Clean chits before charges

Passport image of David Coleman Headley (source: Tribune India)

India Government has shown extraordinary reluctance in investigating local links to the 26/11 attacks. In fact, even when the attack was going on with prime real estate in Bombay under siege, many in the media and Government said there were only foreign hands behind the attacks. While the motivated bunch were burning up, brutalizing, sexually torturing inmates at two hotels and a Jewish center, secular blowhards were naturally more worried about retaliation against minorities which never happened.

Various freelance and amateur commentators have pointed out many fallacies in the convenient theories of the Government. There was no particular interest in fact finding. That such an attack is inconceivable without detailed recon, never seemed to have occurred to them.

But then again we know the compulsions of a secular political system. General elections were due in a few months and if they stirred up too much dust in Bombay, it might have cost them Delhi.

The capture of David Coleman Headley aka Daood Gilani, an American of Pakistani ancestry has clearly put the Government into an uncomfortable situation. Given that this is the FBI, it is not easy to dismiss the charges or create a bogey of Hindu/Jewish conspiracy. Moreover, the man seems to be intimately connected to the big boys in that business and seems to have left a huge trail across two continents. In other words, this is a major catch.

The news would have lingered on secondary headlines and off hours TV spots for a few days before disappearing - had it not been for the media's need to create titillation around a certain mysterious "Rahul" the aforementioned man frequently referred to in his email transcripts. The mysterious Rahul eventually turned out to be filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt's son. Mahesh Bhatt as we all know is a die hard secular with an almost physical need to assert the point on a regular basis.

Since then Bhatt senior has been playing the indignant father on prime time TV. The media for its part has already issued a clean chit to junior.

Now, strictly to maintain a semblance of parity in both religious and social justice terms (Rahul is only a quarter Muslim) - it would really be prudent to throw him into the cooler for a few days. Under the same circumstances a man from a Muslim ghetto would probably be given a slightly rougher treatment.

All these things again raise serious questions such as the nature of Bollywood as an industry and its nefarious linkages to jihad-mafia networks. They seem to run into terror related issues very frequently. Even when Bhatt junior was socializing with Headley, he was supposed to appear in a film tentatively titled "Suicide Bomber". This is perhaps a coincidence, but surely he would have researched the role a little? Being a resident of Bombay and coming from a background where people wear their politics on their T-Shirts, he should have chosen his company a tad more carefully.