In a audacious sting operation, Star TV has carried out the a part of international conspiracy to discredit the power of Fatwa that rules the lives and times of one billion Muslims of the world. STAR TV's operatives with hidden camera contacted one Deoband graduate to help them get a Fatwa against the use of Credit Cards, as its use presupposes the interest content of its charges on outstanding amounts.

The Fatwa verdict has to focus on the INEREST content of whole commercial transaction, on which the total capitalist economics of consumerism is based. Those have thrived on interest bearing business for centuries, are worried that any push for their Credit Card distribution and converting the whole consumer class to a regime of forced interest bearing economic system, will be opposed by Indian Muslims.

In a flanking move to confront the probability head on, a preempting exercise was devised to get a pro forma FATWA from India's premier Islamic Institution while rewarding the Mufti with gift of cash as a gesture of appreciation and capturing the whole sequence on secret spy-camera and presenting it to millions of viewers as a bribe to the Mufti, who clearly handled the cash and placed it in his pouch, is grossest misrepresentation of fact and manifestly a crime of defamation.

The spy-camera shot blurs the conversation, when the Mufti who has given a valid fatwa and thus can not be accused of taking bribe to give a wrong fatwa, clearly accept the amount as gift. Since no illegal tampering of Fatwa was involved, the STAR TV's campaign to project the Mufti as corrupt and taking bribe for a 'wrong' fatwa falls flat and the whole exercise could have legal implications for STAR TV.

Indian Muslims have fought pitched and long drawn battles with the outsiders and colonials and surely they will once again prove their mettle, if a confrontation of any dispensation is thrown against them.

Let STAR TV beware, it has not last heard about the regime of FATWA.

GHULAM MUHAMMED, MUMBAI