Dear fellow citizens,

I write this with both grief and a sense of responsibility — a responsibility that comes from my identity, not in spite of it. We can no longer pretend that terrorism “just happens", or that it is merely an intelligence failure or a systemic lapse detached from its ideological source. When the perpetrators of this attack come from my own community, it is not “Islamophobia" to name them — it is truth, and truth is the first step toward reform.

And truth demands that we acknowledge what many among us still refuse to say: radicalisation exists within sections of our own community. There are networks, sympathisers, and ideological pipelines that have been active for decades. Many of these pipelines trace back across the border, to Pakistan’s terror factories and their proxies within India.

The investigation into the recent Delhi terror attack already shows links with known terror outfits. When the patterns match the same old fingerprints of cross-border handlers and the motives echo familiar jihadi propaganda, how long can we keep pretending that the root is anything but what it is?

What jolts me awake is not simply that the blast occurred in Delhi, but that it was masterminded by professionals who looked like us. Names now emerging from the investigation include Dr Muzammil Ganaie (Pulwama), accused of surveying the Red Fort and storing explosives in Faridabad; Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather (Kulgam) and Dr Umar Un Nabi (Pulwama), linked to the transport of bombs; Dr Shaheen Saeed (Lucknow) and Dr Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyed (Hyderabad), one of whom allegedly exchanged messages with an ISKP-linked channel; and cleric Irfan Ahmad (Shopian), accused of indoctrinating young minds. These are people who had credentials, status, ambition — yet they chose radicalisation.

This should alarm us: we can no longer think of extremism as “illiterate, desperate, jobless". The truth is far more insidious. Education, employment, and respectability are not shields; they can become facades. Radicalisation today is ideological and structural. It breeds in professional cloaks, institutional security, and unsuspecting settings.

What makes this case even more alarming is that India is now dealing with something almost........

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