சிமி தான் பம்பாயில் குண்டு வெடித்து 209 பேரை கொன்றது. முன்னாள் சிமி தலைவர் ஒப்புதல்

சிமி தான் பம்பாயில் குண்டு வெடித்து 209 பேரை கொன்றது. முன்னாள் சிமி தலைவர் ஒப்புதல் ..

தொடர்ந்து படிக்க
Storm rages within SIMI
Praveen Swami
Jihadist hardliners and political Islamists lock horns over tactics
Terror links blamed on hardline minority
Moderates in SIMI want to come overground

MUMBAI: Last month, a soft-spoken, bespectacled man walked into a Nagpur court and announced that he wished to surrender to the authorities.

Startled court clerks watched as Mohammad Abrar Qasim said he was a member of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India, wanted by the Maharashtra police ever since the Mumbai serial bombings of July 11, 2006.

Like hundreds of others, Qasim joined SIMI in 1993, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the pogroms which followed it. A dentist by training, he later married the daughter of Ziauddin Siddiqithe, the SIMI leader, whose inflammatory speeches led to criminal charges first being filed against the organisation.

A fanatic? Not quite. In the weeks since he surrendered, Dr. Qasim has been telling officials that SIMI’s links with terror are the work of a hardline minority. Most of SIMI’s rank and file, he says, wish to emerge from the shadows. “Moderates in SIMI want to come overground,” Dr. Qasim told a police official, “for we have nothing to hide.”

Back in January, 2006, the former SIMI president, Shahid Badr Falahi, called a meeting of core SIMI activists at Aluva, Kerala. Under cover of a summit of the National Urdu Promotion Council, the group elected new office-bearers for lobbying with politicians and religious leaders to have the 2001 ban revoked.

Most of the team led by the new SIMI president, Mohammad Misbah-ul-Haq, a West Bengal resident, were anti-jihad political Islamists. Key office-bearers, Kalim Akhtar, Shahbaz Husain, Abdul Majid, Noman Badr, Saif Nachan and Minaz Nachan believed that SIMI’s jihad links had hurt both the organisation and Muslims as a whole.

But one team member didn’t share their beliefs. Shibly Peedical Abdul, a computer engineer from Kerala who escaped last month’s police sweep against terror suspects in Karnataka, was among the jihadist SIMI operatives thought to have helped to organise the July 2006, serial bombings in Mumbai. The bombings killed 209 people and injured 704.

Abdul fled Bangalore hours after the arrest of SIMI operative Ehtesham Siddiqui, who police say helped to execute the bombings. So, too, did SIMI political Islamists. It wasn’t until January, 2007 that the political Islamists were again able to meet. A senior New Delhi-based Jamaat-e-Islami leader was in attendance this time, attempting to persuade the new leadership to surrender.

“Misbah-ul-Haq called Abdul in the middle of the meeting,” one participant told The Hindu, and demanded to know why SIMI cadre had participated in the Mumbai attacks. Abdul admitted that the jihadists had met in Ujjain just a week before the terror strikes. He said the jihadists would continue their activities, and accused us of “selling out.”

With no hope of a compromise, SIMI political Islamists met again in Calicut from November 12 to 14, 2007. If SIMI was ever to function as a political organisation, Misbah-ul-Haq said, its leaders would face prosecution. Dr. Qasim, fed up with a life on the run, offered to go first.

“The idea,” says a senior SIMI functionary, “was to see if it would open some doors.”

Hazy future


Will it? It was in 1991, in the midst of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Ram Janmabhoomi movement, that SIMI first began funnelling cadre into jihadist groups. At a convention in Mumbai’s Bandra Reclamation that December, top SIMI leaders CAM Basheer and Saqib Nachan met with leaders of terror groups linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.

By the time of SIMI’s 1999 Aurangabad convention, the jihadists controlled SIMI. “Islam is our nation, not India,” thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad, one of the over a dozen SIMI-linked Lashkar operatives arrested in 2005 for smuggling in military-grade explosives and assault rifles for a series of attacks planned in Gujarat.

When 25,000 SIMI delegates met in Mumbai in 2001, at what was to be its last public convention, the organisation called on its supporters to turn to jihad. SIMI activists later organised demonstrations in support of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin-Laden, hailing him as a “true mujahid” and celebrating the demolition of the Bamian Buddhas by the Taliban.

Has the wheel turned? It seems clear that a storm over tactics has broken within the organisation’s ranks. What is less certain is whether the moderates, so decisively defeated in the charged climate of the Babri Masjid demolition, will find willing listeners. For most young SIMI cadre, the wounds of the Gujarat pogrom are still fresh and reason less appealing than the seductive jihadist call.