Systems on test

All of India must have heaved a sigh of relief after the Australian authorities released on Friday the Indian doctor, Mohamed Haneef, after 25 days of custodial detention in Brisbane, where he had been accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of having helped a terrorist group involved in car bomb attacks in Glasgow and London last month. Relief because, now that Indian Muslims have been found to be indulging in terrorist activities, Haneef's exoneration will prevent people everywhere from jumping to conclusions without going into the specifics of each case.

The Australian police get no credit for the manner in which they conducted the investigation. They posted false entries in Haneef's diary and tried to make out that they were the doctor's own entries, in an effort to implicate him""it must be hoped that those guilty of this criminal act will be suitably punished. Then they made other allegations that turned out to be untrue. The court was told that Haneef's subscriber identity module (SIM) card used on his mobile phone had been discovered in the vehicle used to attack Glasgow airport, and that he had lived with the Ahmed brothers (accused of the UK terror plot) in Liverpool before moving to Australia last year. Neither was the case.

Equally shameful was the manner in which Haneef's visa was summarily cancelled, using arguments that varied from time to time and contradicted each other. There is evidence in all this of 'racial profiling' having been carried too far ('if he is a Muslim from an Asian country, he must be guilty of terrorism'), to the extent of planting evidence in order to make a case and not caring whether an innocent man is being incarcerated.

To the credit of the Australian system, though, there is the exemplary role played by that country's courts and by civil liberties organisations; the first went by the book, the other fought for an innocent man when it would have been all too easy to keep quiet or adopt the stance that some Indian politicians took""that Haneef must be presumed to be guilty as charged.

Justice was not delayed either, and even though there was wrongful detention on false charges, Haneef is now a free man. Reports from Australia suggest that the immigration authorities too have recognised their folly and are providing him a "bridge visa" that will allow him to leave Australia honourably, without the stigma of deportation. The Australian prime minister (who had initially adopted an aggressive posture on the whole issue) has now said that the prosecuting officers will need to explain their handling of the case.

Here in India, the question is whether a case like Haneef's would have been handled any better. In the wake of the convictions being handed down to those guilty of the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai, questions have been raised by Muslims and in the media about the comparative inaction against policemen and others indicted by the Srikrishna Commission for their role in the 1993 riots in the same city. In the first case, Muslims are in the dock; in the second, it is Hindus. So is justice even-handed in India or does it have a communal bias? It is a legitimate question.

There remains the question of how Muslims in the country need to address the challenges facing them. Building a case of victimhood is as easy as racial profiling, and neither helps improve the situation. What the community needs is wise leadership that rises to the challenge of influencing young minds to be a part of the national mainstream, and of closing the perception gap on key public issues so that no ghetto mentality develops.