Opinion | 'PhD' Handlers To Faridabad 'Doctors', How 'White-Collar' Terrorism Isn't New

Doctors are meant to save lives, not take them, no matter what the cause is. That concept is supposed to be so basic that we rarely feel the need to articulate it. The detention of several doctors and the seizure of nearly 3,000 kilograms of explosive material from two houses in Faridabad, followed by a deadly car explosion near Red Fort that killed nine innocent people, has forced us to confront a far more unsettling reality. Many have started calling this a "white-collar" terrorism module. The shock comes not only from the scale of the plot but from the profile of those accused of planning it.

The first reaction is disbelief. We are conditioned to imagine terrorists as desperate youth, school dropouts, unemployed, with little education and no hope. But the blast in Delhi is a reminder that violent extremism does not always arrive wearing the faces we expect. Sometimes it is the physician who examined your child last month. Sometimes it is the engineer who tinkers with gadgets in the flat next door. Sometimes it is the software developer who smiles politely in the lift. They are our next door neighbours - the so-called "white-collar" neighbours who blend in without raising suspicion.

The LSE Student

For me, the profile is disturbing, yes, but not surprising. I have reported on terror long enough to know that the middle classes are not immune. If anything, they often produce the most ideologically rigid foot-soldiers. Men who speak fluent English, quote philosophy, argue with you believing they are fighting for a just cause.

I remember one such encounter vividly. In 1994, I met Omar Saeed Sheikh in a private hospital in Ghaziabad. He was barely 18, recovering from a bullet wound after a shootout with the Saharanpur police. He looked gentle, soft-spoken, almost scholarly. He had studied at the London School of Economics and was a mathematics topper. He spoke to me of Bosnia, where he claimed to have gone earlier for 'jihad'. He had come to India, he said, to abduct foreign tourists in order to secure the release of Pakistani militants. He was wounded precisely during a daring abduction of a few foreign tourists whom he was taking to Kashmir. The moral clarity with which he justified his action came from conviction - though I told him his conviction was misplaced and that his action was terrorism. I told him he was brainwashed by the now-banned British outfit, Hizb ut Tahrir, often busy on campuses.

Years later, when I saw him on television - being freed as part of the Kandahar hijack exchange on the last day of 1999 - my heart sank. And then again, when he was convicted for the kidnapping and beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl, the memory of the soft-spoken young man in that hospital room came rushing back. Brilliant student. Charming. Polite.

The Architect, The Physicians

This is not an Indian anomaly. The 9/11 hijackers included men who had had higher education. They were your normal guys, the ones you would hang out with. They were modern and cool. They came from stable, middle-class families in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and had studied or lived abroad. Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, studied architecture and urban planning at Cairo University and later completed a postgraduate degree in urban design in Hamburg. Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah also studied in Germany, the latter coming from a well-off Lebanese family; he attended Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Investigations and testimony later showed that some members of the Hamburg cell went to parties, drank alcohol, took driving lessons, rented apartments, used gyms and did not outwardly display religious extremism in their early years. 

ISIS is known to have successfully recruited medical students and young physicians from the UK and Sudan to serve its project. Closer home, the Sri Lanka Easter bombers came from affluent merchant families. From ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who held a PhD in Islamic Studies, to Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon, and Osama bin Laden, a civil engineering graduate - some of the world's most violent extremist leaders have come not from illiteracy or deprivation, but from classrooms, universities and privileged backgrounds.

The 'Educated' Ones

It is also important to recognise that educated militants are not unique to Kashmir or to Muslim-majority contexts. The phenomenon has appeared across ideologies and geographies. The Tamil LTTE drew heavily from Jaffna's educated middle class; many of its senior leaders were graduates, teachers and engineers and its suicide attack squads were often composed of young people who had excelled in school. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) recruited university students, civil servants and professionals who believed they were waging a legitimate political struggle. 

In India's own recent past, the Sikh militancy of the 1980s included doctors, government employees and young men studying in colleges in Punjab and Delhi, some of whom were pulled into underground cells through networks of identity, grievance and belonging. In 1997, I travelled to Pakistan to report a series for the Western media outlet I was working with at the time. There, I met Dal Khalsa founder Gajinder Singh, the man who led the 1981 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in the name of Khalistan. He was soft-spoken, widely read and spoke with the intensity of someone who believed history had chosen him. He sounded convinced that the hijacking was not a crime, but a moral act in service of the Khalistan movement. During our conversations, he gave me a list of addresses in one of Jammu's most affluent neighbourhoods and said, almost casually, "They will open the door if you take my name." They did. The people who welcomed me lived in spacious kothis, held secure government jobs and were fully embedded in middle-class respectability. Yet, they spoke with unwavering conviction about Khalistan.

Years later, in Pulwama, I met the family of the young suicide bomber who carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Indian security forces. They lived in a large, well-maintained home with manicured gardens, not the poverty-stricken stereotype often imagined in narratives of militancy, mistakenly perpetuated by Bollywood. The living room was warm and the surroundings comfortable. The parents and relatives were unrepented and said their child was a martyr for the cause of 'azadi' (freedom). 

These cases underline that radicalisation does not require poverty or illiteracy. It perhaps requires a narrative powerful enough to justify violence as duty.

Why Is Violence So Seductive?

So, why do doctors, engineers and ordinary middle-class professionals drift towards violence? These are people raised with the presumed "middle-class values" of careers, stability and coexistence. Yet, some embrace the logic of killing. What breaks inside them? One of the clearest explanations comes from political psychologist Dr. Fathali Moghaddam, who studies radicalisation at Georgetown University. He says, "Radicalisation is not born in poverty or ignorance alone. It happens when people feel morally humiliated, socially disrespected and politically unheard. Educated individuals are often more vulnerable because they seek meaning and grand narratives. Violence becomes, in their mind, not destruction but purpose." 

Scholar Arun Kundnani, in his book The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror, explains why radicalisation is not "the product of a sudden psychological vulnerability" but "a political response to a political context".

Many scholars suggest a more complex situation: moral outrage at perceived injustices; a "cognitive opening" triggered by personal or political shocks; tight peer networks that normalise radical ideas and, crucially, a yearning for certainty and status that ideologies theatrically supply. 

This Is A Moral Challenge

Which is exactly why the Faridabad and Delhi cases must not be dismissed as aberrations. The question is not simply what these educated individuals allegedly did. The real question is why they believed they were right to do it. Many white-collar recruits do not join terror networks because they are jobless. They join because they feel morally superior and are possibly psychologically disturbed. They believe they have seen something others refuse to see. Or they feel betrayed by their fellow faith followers. I would like to emphasise this is not about demonising a community or a state. Nor is it about dismissing legitimate grievances. It is about recognising why violence becomes seductive.

White-collar terror is not just a security challenge. It is a moral challenge. A civic challenge. A challenge beyond normal policing and security. They do not come from the shadows or caves. They come from among us. And that is what makes this moment so urgent. 

And unless we learn how to address those challenges at the level of meaning and identity (not just policing) we will continue to be shocked by the doctor who turned militant, the engineer who turned recruiter and the software developer who turned bomb-maker.

(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London-based senior Indian journalist with three decades of experience with the Western media)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author