Author: Uday Mahurkar
Publication: India Today
Date: January 21, 2002
Insurgency has often thrived on
the misconception that outlawing a subversive organisation will quell rebellion.
The Government sought to feed this delusion in September last year when
it banned the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Only for the
unsavoury truth to be reiterated when 123 SIMI activists were arrested
in Surat last week. For, even as India and Pakistan braced themselves for
a military stand-off on the issue of terrorism, the Surat arrests revealed
a robust regrouping of the fundamentalist organisation within the country.
More significantly, it unearthed SIMI's hitherto unknown US connection.
The activists, now sentenced to
a 14-day police remand, had converged on Surat under a spurious banner
of the non-existent All India Minority Education Board, Delhi, with the
purported objective of holding a conference on education. Abdulhai Abdulsattar
Silavat, an assistant professor in Jodhpur University, along with two other
persons, is believed to have planned the meet and even produced a half-page
conference agenda to substantiate their claims. But as Surat Additional
Commissioner of Police Ashish Bhatia says, "Their prime objective seems
to be the recruitment of Muslim youth after the ban."
With members hailing from Maharashtra,
Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal
and Gujarat, the campaign is nationwide and probably the "first in a line
of such meets". Many of the arrested people have several cases pending
against them for inciting communal feelings and indulging in anti-national
activities. The literature recovered from the site includes inflammatory
pamphlets on Osama bin Laden, SIMI entry forms and other texts in Urdu
and Arabic. Expectedly, the pamphlets castigate the US, India and Israel
while extolling the virtues of bin Laden.
What has, however, caught the Government's
attention are the messages in the e-mail account of a key SIMI activist
from Ahmedabad, Suhel Patel. A US-born Indian from Paguthan village in
Bharuch district of south Gujarat, Suhel has been living in Ahmedabad for
nearly 15 years now. The messages offer vital information on the financial
support being provided by two US-based organisations: the Islamic Society
of North America (ISNA) and the Chicago-based Consultative Committee of
Indian Muslims (CCIM).
One of the messages dated December
11, 2001 carries a Rs 1.24-crore proposal forwarded by Suhel to one "mehman"
for sustaining the SIMI movement following its ban. It seeks Rs 48 lakh
for the families of the arrested leaders and Rs 25 lakh as legal aid for
fighting their court cases. It asks for another Rs 7 lakh to launch a magazine
"for making the world Muslim brotherhood aware of the fast-changing situation
in the Islamic world" and Rs 12 lakh for scholarships to "those working
full-time to fulfil our goal".
According to the police, Suhel has
confessed to drawing up the proposal following a directive from SIMI President
Shahid Badr, who is currently lodged in Delhi's Tihar Jail. In fact, reveals
Suhel, one of his brothers-in-law Yasin Ghulamrasool Patel, an Ahmedabad-based
printing press owner, is currently in Chicago collecting the funds. Suhel
is also said to be in constant touch with Badr's legal adviser in Delhi,
Anees, regarding the funds. In fact, six months ago, Suhel had written
to a Jamaat-i-Islami leader in Pakistan, Tayyab Abu Adil, for securing
the copyright of the Gujarati and Hindi versions of Quranic verses. Suhel
believes he is only one of several persons recruited by Badr to amass funds
for SIMI and that a massive fund-raising drive is currently on in various
countries.
Other e-mail messages in Suhel's
account show how money is being transferred from the US to India for "Islamic
causes". Rafik, his Chicago-based brother-in-law, has written to him about
an ISNA conference in the US attended by delegates from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Singapore and India on August 31 last year. He also talks of Maulana Sajjad
Naumani who through his connection with the IMRC-an as yet unidentified
organisation that Suhel claims no knowledge of-was raising a madarsa at
a cost of $1million (Rs 4.8 crore) in Lucknow. similarly, Naumani's accomplice,
Zakir Naik, an Indian, is said to have collected more than Rs 1.2 crore
for the IMRC in just 20 minutes at the "Islamic foundation fund-raising
dinner" in the US.
In yet another message in June last
year, Rafik apparently passed on exhortations and advice by Chicago-based
Professor Munnawar Hussein "of the Jamaat": "Try to expand SIMI's activities
at all levels; focus on universities, unions, women, farmers and local
field workers; and create a political wing of SIMI." Says Surat Police
Commissioner V.K. Gupta: "We are forwarding the details of SIMI's US connection
to the Union Government to be passed on to the FBI for further investigation
in the US."
Rafik also advises Patel to delete
every message as soon as it has been read. Below the message concerning
Hussein, Rafik warns, "Don't reply to this message. Delete it and create
a new message to respond." Says Assistant Commissioner of Police Narendra
Amin who tracked Patel's e-mail account: "This clearly implies that even
before the September 11 terrorist attack in the US, those connected with
jehadi outfits in the US were aware they had to steer clear of the US detectives."
Suhel was also sent an article,
"Good Bye Kashmir", written by Abid Ullah Jan of Pakistan, who rebukes
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf for capitulating to the western
world. He rues that "after the turn of events in Afghanistan and Pakistan
the Kashmir cause is lost to the Muslim ummah". The message adds: "If jehad
is so irrelevant that we (Pakistan) remove jehad-related Quranic verses
from school curriculum how can we force it in Kashmir? If religion is so
irrelevant in Pakistan, so is our existence as a state and our demand for
Kashmir."
Though the police have failed to
establish a direct Pakistani connection, of late, fundamentalist Islamic
groups have been active in Gujarat. This is in keeping with the ISI strategy
of creating Islamic bases in states bordering Pakistan with pockets of
sizeable Muslim population. In Bhuj last week, several Muslim leaders delivered
provocative public speeches but the police refrained from taking any action.
This was preceded by the recovery of three consignments of RDX from the
Kutch-Banaskantha border in the past two months.
SIMI's role as a subversive outfit
in India came to light for the first time in 1992 when the Gujarat Police
recovered ammunition from Ahmedabad and arrested three SIMI activists.
Their interrogation had revealed that Rafik Dadu from Gujarat-one of the
123 held last week-had taken arms training at an ISI camp in 1990. A decade
down the line SIMI is as active and its objectives as undiluted. It will
perhaps take sterner measures than an easily flouted ban to curb the fundamentalist
fervour of a fanatic organisation.
