Months in the bosom of the Students Islamic Movement of India as
seen through the lives of two young men
BY NEELESH MISRA AND HAIDAR NAQVI
You could say that Syed Wasif Haider ended up setting off
bombs because of Kanpur’s terrible power situation. Haider was 27 years of
age in the winter of 2000. He worked as sales manager at the American
company, Becton Dickinson, was happily married to Kavita, a Hindu woman,
and had two daughters – five-year-old Maria and two-and-a-half-year-old
Dania. One morning the power inverter broke down in this cosy home in the
Humayun Bagh neighbourhood of Kanpur. Haider took the machine to Jilani
Electronics near the Gulab Ghosi mosque. The Kashmiri owner introduced him
to another person – Maulana Mumtaz, a signboard painter with a mesmerising
personality.
Haider’s life was about to change.
In another part of Uttar Pradesh lived another man of the
same age – Syed Abdul Mobin, father of five, with his wife Sumbul. He had
studied Arabic and Unani medicine at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU)
after leaving Bachhawa village in the Dumariyaganj district near the Nepal
border. The police say he was also SIMI’s first bomber.
Some 30 metres away from Jilani’s repair shop where Haider
had gone is the cluttered and chaotic Parade Road. The story of SIMI,
India’s most dangerous militant religious movement, runs through it.
The meet that sounded the bugle
Almost a year back, on the evening of October 29, 1999,
thousands of Muslim men – and about 150 women – had poured into the Halim
College campus on Parade Road, raising Islamic slogans. It was the
beginning of a three-day SIMI conference that announced its assault on
democratic, secular India.
At the congregation seven-year-old Gulrez Siddiqui got up
on stage and electrified the audience of some 20,000 people. He roared: "Islam
ka ghazi, butshikan/ Mera sher, Osama bin Laden (The warrior of Islam,
the slayer of idols/ My lion, Osama bin Laden)."
Later, on a telephone line placed before the microphones,
the voice of Sheikh Yaseen, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas,
reverberated through the awestruck gathering. He was making a live
address, as was Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan,
and the imam of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Israel. Those present included
Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, vice-chairman of the All India Muslim Personal Law
Board.
Three Afghans walked around with green badges bordered
with silver and gold. One of them, Ali Khan, admitted that he was a Talib
from Kandahar.
Kandahar was where all attention would shift to in two
months. There were books and cassettes of speeches by Maulana Masood Azhar
who, unknown to all at this point, would be released in the Afghan city on
December 31, 1999 after an eight-day Indian Airlines hijacking.
"It was all a shock for us. We realised they are
developing international links. We distanced ourselves," says Haji
Mohammed Salees, 51, who runs a hosiery shop and was at the congregation.
Salees is rumoured to be a founding member of SIMI and was briefly
arrested in 2001 but now writes against the organisation in newspapers.
We are sitting down the same road at another milestone of
the SIMI story – Bhatia Restaurant, once a SIMI planning hub where major
operations were allegedly planned over tea and fried snacks.
"The road that SIMI was taking could never have helped
Muslims," said Salees.
The Kandahar-Kanpur link
That road had started with a different destination in the
first place.
SIMI was founded with the aim of "character development of
students". In many parts of Uttar Pradesh, activists went door-to-door,
asking parents to enrol their children in the Shahin Force, the SIMI
children’s wing where they are taught the basic tenets of Islam.
Its influence spread gradually. In 1984 the activists were
knocking at the door of the deeply religious Mohammed Farooq in Bachhawa.
Farooq promptly signed up his son, Syed Abdul Mobin, for the Shahin Force.
Mobin then headed for AMU, the centre of SIMI’s power.
By the 1990s Mobin had completed a three-year course in
the Arabic language. He had also become a SIMI ansar, with the task
of going door-to-door, motivating young Muslims.
Haider too finished his mathematics honours degree from
the DBS College, Kanpur. Between 1994 and 1997 he worked as a sales
representative with the Weighing Balance Company at first and the Belgian
company, UCB, later.
Life was falling into place. He had broken tradition and
married a Hindu woman, Kavita, who would convert and assume the new name
of Mariam.
In 1995 Mobin travelled to Bhopal to attend the four-day
All India Ansar Meet where SIMI leaders openly talked about an armed
struggle. Mobin, a young man who loved football, was ready to pick up
grenades.
In faraway Afghanistan, the radical students’ group,
Taliban, assumed power in 1996. "The corruption in SIMI came after the
Taliban took over Afghanistan," says Salees, munching on a pakora at
Bhatia Restaurant. "They thought, ‘If they can do it, we can also do it
here’."
For some time Kanpur was indeed getting shades of Kandahar.
By the time of the Ikhwan Conference in 1999 much was
changing within SIMI. Two rival groups had emerged. One was led by its
president, Shahid Badr Falahi, who wanted to transform it into a political
party and fight elections. The other was led by the hardliner, Safdar
Nagauri, who wanted an armed jihad.
By September 1999 Mobin was a Unani doctor. He had also
deepened his association with SIMI. His father was happy that he had
married and had five children. But at the same time the police say he had
become SIMI’s treasurer and was living at AMU.
In 2000 Mobin volunteered to be a bomber when attacks were
planned in UP after the Ikhwan conference. He was assigned Agra, deputed
with Hizb ul-Mujahideen’s Ali Mohammad and bomb expert Gulzar Wani, and
received Rs 8,000 in instalments. The bomb was assembled at an AMU hostel
and taken to Agra by bus on July 28.
On the way, they somehow broke the timer device. The plan
failed. Mobin was asked to escape – and lie low.
Countdown to Independence Day
Within months, Haider’s inverter broke down and he met the
mesmerising Maulana near Parade Road. They began to spend time together,
meeting Maulana’s new friends, including one called Nazir Kashmiri. The
Maulana, allegedly involved in several terrorist attacks since 1993,
excelled at narrating horror tales of the oppression of Muslims in Kashmir
and elsewhere.
"I loved listening to stories of militant heroes. I was
also filled with rage," Haider would later tell his interrogators. By
August, unknown to his family, he was ready.
They were to carry out blasts around August 15. But before
that a dry run was required. Haider brought out his Maruti Gypsy in which
he took Nazir Kashmiri and Maulana Mumtaz to a remote rural expanse near a
railway track in Unnao.
Haider had stepped over the precipice. On August 14, he
and the others took two bombs – one in a pressure cooker and the other in
a wooden box – and buried them under gravel at the Aryanagar crossing.
They heard the huge blast while passing the Hallett Hospital. Nazir asked
to be taken to a place with a roof a kilometre away from Aryanagar. They
went to a friend’s house from where Nazir set off the second blast by
remote control.
Mobin was working on another August 15 operation. He was
in a rented room at Qasai Bada in Aligarh, making a timer-controlled bomb
to be set off at Agra’s cantonment. One afternoon, when Mobin had stepped
out, a technical glitch caused a huge explosion, instantly killing four of
his fellow militants.
On September 4, Mobin was arrested.
Over the next year Haider – who now carried a gun at all
times – walked his way through a series of terror operations. On July 24,
2001 he was arrested near the Red Fort in New Delhi with RDX and hand
grenades on him. He received a life sentence.
Months later, SIMI was banned by the Vajpayee government
and it went underground.
The schism within was also complete – Nagauri and his
cohort had transformed it into a conventional terror group.
(This article was published in the Hindustan Times
on August 10, 2008.)
Courtesy: Hindustan Times;
epaper.hindustantimes.com