Derided by the media and under pressure to show results following the series of terror attacks in the country, the security establishment recently announced a number of arrests relating to the explosions in Ahmedabad and Bangalore and the earlier ones in Jaipur.

While it is praiseworthy that the police acted comparatively quickly this time in tracing the culprits, it later turned out that some of those arrested, whose names the media had readily released, had no involvement in the dastardly acts.

But the damage had already been done, as a ’suspect’ told a newspaper after his release: “I will have to live with a ‘terrorist’ tag for the rest of my life.” Anwar Hussein, a doctor, said his family now faces abuses from neighbours and customers are avoiding his family’s business of iron work in his native village.

Rashid Hussain, an IT professional, said he was sacked by his employers following his arrest, even though he was released after eight days in detention.

Muslim organizations and rights groups have cried foul over the arrests, complaining that the detentions were ‘illegal’ and a violation of human rights. Indian law requires detainees to be provided a legal counsel and brought before a magistrate within 24 hours, which did not happen in this case, like many others before.

While special laws like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) allows authorities to detain suspects for longer periods, the detainees in this case were not charged with anything. But while many say the authorities acted ‘illegally’, experts say it is a grey area, as there is a provision in the law book which allows the police to arrest someone on suspicion alone.

“Article 41 in the CrPC empowers the police to arrest anyone on the basis of suspicion even if there is no proof. If the investigating officer later comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence, under article 157, he can say that he has stopped the probe and release the person,” Supreme Court criminal lawyer D B Goswami says.

With India losing the maximum number of lives in terrorist attacks in the world after Iraq (according to a Times of India report), many would argue that the unfortunate incidents are unavoidable in the fight against terror - collateral damage, if you may.

But what about the old adage, “Better 100 guilty men at liberty than one innocent man in prison.”

Law enforcement agencies should by all means investigate and question anyone they think is involved, or know anything about the perpetrators of such mindless violence, but there ought to be a more discreet way of carrying out the investigations, like not releasing the identity of the person until the police are sure of his/her involvement in a crime.

And the role of the media can never be overstated, with the enormous influence it has over public perception. A reputation, not least a life, can be destroyed by one incorrect report by an overzealous media.

And what can be said of the charge by Muslims and civil rights groups that Muslims are targeted by authorities every time an explosion takes place? And the trend of officials naming Islamic groups as suspects immediately after any terror strike when it is obvious that facts have not been ascertained yet.

Has “M” become the new scarlet letter, a metaphorical ‘guilty’ tag on persons by association to a particular religion?

I’m sad to learn that not everyone at the DNA newspaper reads this blog. Yesterday, they ran the story of the arrest of Johann Bach — the fictional, music-loving, piano-stealing, octagenarian Nazi war criminal with a fondness for Goan trance parties — a full day after it was exposed as a hoax. 

The Pen Pricks, the Goan bloggers behind the hoax, have e-mailed me back, and have also updated their blog with a gleeful recounting of the prank. They won’t say who they are, other than to say they are journalists based in Goa. They said they got the idea for the hoax after being disappointed in the media’s coverage of recent high-profile murder cases, where, they say, “Almost every kind of rumour, tidbit was reported as the gospel truth”. Here’s another passage from their e-mail:

All we wanted to do, was expose the depths of depravity in the media by leaking this absolutely fake story to the media in Goa. As expected, once the story was picked up by a couple of papers, the national media just sucked in on it, without verification.  

It’s interesting to see how different victims of the hoax are reacting. As far as I can see, only Goa’s Herald has published a straightforward mea culpa. Other papers have shifted some of the blame onto hapless local police and intelligence officials, who had earlier been gently criticised for not knowing the details of the case.  

The Indian Express partly blames local intelligence officials for what “could be a media hoax”. The New Indian Express said it regrets that it fell for the hoax, but also explains to readers it had confirmed the story with local police. (They did not include this confirmation in the original report, which only quotes a police officer who was “unaware of the incident”.)

The Telegraph, however, has heard that “certain blogspots” are saying the whole thing is a hoax, but the paper is still hedging its bets (although it appears to have wiped the original story from its website). It says it is asking its sources in India’s Intelligence Bureau to reveal the whereabouts of Mr Bach, the name of the concentration camp he had overseen, the name of the Perus Narkp agent who lead the operation, and to provide more details on that stolen piano. The truth is out there.

You would think a press release about a German Nazi war criminal named Johann Bach being caught in the jungles of Goa after trying to sell a stolen 18th-century piano would be worth double-checking.

Nonetheless, the press release has been regurgitated on the front pages of the Deccan Herald and the Indian Express and inside the Telegraph, citing Perus Narkp, “the intelligence wing of the Berlin-based German Chancellor’s Core (sic)”, as the source.

Perus Narkp, a not especially Germanic name, is an anagram of “Super Prank”.

The organisation’s motto, printed at the top of the press release, is “Eht rea enp cabk skripc” — clearly not the language of Goethe or Virgil, but another anagram: “The Pen Pricks are back”.

The Pen Pricks, who run a blog skewering the Goan press, promised readers on Sunday they were about to break a “big, Big, BIg, BIG” story. It looks like they succeeded. Still, it should not take pranksters to remind us that gullibility is a dangerous flaw in journalism.

It takes Google only 0.13 seconds to establish that the Marsha Tikash Whanaab concentration camp at which Bach was apparently posted does not exist. The Express reporter, at least, telephoned the German embassy and Indian police for comment. The fact they had no idea what the reporter was talking about did not deter publication. Only the Times of India gave even a hint that it smelt something fishy, but ran a story all the same.

(I don’t want to seem like I’m recklessly throwing stones in a glass house: no organisation is immune to occasional lapses in journalistic perfection, as readers of the Reuters’ blog Good, Bad, and Ugly may be aware.)

I asked Ramakrishna Upadhya, a senior editor at the Deccan Herald, what might have gone wrong.

“We all believed that it was real because it had so many details,” he said about the press release. “They should have been cross-checked,” he added.

He said he is investigating what happened, and that the paper will run a correction if necessary.

An official at the German embassy in New Delhi very politely said they were looking into what happened but considered it too soon to declare it a hoax.

I have tried to e-mail the Pen Pricks. I’ll let you know if I get any response.

Hopefully this was a singular blip and from now on we can once again believe every word we read in the press.

Sometimes journalists are accused of only writing about bad news, so I wanted to share with you a wonderful day I had last Friday travelling to Hyderabad.

For a change, even the journey was smooth. I went on a brand-new plane with one of India’s new airlines — not only was the service good, but it actually left exactly on time, and arrived early. A bit of a rarity in my recent experience of India’s congested airports and airspace.

And when I arrived, what an airport. The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, which was opened in March, is truly state-of-the-art, incredibly clean, very spacious and stylish. A public-private partnership, it would grace any country in the world, and clearly had been built with room for Hyderabad to expand. Again, a pleasant change from Delhi’s chaos, where the airport is several steps behind demand.The private sector won’t solve all of India’s problems, but here were a couple of examples of liberalisation at its best, of reforms which have unleashed the country’s vast economic potential.

My destination was the new Google office and India headquarters, where I was giving a talk on my life as a foreign correspondent, and especially the last six years in South Asia. I also gave a similar talk to a smaller crowd at Indian School of Business, recently ranked at number 20 in the Financial Times list of the top business schools around the world.

The people I met at both places were enthusiastic, intelligent and dynamic. They asked plenty of thoughtful, probing questions about the media, and were generally fun to hang out with. The energy at Google was pretty contagious.

It’s the sort of day which made me genuinely optimistic about India’s potential. If there is a downside, though, it is that very little of this energy and dynamism seems to be going towards solving India’s continuing problems, of poverty and heathcare and education.

The young seem pretty cynical about politics, and probably have good reason to be. Not that many of them could break into politics even if they wanted to, without the right family or vote bank behind them.

Still, let’s just hope that India continues to harness the energy and dynamism of its young people. I guess quite a few of the Googlers will go on to do MBAs, and with a bit of luck a few will stay and use their expertise in India, rather than go abroad.

I was a little shocked this morning to realise how little coverage the terrible tragedy in Myanmar has received from India’s major newspapers.

Latest official estimates suggest 22,500 people have died and another 41,000 are missing in India’s eastern neighbour — a death toll comparable to Sri Lanka’s experience in the 2004 tsunami, and one that could easily rise further.

Yet the story does not even merit a mention on the front page of the Delhi editions of Wednesday’s Hindu, Indian Express or Mail Today, with the Hindustan Times granting it a tiny paragraph pointing to a page 18 story.

Only the Times of India and the Asian Age thought Cyclone Nargis merited a front-page story.

Nargis is the most devastating Asian cyclone since the one that hit Bangladesh in 1991, with a death toll already higher than in Orissa in 1999. And it could so easily have hit India’s eastern coast.

The Indian government is already sending relief and medical supplies to Myanmar. But why do parts of the media in the capital appear indifferent?

Last year, foreign correspondents rushed to north and eastern India to cover widespread floods, reported to be the worst in decades in some areas. In New Delhi, the devastation hardly seemed to merit a story.

Is bad weather, death and destruction simply not news for Indians these days? Is India so inward-looking that events in Myanmar simply don’t interest people? Or is the media just too Delhi-centric?