerner to a similar plight?

I’d just like to juxtapose this event against one of the airborne terror alarm events which happened yesterday (there were apparently 7 diversions to flights in a span of 24 hours due to terror alerts, as reported by TOI today). In one such event, there was passenger who was carrying a stick of dynamite in his luggage; however, after some interrogation was let off as it turned out that although he wasn’t carrying the stick for explosive purposes, it was against airline security policy to let it on board. It turns out that this passenger was a US citizen, apparently not a brown Asian. I dread to think of the possibility of a similar situation being encountered by a brown Asian (and to top it, a Muslim)…another plain open-and-shut case of an Islamic fundamentalist Jehadi conspiracy of blowing up airplanes in mid-air?