Minority Muslim Techies under Police Scanner
By Sunil Sharma

A very small group of Muslim IT professionals in Bangalore are feeling a different kind of heat these days. Most of them are feeling offended and hurt, while some others are disgusted. Of late there have been many attempts to label a small group as terrorists or extremists. There have also been allegations of a terror network formed by Muslims in the IT industry.

Just a few days back, a respected national daily Times of India had accused K M Sherif, a senior IT professional of heading a group of terror suspects, all techies under the aegis of MITA - the Muslim IT Professionals Association. Sherif, who is the CEO of iCalibrator and the ex-CTO of Sun Microsystems, strongly feels the report has been defamatory to the Muslim community and he has petitioned the courts. Ever since the Bangalore connection to the Glasgow bombings were established, some sections of the media and the police have been very critical of this minority of Muslims from Bangalore.

Last year when two software engineers from IBM and Intel were picked up in Bangalore in a conversion case, the same national daily had carried reports of them being arrested from a Madrasa as members of a fundamentalist organisation.

The Bangalore Police had recently arrested Yahya Kammakutty, a software engineer on the basis of the information provided by another terror suspect, Mohammed Asif. Asif, a final year medical student was detained last month and is suspected to have links with the SIMI. Yahya, a B Tech from NIT runs a start up having worked for Tata Infotech and Wipro GE Healthcare. He was a member of MITA and had attended its meetings, so naturally other members of this organization are also under the police scanner.

Cops investigating the terror network in Karnataka feel that a small number of Muslim techies in the city are networking and suspect the group provides logistic and financial support to SIMI and Lashkar-e-Taiba. But MITA claims to be a social networking forum for Muslim techies to improve the lot of their not so lucky brethren. They conduct seminars on personality development and entrepreneurship to uplift poorer people of their community. With members across the country, the network is concentrated in Bangalore. It’s really bad that the arrest of a few IT professionals has lead to sense of discomfort of the vast majority.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bangalore_hub_of_techie-terror_network/articleshow/2820775.cms