By Chris Morris
BBC News, Mumbai
The Mumbai attacks highlighted how some Indian Muslims feel victimised
Early morning, just off the Mumbai shoreline. The seas are calm, there are a few pleasure craft pottering around - everything is normal.
But three months ago, this is where 10 armed men came ashore to attack this city, killing more than 170 people.
On the coast in front of me is the old arch of the Gateway of India, and behind it, still boarded and shuttered, is the Taj Palace hotel, which was under siege for three days.
This is the place that crystallised images of terror striking India, and in particular of the threat from abroad.
In or out?
India's response to the attacks has been to pile international pressure on Pakistan, and review its own security arrangements.
But is the focus on external threats overshadowing other serious issues?
"India has always faced very severe threats, in fact the terrorist threats to India predate 9/11 in the US," says Minister of Home Affairs P Chidambaram.
"Until the Mumbai attacks, perhaps there was not sufficient realisation of the gravity of the threat India faced."
But does that threat, I suggest, not come from within as well as without?
Madni's Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind is India's largest Muslim organisation
"Well, the threat essentially comes from without," he replies. "But there are some people within the country who are fundamentally misled by those who fund them, train them, help them and motivate them from without."
The year 2008 was a bloody one, with a series of multiple bomb blasts in Indian cities claiming more lives than the days of terror in Mumbai.
Well before the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was accused of attacking Mumbai, it was a focus of attention, as was its mysterious local offshoot, the Indian Mujahideen.
And home-grown militancy is the subject of increasing concern among the security elite.
"Mumbai has secured a very exaggerated significance, partly because of the nature of the attack, and of course the nature of the targets," says Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.
"But this country has been facing a continuous movement of Islamist terror for over a decade and a half now. An intelligence or enforcement agency somewhere in this country identifies and neutralises an Islamist terrorist cell backed by Pakistan on average every fortnight."
'Anti-Muslim bias'
Just this week, a charge sheet was filed in Mumbai against some of those alleged to be responsible for last year's serial bomb blasts - members of the Indian Mujahideen.
There have been suggestions that the accused were motivated by the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, and the destruction of the Babri mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya a decade earlier.
The Mumbai-based civil rights activist Teesta Setalwad recently met one of the accused, Mansoor Peerbhoy, in custody.
Ms Setalwad has been a regular and outspoken critic of the city's police force, but the police let her talk to Peerbhoy to allow her to form her own impression of the kind of individual alleged to be involved in these attacks.
We don't equate or identify terror with any religion
P Chidambaram
Minister of Home Affairs
"He came across as so deeply indoctrinated," she says. "He said, 'the Islam that was taught to me by my mother is not the real Islam. But the Islam I learned at 'Koran understanding' camps in Hubli, in Karnataka, that's the real Islam'."
That his indoctrination took place in India is "very worrying", says Ms Setalwad.
India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, and community leaders have been speaking out forcefully against extremism. Fatwas have been issued and rallies held to condemn terrorism in all its forms.
"This is nothing to do with religion, it's all politics," Maulana Mehmood Madni of the Muslim organisation Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind tells me at a rally in central Mumbai.
"And the whole world knows where that politics is coming from."
But the serial bomb attacks, the subsequent rounds of arrests, and the killings of alleged suspects in so-called encounters have left some parts of the community feeling victimised.
The government, though, insists that Muslims have nothing to fear.
"We don't equate or identify terror with any religion," says P Chidambaram.
"I don't think a terrorist is advancing the cause of any religion. If he takes to the gun, and if he indulges in violence, if he kills, he's a terrorist and he has to be dealt with as a terrorist."
"I think most Muslims in this country, most minorities in this country, understand that."
'Second-class citizens'
Just outside the Nawab Masjid mosque in Bhindi Bazaar, in Mumbai, worshippers have laid long strips of blue plastic as temporary prayer mats.
Among the faithful is Gulzar Azmi, who spends much of his time defending some of the terrorism-case suspects who he says have been framed by the police.
And he insists the system is still biased against Muslims.
"When a Muslim sets off a firework, even then they say it's a bomb," Mr Azmi complains.
Mumbai's CST train station has mostly returned to normal
"The government says one thing and does another... they pretty much treat Indian Muslims like second-class citizens.
"When a Hindu commits a crime they get charged with lesser offences. It's the opposite for Muslims," he says.
"It was only in September last year that the government finally accepted that Hindus are also responsible for bomb attacks," he concludes. "Before that they'd never acknowledged that it could happen."
The fact that alleged Hindu extremists - including a serving army officer - are now in custody, accused of carrying out at least one of the recent bomb attacks, suggests that the authorities may have to broaden their investigative efforts.
But general elections are looming in India. The opposition is stepping up its criticism of the government's response to Mumbai.
At CST railway station, where more than 50 people were murdered during the attack, there are few signs of what happened three months ago.
One window in the announcer's booth still has a bullet hole in the glass, and paramilitary police are dug in behind sandbags. Otherwise, it is back to business as usual.
But standing on the station concourse, with a great tide of people flowing in all directions, is a sobering reminder that stopping the next attack will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Source