What's worse, Operation Hearts and Minds will unfold even as the Blair government has assumed the role of a watchful Big Brother hovering over young British Muslims. In fact, in Britain's Muslim world, life has rapidly become a game between the watching and the watched. In police-speak, the name of the game is intelligence and surveillance. Post 7/7, Britain is a nation on camera—on the streets, at bus and train stations, on buses and trains, road crossings, outside buildings, inside them; in fact, through much of daily life outside home, everyone's on camera. Add to that intelligence through infiltration of at least potentially suspect groups.
"I think it's a myth that there is great tolerance in Britain," Rime Allaf from the Royal Institute for International Affairs (better known as Chatham House) told Outlook. "Perhaps there is, at the official level, but I think we're beginning to see cracks. A number of people in the Muslim community in Britain are not feeling that integrated, not feeling that welcome, and are turning to where they believe they will be more welcome."
It could not have been just the pull of what Blair called an "evil ideology" that made death seem so much more attractive than life in Britain. And that unwelcomed feeling will be nothing to match what's to follow 7/7.
Consider the scene ahead. The Serious and Organised Crime Agency has been asked to investigate the sharp rise in suspicious monetary transfers reported by financial institutions. What could have been remittances to Pakistan until the other day will now be seen as suspicious transactions. Every young passenger on a PIA flight in or out of London could be the 'inspired' one. They will check, and he will feel checked. Every young Muslim has been damned by the apparent normalcy of the lives of the suicide bombers.
Home secretary Charles Clarke has announced new laws on the way. Recordings from phone tapping are as of now not admissible in court as evidence; this is being reconsidered. New laws will target anyone who runs a website or even the blogger (an individual who offers views on the net) who's suspected of even indirectly inciting religious hatred. Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair has asked for a law to shut up extremist preachers. Offenders will face jail and deportation.
The police are setting up special intelligence units that would be equipped to listen in to home conversations from a discreet distance. They will tap phones, access email messages, follow the young around. New budgets will pay for more informers within every mosque. The more religious will be that much more suspect—strict Islamic observance could be seen as spiritual preparation for the terrorist path. Muslims on their part will suspect—and hate—the suspicion. What they imagine may not be real, but the imagining of it will be.
That might just have been one of the aims of the terrorists and their masterminds; the killings and the reactions to follow both by way of prejudice and policing would drive a deeper wedge between Muslims and the rest. This would "act as a recruitment sergeant for more young men in the future," Conservative MP David Davis warned.
"You have to look at the British society—what you are doing to the Muslim community and why the Muslim community is not integrating into British society," Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations Munir Akram said. The new environment of institutionalised suspicion will make such prospects a lot dimmer. The pressure on parents and community leaders is almost like another threat. "It's the responsibility of the Muslim community to prevent merchants of evil influencing the young," said Conservative leader Michael Howard.
That's precisely the rationale behind constituting the task force: it is supposed to work with parents and elders to dissuade the young from terrorist ways. It is not clear what exactly it could do. Tell the young don't play with bombs, play carrom, play cricket. But the bombers did too. Were you really out for a film or were you making bombs? There is no one a young man will want to rebel more against than a strict father. It could feed so easily into an impulse for political rebellion against the state—and that could take the shape of terrorism.
Looks like a long haul ahead. Britain has lived with IRA terrorism for many years and seems to have turned a corner on that front, finally. But with young Muslims, this will have to be done the gentle way. "Be patient, win hearts and minds, integrate people, find out what their complaints are, deal with them," Lord Meghnad Desai told Outlook. That is unlikely under the unseen all-seeing eye upon you.
