Of SIMI, Jehad and the NE Reach

In India, the genesis of Islamist fundamentalism, which has now transformed into a full-fledged jehad, can be traced back to the early forties of the 20th century. It was the Jamaat-e-Islami, founded by the influential Islamist ideologue Syed Abu Ala Maududi in 1941, that first sowed the seeds of a proposed Islamist dominion in pre-Independent India, to be governed by the Sharia. Naturally, as one of the experts, Praveen Swami, writes, ''the Jamaat-e-Islami went on to emerge as a major political party in Pakistan, fighting for the creation of a Sharia-governed state'' (Frontline, December 21, 2007).

Back in India, which was to emerge as a secular state without even the Constitution saying a word on ''secularism'' when it was adopted, the Jamaat was left with little option. Despite brewing with Islamist tendencies, it had to reconcile with the natural Hindu order that was quintessentially secular. But it soon set out in its own journey, establishing schools and study circles to counter the growing influence of secularists as an alternative stratagem to revive Islamism as opposed to secularism. And then, in 1956, the Jamaat's students' wing came into being - the Students' Islamic Organization (SIO) - headquartered at Aligarh. However, with the Muslims of North India distancing themselves from Syed Maududi's Islamist theory, as also the Jamaat's edifice, after being visited by communal violence that was reflective of Hindu supremacy, many SIO leaders surrendered to the inevitability of secularism in India, thus gradually jettisoning the notion of exclusivist Islamism.

This provoked a rift across the Jamaat fold, with many of its hardliners seeking to regain their 'past glory' and re-energize the declining SIO. Thus was born the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in April 1977.

That the SIMI initiative was the precursor to Islamist resurgence in India and the consequent jehadi indoctrination of many an illiterate but devout Muslim youth, is clear from its main slogan: ''Mohammad is our commander; the Quran our constitution, and martyrdom our one desire.'' The thesis of Mohammad being ''our commander'' in public life whose constitution is a ''Quranic'' subtext that would necessitate ''martyrdom'' in the jehad against non-believers, had and still has SIMI members and activists convince their brethren of the need to write a permanent disclaimer to the Indian secular order, which is ''Hinduist'' as they would assert. It is another matter that the SIMI has not succeeded in a way it believed it could.

Yet, the SIMI trajectory is portentous, especially when the highly erroneous concept of ''ghettoization'' of Indian Muslims pitted against the ''dominant, free and flourishing'' Hindu community is dovetailed to the jehad text. As Praveen Swami writes, ''Although it (SIMI) was proscribed in 2001, the organization remains the largest platform for radical Islamists in India. The serial bombings in Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi on November 23, the evidence so far available suggests, were organized by networks from SIMI's ranks. So, too, were at least half-a-dozen recent attacks in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh... From the outset, SIMI made clear its belief that the practice of Islam was essentially a political project. In the long run, it sought to re-establish the caliphate, without which, it felt, the practice of Islam remained incomplete. Muslims who were comfortable living in secular societies, its pamphlets warned, were headed for hell.''

The SIMI got its best inspiration from the Pakistan dictator General Zia-ul-Haq who passed the Islamist decree for his country soon after deposing the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose Leftist leanings, as many believe, could well have prevented Pakistan from slipping into an Islamic fiefdom. The SIMI fully supported the mujahideen war in Afghanistan against the erstwhile Soviet Union, launched at the behest of the US-Pakistan combine, which was to eventually lead to the rise of one of the most savage Islamist forces in the world - the Taliban. To quote the scholar in the field, Yoginder Sikand, ''SIMI's rhetoric grew combative and vitriolic, insisting that Islam alone was the solution to the problems of not just the Muslims of India, but of all Indians and, indeed, of the whole world.''

Therefore, it was natural for the SIMI to hail the Al Qaeda as it carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US, eulogizing Osama bin Laden as a true and infallible mujahid out to salvage the Muslims of the world from 'un-Islamic' orders and regimes, including that of India. The SIMI also supported the destruction of the famed Bamiya Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Should one then be at all surprised if a growing breed of SIMI members has reportedly had training in jehad in the camps of the Laskar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami (HuJI)? It is another matter that the SIMI has denied any such links. The fact remains that after its statement in 1996 that Indian democracy and secularism had failed to protect Muslims in the country, the SIMI put up posters calling on the Muslims of the country to tread the path of the 11th-century conqueror Mahmood Ghaznavi and made an ''appeal to Allah'' to send someone, as avatar, to wreak vengeance on those who had destroyed masjids in India. It is in the fitness of things to ask: How many of the Indian secularists, who are now alarmed by the SIMI's increasing network and sleeper cells, bothered or had the guts to ask its leadership and mentors at that time as to who would avenge the unprovoked demolition of mandirs in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Be that as it may, the bottomline is that the Indian nation-state, in its so-called secular bliss, more so under the UPA dispensation, has failed to demolish the SIMI citadel in entirety. An organization that talks of ''Islam'' of the Taliban brand as the ''only solution to the problems of not just the Muslims, but of all Indians'', as it comes across a perverse secular cardinality as the UPA's that punctuates even the counter-terrorism theory with ''the sensitivities of minorities'' dots, will only recuperate to new and emboldened jehadi heights after every setback whatsoever. Hence the ground for the SIMI fold to expand as more and more mercenaries of terror set out for India to bleed the country by a million cuts.

Of the most vulnerable areas in the country in terms of SIMI penetration and networking, Assam is one, thanks of course to the unbridled surge of the illegal Bangladeshi population in the State and the ISI's choice of the State as a prized catch in the making of a greater Islamic state in the subcontinent. In view of reports that several jehadi outfits have sprung up in Assam, notably the Muslim United Liberation Front of Assam (MULTA), to orchestrate jehad in the State in tandem with fundamentalist and terrorist organizations based in Bangladesh, it is only too imminent that the SIMI, given the strategic expediency of Assam, will try to cover an extra mile in the region. While it will have no problems in adding to its recruits from among the illegally settled Muslims of Bangladesh in Assam who are mired in extreme poverty and need financial support of the kind that the SIMI would provide, funded as it is by oil-rich Islamic organizations based in West Asia and given the support it has earned from the influential Saudi Arabia-based International Islamic Federation of Students' Organization (IIFSO), it is New Delhi's known apathy to the region, as also the UPA government's perverse pseudo-secular restraint, that will serve as the best boon to the zealots. Is anyone concerned?

Back                          Top