July-August 2008 
Year 15    No.133
SIMI


Beware of SIMI!

 

The dangers inherent in the activities and mind-set of organisations like the Students Islamic Movement of India cannot be overstated

BY JAVED ANAND

The special tribunal set up under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and headed by Justice Geeta Mittal
recently lifted the ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The undiluted joy with which several mainstream Muslim organisations and much of the Urdu press greeted SIMI’s return to lawful existence proved to be short-lived since the very next day the Supreme Court stayed the tribunal’s verdict. Nonetheless, the misguided show of solidarity with SIMI raises some very disturbing questions. Are Muslim leaders and the Urdu media wilfully blind to the malevolence sheltering in their own backyard? Or could it be their case that in the interests of "communal balance" anything goes?

SIMI’s nefariousness has been evident from the moment it emerged from the womb of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) in 1977. "Character building" to fight against the perceived twin evils of communism and capitalist consumerism with its "degenerate morality" was the declared objective. But in less than a decade this self-styled moral brigade metamorphosed into "the real inheritor" of the legacy of the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi.

(The late Maududi preached that Islam enjoins all Muslims wherever they are on earth to strive in every possible manner to replace man-made laws and institutions with Allah’s laws (Shariah) and an Islamic state. That is why even today the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind also remains committed to the ideal of establishing an Islamic state in India).

True to its ideological moorings, in the 1980s SIMI produced eye-catching stickers proclaiming: "Secularism, NO; Democracy, NO; Nationalism, NO; Polytheism, NO; Only Islam". Widely distributed, these stickers adorned many Muslim homes and shops throughout India. But no one seemed to be unduly perturbed by this dangerous drift of a section of Indian Muslim youth, spreading its wings under the loving care of its patron, the JeI. (It was only in the late 1980s that the JeI officially snipped the umbilical cord that organically linked it to SIMI).

As many scholars of religious fundamentalism have pointed out, there is a filial relationship that unites different fundamentalisms and there is a sibling relationship between fanaticism, extremism and terrorism. Put differently, there is a thin line that divides one from the other, which in certain situations are easily crossed. And cross the line SIMI certainly did. By the early 1990s it was talking the language of "jihad" and an "Islamic caliphate". In SIMI’s case jihad can mean nothing other than armed struggle, for how else do you overthrow the secular Indian state?

Don’t trust information doled out by the intelligence agencies? What about former SIMI members, including its founding president and unit chiefs?

Take, for example, Saeed Ahmed Khan, former Mumbai chief of SIMI, who confessed to a national daily last month that he visited Pakistan in 1991 after learning that "the ISI was training Indian youths (sic) to cultivate the culture of jihad". Khan added that while he was saved by providence, the then SIMI top brass, CA Baseer and Asraf Zafari, were pushing SIMI in a more militant direction. "It was at this juncture that the gun culture took root in Simi… These radical preachers toed the line of jihad and brainwashed Indian youths who later turned into anti-Indian jihadis," he said in his interview.

Don’t believe Saeed Ahmed Khan? What about many other former SIMI activists from Mumbai, Jalgaon, Aurangabad and elsewhere in Maharashtra who corroborate his account and cite this as the reason for the split within SIMI in mid-1992. The breakaway group went public about the reason for the split through prominent advertisements in Urdu newspapers.

What about Dr Mohammad Ahmadullah Siddiqi, the founding president of SIMI at its birth at the Aligarh Muslim University in 1977, who left India in 1981 and has been a professor of journalism and public relations at the Western Illinois University, Macomb, USA, for well over a decade? In an interview given in September 2003 Dr Siddiqi also pointed towards the same malady: "Perhaps the group has been hijacked by elements in other countries and other Muslim societies and not all of them maybe but some of them at least have become misguided and radical in their beliefs."

What about yet another ex-SIMI man, Haji Mohammed Salees from Kanpur, who was horrified by what he saw and heard at SIMI’s "Ikhwan Conference" held in his city in October 1999? Among the things that reportedly shocked Salees was the war cry of seven-year-old Gulrez Siddiqui before an audience of more than 20,000 people: "Islam ka ghazi, butshikan/ Mera sher, Osama bin Laden (The warrior of Islam, the destroyer of idols/ My lion, Osama bin Laden)." Those who addressed the gathering by long-distance telephone were the Hamas founder, Sheikh Yaseen, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, and the imam of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Israel/Palestine. "It was all a shock for us. We realised they are developing international links. We distanced ourselves," Salees told a national daily last week.

Two years later, at an impressive gathering of 25,000 Muslim youth in Mumbai in September 2001, SIMI reiterated that the time had come for Indian Muslims to launch an armed jihad in India, with the establishment of an Islamic caliphate as the ultimate aim.

Don’t believe the intelligence agencies? Don’t believe the accounts of ex-SIMI leaders and activists? What about SIMI’s own posters repeatedly plastered in the lanes and by-lanes of Muslim mohallas across the country following the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, bearing the invocation: "Ya Ilahi, bhej de Mahmud koi (Oh Allah, send us a Mahmud)"? Who does not know that the reference was to Mahmud Ghaznavi whom the fanatics among Muslims revere as a "Butshikan" (Destroyer of Idols; infamous for his pillage of the Somnath temple)?

Which Muslim leader or editor of an Urdu paper can disclaim knowledge of these inflammatory posters? Could it be that the Urdu papers did not receive any press releases from SIMI on their official letterhead with the logo depicting a Koran and an AK-47 perched atop a globe? And who has not heard of SIMI’s open adulation of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for whom India is at best Enemy No. Three – after the US and Israel?

Let’s now turn to the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, amended in 2004 to also bring terrorist activities within its ambit. The act provides for a ban on any organisation that is inimical to the sovereignty and integrity of India, or is involved in terror acts, or is guilty of a crime punishable under Sections 153A (for promoting enmity between different groups of people on grounds of religion, etc) and 153B (for questioning the faith and allegiance of any class of persons in the Indian Constitution) of the Indian Penal Code.

Are the blasts after blasts, in city after city of India in recent years, part of the ‘jihad’ espoused by SIMI? The investigating agencies obviously believe this to be the case. Why else would SIMI activists be routinely detained, arrested, interrogated, charge-sheeted and put on trial? Admittedly, they have yet to establish the terrorism charge against SIMI activists before any court of law in any of the blast cases. And clearly, the case made out before the tribunal for a continuation of the ban on SIMI has been shoddy and sloppy.

Any argument for a continuation of the ban on SIMI before any judicial body would need to convincingly establish SIMI as guilty of one or more of the charges – secessionist activity, terrorism, spreading communal discord, hostility to the Indian Constitution – since 2006, the last time the ban was reimposed on SIMI. Otherwise, from a legal perspective, a ban cannot be reimposed on the organisation.

But is SIMI merely a question of law? Should it not also be evaluated and judged from a sociopolitical perspective, in terms of its implications for India’s secular-democratic polity? Should any sensible citizen be embracing the Bajrang Dal on the simple logic that it has not been banned or convicted under the law of the land? Is it OK to treat Narendra Modi or Bal Thackeray as saints until we have a verdict from the courts? If that is not acceptable, by what logic can Muslim bodies rush to SIMI’s rescue instead of warning Indian Muslims of the great danger it poses to India in general and Indian Muslims in particular?

Before the first ban was slapped on SIMI in 2001 the chief ministers of three states – Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – had made a strong case before the then NDA government in Delhi for a simultaneous ban on both SIMI and the Bajrang Dal. And rightly so. But the Vajpayee-led government chose to act against one and not the other. The Congress-led UPA government, which has been in power since 2004, has done no better.

The Bajrang Dal, the VHP and the RSS not only continue to spread communal hatred (Section 153A) and question Indian Muslims’ allegiance to the Indian Constitution (Section 153B) but also thereby endanger the sovereignty and integrity of the nation (unlawful activity). In the last two years members of the sangh parivar, the Shiv Sena and other Hindu extremist outfits have also been implicated in different incidents of bomb blasts in Nanded, Parbhani, Purna, Jalna and Panvel in Maharashtra.

Why then aren’t these Hindu extremist organisations also placed under the scanner of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act? To ask this question is to rightfully demand an end to discriminatory justice, and even-handed application of the law of the land against all. Mulayam Singh and Laloo Prasad Yadav welcoming the revocation of the ban on SIMI can be explained away in terms of vote bank politics. But for Indian Muslims to be seen as standing by a self-proclaimed enemy of secular-democratic India is nothing short of suicidal.


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