Dr Umar Nabi has shattered a popular misconception about terrorism

T he Delhi blast of 10/11 is India’s 9/11. It brought down the ivory tower of the romantic view of terrorism. Dr Umar Nabi, the suicide bomber who blew himself in a car near Red Fort on 10 November, finally managed to change the traditional perception of terrorism as desperate action of the economically deprived, socially marginalised, politically disempowered, and religiously persecuted. He and his accomplices — all doctors, well educated, well placed, well regarded — have shaken off the lotus – eating experts from their hazy view of terrorists as victims of discrimination, injustice, and systemic apathy. Their analysis, in the end, virtually justified the phenomenon of terrorism as a just and moral, if not wholly rational, response to bottled up grievances which had no scope for