The conference, titled "Terrorism: A Solidarity Approach" and jointly organized by the People's Movement of India and the Rajasthan Muslim Forum, was held in Jaipur where eminent personalities from various areas of Indian society demanded a high-level probe into all terror attacks.

India's renowned civil rights activist and former judge Justice Rajinder Sachar delivered the keynote address at the conference. Sachar, who headed a government-backed committee to study the situation of Muslims in India, said the arrest in New Delhi of a man allegedly carrying the explosive RDX, on suspicion that he was connected with the Jaipur bombings, proved wrong, as forensic experts declared that the explosives used for the Jaipur bombings contained no trace of RDX.

"Investigating agencies cannot reach anywhere near the real culprits unless they get people's feedback and involve citizens in their work," Sachar said.

The overwhelming view in the conference was that there was a need to analyze the Jaipur bombings in a political context because the strategy of terrorism seemed to have replaced the politics of communal riots in dividing and weakening the people.

"There was a possibility that the international intelligence agencies might have connived with their Indian counterparts to carry out the Jaipur terror attack to give political advantage to certain sections. Police, with their biased mindset, are not ready to look for the real culprits," said Mohammed Salim, president of Rajasthan state Jamat-e-Islami Hind.

Another prominent Muslim scholar, Feroze Mithiborwala, was of the view that the Jaipur blasts had further communalized the people. "It will lead to faster ghettoizing and marginalization of Muslims, who will become an easy target for both the police apparatus and Hindu fundamentalist forces," he said.

The gathering adopted a resolution, which cautioned the investigative agencies that rounding up Muslim youths and subjecting them to physical and mental torture would lead to widespread anger, resentment and despair among Muslims, which would not be a good sign for society and the country.

During the investigation of the Jaipur bombings the security and investigative agencies picked up several Bangladeshi nationals who have been illegally staying in the walled city of Jaipur and various other places in Rajasthan state. Also among the arrested, the Muslim organizations say, are Indian Muslim youths who have no links with any terror groups, including the little known-Indian Mujahedin, which has claimed responsibility for the Jaipur bombings which killed 66 people.

The investigative agencies, however, denied the allegation, saying those arrested have suspected links with terror groups. According to a senior federal interior ministry official, who declined to be named, the investigative agencies are in the middle of the Jaipur investigation and nothing more could be divulged at this stage.

Raghavendra Suhasa, superintendent of Police (North) and member of the special investigative team that is probing the bombings, said new sketches released recently were those of persons in the age group of 18 to 25. "They have different complexions," he said.

The anti-terror conference was part of a campaign that various Muslim organizations have been waging following a resolution passed at a conference of Muslim clergy held in February in Darul-Uloom Deoband, the religious educational academy of Muslims that is highly regarded in India and throughout the world.

The resolution called upon religious, political and intellectual groups to hold conferences in different parts of India to raise their concerns over growing terrorism and to mount pressure on the government not to paint the Muslim community as terror sympathizers. Different Muslim organizations so far have held over a dozen such conferences across the country.

"There has been a tendency for quite some time that whenever and wherever a bomb blast takes place, the name of a Muslim organization is cropped up without having any evidence or investigation. Such an exercise is nothing but an effort to malign the community as a whole," said M. Ahmed Kazmi, a prominent Indian Muslim intellectual.

With increasing incidents of terror attacks in the country, clergy and radicals in India's Muslim community have been working toward bringing the minority into the country's political mainstream. A recent outright rejection of terrorism and motives of militants to link terror with Islam by prominent Muslim clergy have helped the community to come out more boldly against the menace that has hit the southern Asian giant.

"What the right-thinking people in the Muslim community want is that the government should understand their grievances and direct the security agencies to stop arresting innocent Muslim youths. Such an understanding could pave the way for taking all sections of society together to fight against the menace of terror," said A.B. Mahapatra, director of the Center for Asian Strategic Studies, a non-government think tank dealing with strategic issues.

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