TO most people, soft-spoken, well-educated Tanvir Ahmad Ansari might seem an improbable terrorist. In Mumbai's Mominpura slum, though, there is little surprise. If the practitioner of Unani medicine who was detained on July 24 does turn out to be one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who executed the serial bombings in Mumbai on July 11, it will have a curious kind of fitness. Twelve years ago, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had carried out a series of raids just up the road from the one-room tenement in the BIT Chawl where Tanvir Ansari lived with his 70-year-old mother. Jalees Ansari, a government-employed doctor, was arrested then for having executed a series of bombings in 1993 - the Lashkar's first terror strikes outside of Jammu and Kashmir. Azam Ghauri, who helped execute those attacks, managed to escape the CBI net. A third man also vanished.
In late June, Mominpura residents watched the twin stories of that third man, Syed Abdul Karim `Tunda', and Tanvir Ansari unfold in almost fugue-like fashion on their television sets. Neither Karim's strange arrest and bizarre disappearance, nor even the deaths he helped bring about, are the key motifs of this dark composition. Instead, his story, like that of Tanvir Ansari, illustrate the intimate embrace between Islamist terrorism and Hindu fundamentalism - the ways in which communalism feeds communalism.