The Hizb-ut-Tahrir has been active on British campuses since the mid-1990s, recruiting Muslim students

“India has over 140 million Muslims, and it has the second-highest Muslim population in the world, and yet you will not find even one Muslim joining international terror networks.” It was Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Science and Technology, who made this proud assertion at the Tehelka London Summit in early June this year.

There was considerable truth in this: Guantanamo Bay and other prisons like Belmarsh in Britain and elsewhere in the world may be crawling with hundreds of prisoners accused of terrorism since the attacks on America in September, 2001 -- prisoners drawn from all nationalities -- but Indian Muslims were conspicuous by their absence despite their large numbers. However fractured relations between Muslims and Hindus might be in India -- the legacy of the Partition apart, between Ayodhya and Gujarat Indian Muslims have suffered enormously in communal carnages in recent years -- Indian Muslims didn’t do global jehad.

You know you are tempting fate when you make such a bold assertion. True, there was the case of Dhiren Barot, born to a Hindu family, but then he was born in Kenya and grew up in Britain. Barot had converted to Islam in 1993, and become Abu Musa al-Hindi. He trained in Pakistan in 1995 and joined the Al Qaeda network. He was arrested in 2004, and found to possess materials indicating planned terrorist acts in the United States, where he had gone on a student visa but never studied. He confessed during his trial, and is now on a 30-year prison term in Britain.

And so that assertion gained currency, and columnists like Tom Friedman of The New York Times pointed out the absence of Indian Muslims in global terror networks to conclude that Muslims who live in democratic societies like the United States and India, where they have the latitude to express their grievances, don’t resort to terror. Generalisations are always difficult, and generalisations about India, more so: Nirad Chaudhuri wrote many years ago that in India, even exceptions run into millions. And so it is, that nemesis has finally caught up with that assertion. And with the arrests of Kafeel Ahmed, now lying in a burns ward with 90 percent injuries, and Sabeel Ahmed in the UK, and the detention of Mohammed Hanif, Kafeel’s cousin in Queensland, Austrlalia, some Indian Muslims have become part of the ever changing, miasmic contours of Al Qaeda.

To be sure, the authorities are correctly and properly pointing out that Indians in particular are not under suspicion. A Scotland Yard official said: “Nobody is convicted yet and we are a long way from any trial. A number of individuals are arrested and they belong to several nationalities and communities. There is no particular attention paid to any national origin.” An official at the Indian High Commission in London said the investigation was entirely a British matter, and Indian authorities were cooperating, where appropriate, in investigations in India.

Muslims in Britain are layered. Many bristle at the idea of hardline organisations representing them

Those are indeed proper replies, but when one sifts through political correctness it is clear that the context for the Indian Muslim, and indeed all holders of Indian passports, will change. Adil Mehdi, a scholar at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies who has been researching the Deobandi tradition in India, points out that many Pakistanis have to wait weeks, if not months, to get visas. Indian Muslims used to be able to get visas within a week, like any other Indian. That could change.

In itself, the involvement of Indian Muslims does not surprise Francis Robinson, an expert on South Asian Islam at the Royal Holloway College at the University of London. “For anyone who understood the way in which the substantial number of networks actually exist in the Indian subcontinent, this development is not surprising at all. Indians are now everywhere, and it would be very surprising if these processes and networks did not reflect Islamic activism in some way. There is a disjunction between India’s self-perception and awareness and the reach of the networks,” Robinson says.

British politicians have been careful: the new home secretary Jacqui Smith was calm and composed in parliament, not invoking religion, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown too, in marked contrast to his messianic predecessor Tony Blair, did not invoke religious or moralistic imagery and referred to those arrested as criminals and not as terrorists.

But policy experts and others familiar with investigations say that the authorities haven’t paid enough attention to Indian Muslims. This is not so much because they are swayed by the democratic rhetoric in India but because, at about 1,31,000, they form a small part of the 1.55 million Muslims in Britain, which in itself is less than three percent of the total population of Britain. (In comparison, there are 6,58,000 Pakistanis, and 2,60,000 Bangladeshis, and at 1,80,000 even white converts outnumber Indian Muslims in Britain). Furthermore, while the Pakistani Muslims are descendants of mill and agricultural workers -- some from Punjab, others from Mirpur -- and Bangladeshis are drawn from Sylhet and many trace their origins to deckhands, a sizeable portion of Indian Muslims in Britain are what are called “the service class.” That is, officials and babus, clerks and accountants. One telling statistic: some 41% of Indian Muslims are in full-time employment, compared with 26% of Pakistani Muslims, and 23% of Bangladeshi Muslims. In comparison, some 55% of Hindus and 43% of Sikhs are in full-time employment.

Two out of three Muslims in Britain are from the subcontinent, however, and among those many are Barelvis, a Sunni movement of the Hanafi community, and others are drawn from Deobandi and Salafi movements. The Muslim community in Britain is extremely heterogeneous, and the tag “British Muslim” conceals enormous diversities of languages, ethnicities, nationalities and attitudes towards life. Many Muslims in Britain bristle at the idea of the hardline Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) representing them.