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.