The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front — perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India — is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a “well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India’s most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

For those Western critics that say Islam does not enough to to condemn terrorism, perhaps they should look at India, home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations — around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India’s 1.1 billion people.

 On Wednesday, it was the turn of Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa in the northern city of Lucknow — a traditional centre for Muslims and religious scholarship. He rejected terrorism as anti-Islamic after he and his colleagues had been accused of apostasy over their pacifist stance by at group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen.

Indian Mujahideen made threats against the madrasa in which they also claimed responsibility for last week’s bomb blasts in Jaipur, western India, which killed 63 people.

“The reaction of terrorists to our stand against terror has shown that we were moving in the right direction,” Rasheed said.

   Apparently a “Movement Against Terrorism” has been created by clerics to exhort imams to use Friday prayers at mosques across India to speak out against terrorism.

This was no flash in the pan. Earlier this year, tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting near Delhi at the 150-year-old Darool-Uloom Deoband — whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan — and denounced terrorism as against Islam.

It is not surprising that Rasheed said they had received support from Darool-Uloom Deoband, Indian clerics appear to be increasingly outspoken, perhaps not surprising in a country where there is a centuries-old tradition of preaching religious tolerance.

How much is this outspoken criticism happening in other Muslim countries? And how much is being reported in the Western press? I would be eager to know more.

 Despite a history of religious clashes, India’s tolerance often seems to win through. It was the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was famed in the 16th century by many for his religious tolerance and who initiated scholarly debates with Muslim, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.

Many of India’s bombings are blamed on Islamic militants, although few groups every claim responsibility and few people are ever arrested. The attacks have mostly failed to incite Muslim-Hindu tensions.

Here in New Delhi, I always enjoy taking foreign visitors to India to the Sufi shrine in Nizamuddin. My latest guest was a U.S. diplomat based in Pakistan. Hardly allowed out in Islamabad - let alone able to visit a mosque — the diplomat wallowed in the warmth of the visit and the relaxed atmosphere of the Qawwali singers.

The bungled police investigation into the killing of a teenage girl in Noida would almost be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. It led me wondering about crime in a booming India and yet again whether India has the infrastructure - this time it’s police not highways - to deal with yet another challenge from a booming economy.

In the case of Noida, one of India’s up-coming hi-tech cities, a teenager girl was found dead, her throat slit, in her room.  Police name a “prime suspect”, the Nepali house helper. But a family friend later finds the home help — his throat slit apparently like the victim’s — in the terrace of the same house as the victim.

The police had somehow missed the second corpse on their visits to the murder scene.

According to some newspapers on Wednesday, police are now clueless. There are unconfirmed reports of reporters contaminating the murder scene, forensic evidence left unsealed on the spot.

Firstly, why are domestic helps so often immediately named as suspects? I’ve lost count of the number of newspaper stories about suspect maids. I wonder how many are proved wrong.

And secondly, are police with the resources and expertise to deal with new and growing crimes in India’s burgeoning urban cities?

The murder case has resonated in the media, perhaps helped by the fact that this was the kind of rising middle class family in India that millions identify with — a dentist couple in the new city of Noida where thousands of white collar professionals now live in newly-built tower blocks.

But for all it’s gleaming malls and its location a few miles away from Delhi, Noida is part of Uttar Pradesh, what is often called India’s most populous and lawless state.  It’s hardly new to controversy when it comes to the police.

Remember the Nithari serial murders in Noida last year? Then also the police were widely criticised for ignoring the initial pleas of poor Indians in a slum nearby to probe the case of missing children. Later more than a dozen bodies were found at the back of a nearby upscale house.

From this evidence, this new tech city of Noida is living with a police force that is struggling to modernise.

People I have spoken to in Noida — including a foreign executive with a software company — are very worried about rising crime and the lack of police responses.

As India grows, crime may also rise. For many foreigners, crime in India often seems very low given widespread poverty that contrasts with huge shows of wealth. Try living in Sao Paulo and Mexico City, where thousands of people are kidnapped every year, to see what real insecurity is.

India is in danger of heading that way as wealth disparities rise and cities grow. Will India’s police be able to nip this trend in the bud?

So far, looking at this latest Noida case, the omens are not good.

First impressions count. That’s true no less with airports, the gateway to a globalised world for any country.

Which is why the United States and India may have more in common than they like to think.

I have been one of those thousands that have spent three hours in Delhi International Airport making it from check-in though to the boarding gate. Which is why I read with interest the recent spat between deputy planning chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and civil aviation minister Praful Patel over who is responsible for the chaos.

But this kind of controversy is not just confined to India. I read this piece in May from Thomas L. Friedman, the author who coined “The World is Flat”. The full article is here. But have a look at this paragraph.

“A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.”

Having lived in Washington DC before moving to India, I can sympathise with Mr. Friedman. Some of the worst queues outside India, I have seen at airports was at Dulles and JFK airports.

Are India and the United States two sides of the same coin?

I think one can draw up correlations between the state of a country’s main airports and its attitude to the globalised world. Travel to Chile and it capital has Latin America’s best airport, as befits a country that also leads Latin America in embracing globalisation.

Then look at Singapore, a country that depends on international trade for its survival. Or Beijing’s new airport, not surprising for a country dependent on export-led growth.

Which is why India’s airports, despite some improvements, show its ambivalent attitude towards globalisation. Whether its retail or financial services, India still feels it can shun the world. As my colleague Simon Denyer recently posted, look at how little media coverage was given to Myanmar’s tragedy. Perhaps U.S. airports, and the controversial immigration treatment that scares many travellers, also underscores how this country feels it does not need the rest of the world.

While there are improvements in India — Hyderabad, and perhaps Bangalore, it’s been late in coming. Some may be half-hearted. Bangalore’s new airport has no new access road, angering business leaders.

Rather like the United States, India still is a huge federal country that still looks into itself. Indeed, India has so many challenges for itself, from caste violence to separatist insurgencies, it may be understandable. For both countries, the outside world still isn’t top of the agenda.

Which is why global travellers here, like global business, may be in for a long haul.

The issue of redressing the imbalance of Hinduism's ancient caste system by creating job and college entry quotas for lower caste and other disadvantaged groups in India seems to be gaining headway in an election year. Now it may be the turn for private industry.

Parties across India's political spectrum appear to be seeing caste-based reservations, as the quotas are known, as potential vote winners. It is a sign again that caste consciousness will become ever more important in what in theory is a secular Indian state.

Now multinationals enjoying the fruits of an Indian economic boom may find they are not immune. Much to the horror of many industrialists worried about their international competitiveness.

India's Supreme Court has already this year upheld a government policy to reserve about half of all state college seats for students from lower castes, in what some call the world's biggest affirmative action scheme.

Then, the Indian Express quoted on TuesdayHindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Gopinath Munde as demanding quotas for lower castes in private companies. His comments were not endorsed officially, but the caste issue was out of the bag for a party that could well win the next general election. The Hindu nationalists' election strategists must realise they could win millions of votes with such policies before a general election due by early 2009.

Turn a few pages of the Indian Expressand there is a full-page advert for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, known as the "Queen of the Untouchables" and the potential "king maker" in the next general elections. Celebrating her first year in power, she proudly espouses her move to introduce quotas to private companies participating in state partnerships in her state, India's most populous. It was the first prominent policy in India to include private business into the quota system.

I recently returned from Bangalore covering the Karnataka state election in southern India where the Janata Dal (S), the main regional party, made headlines by proposing to reserve about a third of seats in IT companies in Bangalore for local Karnataka residents.

IT multinationals are currently free to hire from anywhere in India -- a policy that has increasingly annoyed many local Karnataka residents. Karnataka has its own language and many feel they are discriminated against as highly-educated Indians move to their state to work .

Most leading businesses have shunned the idea of quotas, worried it will worsen their competiveness in a global market, especially in the fast moving world of IT.

For those that think that all this talk of caste quotes in private industry is just small parties playing politics, remember it was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a 2006 speech, who first raised the spectre of quotas in private industry.

He then called on companies to take voluntary action to help lower castes get jobs, a statement at the time widely seen as a warning to India's booming business sector to act or face possible legislation.

India's economy may be booming, but this debate highlights how these religious and social issues of inclusiveness could dictate the election campaign. And then companies may find they are not immune to the issues of caste and Hinduism, no matter how proud they are of their global branding.

Murmurs of discontent have risen in some ranks of the ruling Congress about the influence of the Gandhi dynasty in the party.

Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh criticised last week how decision-making within Congress was made in a “narrow context” — meaning the Gandhis. He quickly backtracked by swearing loyalty to the family, but only after being publicly snubbed by Sonia Gandhi.

This came amid a controversy over Rahul Gandhi’s very public trips around India — leading to him being called “Crown Prince”. Some said he was overshadowing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Clearly there is controversy over what should be the role of these two Gandhi’s – the heirs to the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty that has run India on and off since Independence – in an election year.

Around the same time I had been in Karnataka, spending a hot afternoon at a rally by Sonia while covering this key state election. Sonia spoke in Hindi to thousands of people who only understood Kannada, one of the languages of Karnataka. As a journalist, I found it difficult to find one exciting quote I could use for my story — something unusual for most politicians who understand like no one the value of the sound bite.

Sonia obviously struggles to be great public speaker, but I wondered why no effort has been made either to get a translator for the crowd, or for her speechwriters to present a more media-friendly speech for the Karnataka election.

As Sonia spoke, I turned around behind me to look at the faces of the crowd. Many were falling asleep in the heat, others chatted among themselves. Many people seemed eager to go home.

The next day Hindu nationalist BHP party aides told me they were rubbing the hands in glee at the lack of a strong message in Sonia’s speech.

The same aides were also happy that Congress had not put forward a candidate for the chief minister’s job, common practice in a party where the top brass plays a game and divide and rule with state-level officials.

While Congress may openly criticise Singh for betraying the family name, the more important question for Congress may be asking if the Gandhi name still inspires the kind of voters who attended this rally. They may need to worry about the loyalty of voters.

Few have a bad word for Sonia. But when I asked people why they had come, most said it was to glimpse her as one would turn out to see a Bollywood celebrity. Some said it was to see her “fair skin.” But it was not about politics.

Driving back from the rally, a journalist with 20 years experience in India told me that one could easily forget that Congress leaders in decades past could be awe-inspring public speakers that would draw tens of thousands of eager voters — He mentioned Indira Gandhi as one and he contrasted Sonia with the reception that BJP Narendra Modi had received in rallies.

The string of state election defeats show both Rahul and Sonia are clearly struggling to resonate with voters. One wonders if the time will come when more members of Congress start to ask if the Gandhi dynasty needs to make way for newer faces — a “Modi” equivalent for Congress.