Glasgow plot, village story

This time it is international terrorism that has broken Nagenahalli’s peace.
The lives of the Indian protagonists accused of complicity in the June 29 and June 30 attempts to explode car bombs in the United Kingdom, Kafeel Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, and the now released Mohammed Haneef, are hinged to a maze of family lines originating in Nagenahalli, spreading to the neighbouring town of Mudigere, on to the big city of Bangalore and then to foreign shores—Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

Mohammad Haneef is the first doctor in a family of schoolteachers. These days worry keeps his 70-year-old grandmother awake most nights in Mudigere in Chikmagalur district.

‘‘He is really the shining diamond of our family. Everyone looks up to him for what he has done, especially following the tragedy of his father’s death,’’ says Haneef’s aunt Jabeen Shireen, who was also his teacher in primary school.

‘‘You always tend to remember the really good students and the really bad ones. I remember Haneef as being a very good student,’’ says Haneef’s science teacher K S Yogendra at the Nalanda English School at Mudigere.

Haneef’s father, a government Urdu primary school teacher, was killed in an accident. He was standing by the roadside when a bus went out of control and crushed him under its wheels, barely 500 metres from their house on the Mudigere Jamia Masjid Road.

‘‘Haneef takes after his father. A man of few words and a devout Muslim dedicated to his profession. His father used to be called ‘the clock’ during his teaching days,’’ says Jabeen Shireen.

It was a moment of reckoning for the family that had been totally dependent on Haneef’s father’s salary. ‘‘Haneef had just finished his pre-degree course and had secured 84 per cent marks,’’ says Haneef’s uncle K Abdul Waheed who runs a small plastic ware shop in Mudigere. ‘‘My brother had heard about the results but he was not around to see his son secure a medical seat.’’

For the first two semesters of his medical course in Bangalore, Haneef stayed at the hostel and as a paying guest. ‘‘After a year or so the family received the payout on the father’s life insurance. My sister decided that she wanted her family to be together. They decided to rent out their small house in Mudigere and move to Bangalore,’’ says Haneef’s uncle and Dr Maqbool’s nephew, Nafeez Ahmed, who collects the rent on behalf of his sister.

After his medical education, Haneef, who was already supporting the education of his younger sister and brother—now an engineering student—decided to go abroad and make more money. He decided to go to UK, says his uncle.

‘‘His aim in going to UK and Australia was to study further. He intended to return at some point and work in India,’’ says his sister Sumayya Tabassum a postgraduate degree holder in biotechnology.

The family initially lived in a small house in Bangalore but moved to a larger two- bedroom apartment around the time Haneef returned for his wedding in November 2005.

‘‘In July 2006, before he took up his assignment in an Australian hospital, he brought his wife to meet all of us in Mudigere. He was planning to move his entire family to Australia at some point of time. We don’t know if that will happen now,’’ says Nafeez Ahmed.

THE fortunes of the family of Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed, Haneef’s second cousins, have followed a winding path too.

In their now over four-decade-old journey from Nagenahalli, the family has gone from being wealthy landholders, sliding into middle class agriculture, before rising again to be respected upper-middle-class, urban professionals.

‘‘Much of the land from Nagenahalli to Kaskebyle (about 8 km away) was owned by our grandfather. It was divided and many family members sold their land to move to neighbouring towns,’’ says Sagheer Ahmed, first cousin to Kafeel and Sabeel’s father Maqbool Ahmed. Sagheer is one of the last family members left in Nagenahalli and takes care of a five-acre coffee plantation at Kaskebyle that is held in the name of Kafeel’s father.

Kafeel’s father Maqbool Ahmed, now 65, was the youngest of five children. ‘‘Maqbool’s father was born to the first of the three wives of our grandfather,’’ says Sagheer Ahmed who now lives with his family on one of the two old family houses in Nagenahalli.

‘‘Maqbool was very bright and intelligent. He was very interested in studies and since we did not have good schools, he first moved to the town of Belur (14 km away) then to Hassan (52 km away), then for medicine to Bellary (600 km away),’’ says Sardar Pasha, a resident of Nagenahalli and the man who bought Maqbool’s house in the village for Rs 95,000 some years ago.

The third house still held by the family is the original ancestral home, an over 100-year-old building that reflects some of family’s old shine. The tiled roof, red floor, two-floor house with a large porch supported by large pillars and big courtyard, is now home to the family of an ageing Alzheimer’s afflicted granduncle of Kafeel Ahmed.

The nearly 85-year-old granduncle seems unable to remember his grandnephew and has the same vacant look in his eyes as Kafeel’s father, who too has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Other aunts and uncles have, late in their lives, shown similar degeneration, says Sagheer Ahmed.

Kafeel’s father left Nagenahalli in the footsteps of his oldest brother who became a unani doctor with a practice in Tumkur district, about 200 km from the village, and another brother Mohammed Shafi, who became an engineer and settled in Madras.

‘‘They were from a family of Qazis. They were very important people in the mosque and devout Muslims. There was also great emphasis on studies,’’ says Sardar Pasha.

Towards the end of his medical school at Bellary, Maqbool Ahmed is also believed to have begun taking an active part in the activities of the radical Jamait-i-Islami

‘‘After he finished his studies, Maqbool struggled for a long time to build a practice. Initially he worked with his unani doctor elder brother in Tumkur, before moving to Bangalore,’’ says Sagheer Ahmed.

In Bangalore, during the emergency and before he married Dr Zakia, Maqbool was jailed for his association with the then banned Jamait-i-Islami.

Once married, the doctor couple practised in Bangalore before moving to Jordan, helping in the reconstruction of Iran in 1989, in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war and then subsequently to Saudi Arabia. During their time in Saudi Arabia, Maqbool bought a 3,000-sq ft property in south Bangalore and built a house that was initially rented out till the family decided to move to India in 1992 to allow their children to pursue their higher studies here.

Kafeel who had been studying at the Indian Embassy School in Dammam in Saudi Arabia had already joined the Aurobindo School, a couple of kilometers away from the family’s south Bangalore home in 1991.

‘‘During the holidays, when the boys were young, they would occasionally visit their estate near Nagenahally. They would also come and stay with us. The boys were very well behaved and disciplined,’’ says Nafeez Ahmed, a coffee plantation owner in Mudigere, who is Maqbool’s nephew and the older brother of the mother of Haneef.

In fact, well-behaved is what all who knew Kafeel call him. ‘‘He never had any problems with adapting to a new school in a new place. We never had to call his parents or anything like that when he was in school. He was a well-behaved boy who scored first class marks in the CBSE exams,’’ says a teacher who taught Kafeel at the Aurobindo High School.

At his UBDT College of Engineering in Davangere district, about around 400 km from Bangalore, a professor, Abdul Budan, described Kafeel as one who kept to himself, and rarely participated in non-academic activities during his stint from 1996-2000.

‘‘He is best remembered for his academic brilliance. His notes are still referred to by students,’’ says Dr Budan, of Kafeel, who stood fifth in the Kuvempu University engineering exams.

‘‘He was very soft spoken. Very rarely mingled with other students,’’ says Kiran Kumar J, an aeronautics engineer with the Central Government’s Aeronautics Development Establishment in Bangalore, and one of Kafeel’s five partners on a mechanical engineering project titled ‘‘Excelling quality through testing, R&D and training’’. His project mates say Kafeel brought leadership to the project but rarely discussed anything other than project work.

Another classmate Kiran Hegde says he once overheard Kafeel Ahmed speak against the Indian position during the war in Kargil while they were in the seventh semester.

‘‘He kept to himself but was always willing to help others,’’ says Keshav Thakuria, another project partner.

The family has gone through ups and downs. With the transformation of Kafeel from the helpful boy to the Glasgow terrorist, the Ahmed family’s fortunes have changed yet again.