A major attack on India was averted last week when our agencies seized 2,900 kg of explosives. Although the larger plot was foiled, a blast still occurred in Delhi, claiming 13 lives. Had the seized explosives not been intercepted and instead used by the terrorists, India could have suffered an unprecedented tragedy—potentially the largest terror attack on Indian soil. That, however, was prevented by our agencies, for which they deserve all the appreciation.

A particularly troubling aspect of this terror plot is the profile of those involved. The perpetrators were not the usual category of fundamentalists with minimal education, standing on the margins of literacy and steeped more in dogma than in academics. This time, the radicals are well educated and well positioned in society. Those arrested with the explosives are doctors. Reflecting on how violence can be engineered not only from the fringes of society but also from its professional and educated ranks, the media is now delving into the idea of “white-collar terrorism".

The term white-collar crime was coined by American sociologist Edwin Sutherland, who argued that criminal behaviour cannot be explained simply by poverty or the psychological conditions linked to it, and that a true understanding of crime requires an entirely different framework. Sutherland was not speaking about religious terrorism; he lived and wrote in an era when such extremism was far less potent, weaponised, and politicised. As a description of terror activity, the term was earlier used to denote attacks on telecommunications or data-processing systems where the perpetrator aimed to cause widespread disruption.

Only recently has the term come to describe religiously motivated attacks carried out by educated individuals who hold steady, middle-class professional roles and enjoy social respectability. The people arrested before the blasts near Red Fort—individuals who had stockpiled a significant cache of weapons and an enormous haul of explosive materials—were educated, exposed to the world and its ways, and were the ones who planned an attack that, if successful in its entirety, would have brought immeasurable pain to India.

Individuals with such profiles are not unheard of internationally; many of those behind the heinous 9/11 attacks were well educated. However, in India this marks a shift. The attackers we have typically seen here are young men who can be easily manipulated, who come from poverty-stricken backgrounds, and who have little exposure to the wider world—people like Ajmal Kasab. There were even reports that during the 2008 attacks, the........

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