Author: Anil Nair
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 22, 2005
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=70767
As the Kerala government investigates
links between local militant groups and the ISI, Anil Nair reports on a
hard Islamic identity that is beginning to take root in the state. And
is inspiring religious violence that spills across Kerala's borders
Six years ago the Kerala police
appears to have had hard evidence of its homegrown extemists, with links
to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (The Indian Express, May 17).
The police, of course, failed to act on it. The matter was kept under wraps.
The secret of Muslim extremism coming to light only after the violence
in Marad, in the summer of 2003.
Following the Kerala home department's
revelations about the alleged ISI hand in the Kozhikode-based National
Democratic Front (NDF), M.K. Narayanan, the national security adviser,
has himself ordered a new probe. The dark underbelly of God's Own Country
is under the microscope.
Make no mistake, Kerala is no Kashmir.
The state's connection with pan-Islamic militancy is less about impressionable
youth being handed the latest automatic rifles, and making a voyage from
Karachi to Ponani by speedboat. It is more a combustible mix of personal
resentment and perceived political traditions of faith. Understanding this
is crucial if the state is to formulate a viable and longterm response
to religious extremism.
The real turning point where Kerala's
Muslim militancy is concerned was 2003. On May 3 that year, the state witnessed
one of its worst incidents of communal violence at Marad. The toll, nine
killed, was low. But what made the attack on Hindu fishermen in Kozhikode
significant was its absolute onesidedness and meticulous planning.
Later that month, then Mumbai police
commissioner R.S. Sharma, following the busting of a Lashkar-e-Toiba module
in Thane, revealed details of a terrorist plan for a series of bomb blasts
in Kerala.
Around the same time, Indian Army
troops mopping up militant bunkers in Kashmir's Pir Panjal ranges during
Operation Sarp Vinash stumbled on an abandoned satellite phone. Calls had
been made from it just hours earlier, to Islamabad, Dubai and, of all places,
Malappuram.
Cumulatively, these incidents seemed
to be alarming. But RAW chief P.K. Hormis Tharakan, till very recently
Kerala's director-general of police, still doesn't want to rush to conclusions.
''From a security aspect, nothing,
of course, can be ruled out,'' he says, ''but Kerala doesn't have a terrorist
problem per se. There have been serious communal confrontations in the
past and we are keeping our eyes peeled for that kind of trouble. The only
arms caches that have been found are pipe bombs and swordsticks. Communal
harmony even in that - the Hindus make the swordsticks and the Muslims
use it!''
On intelligence estimates of Rs
700 crore in hawala money being poured into Malappuram in the past three
or four years, he says the police is ''taking it seriously''. To Thakaran,
the hawala transaction is in some ways the perfect 21st century crime.
''For one,'' he points out, ''it occurs in several jurisdictions, thousands
of miles apart. It's hard to determine who exactly commits the crime ...
Only a minuscule amount, however, would be used for militant activities
in Kerala.''
Head hunters by another name
An official from another Central
agency, wishing anonymity, contradicts this. ''Of the hawala money,'' he
says, ''a considerable amount will go to middleme,n but SIMI and NDF could
be the final beneficiaries.'' He also says groups like the Chicago-based
Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims and Jamayyatul Ansar, an organisation
of expatriate Indian Muslims in Saudi Arabia, could be possible sources
of funding.
MALAPPURAM'S peculiar demography
provides perfect cover for groups that seek it. It is one of only two Muslim-majority
districts in India, outside Jammu and Kashmir (the other being Murshidabad
in West Bengal). Since the early 1990s, fundamentalists appear to have
had a concerted plan to win over the community.
Kerala Nadvathul Mujahedeen's leader
Ahmed Kutty paints a grim picture: ''The method of the extremists to take
control of a mosque is always the same. It begins with a small cell of
adepts praying with the others and trying to rally them. If there is not
much headway, relentless arguing and verbal abuse follow. The majority
then either falls silent or goes to another place.''
Where cajoling fails, there's direct
action. The murder of Chekannur Maulvi, a reformist Islamic scholar, a
decade ago still evokes memories in Malappuram. The frequent acts of cultural
policing - like the burning of cinemas and attacks on Muslim women trying
to marry outside their religion -are only some instances of fundamentalist
violence at fellow Muslims. There have been reports of such incidents as
recently as earlier this year.
Slowly the process of indoctrination
acquires momentum. To some Muslims, alienated by the moral vertigo of contemporary
society, an austere interpretation of Islam has an appeal. One of them
even justifies the drug trade in these terms.
''Let me be clear, I personally
don't support such activities,'' says advocate Abdul Gafoor, an active
supporter of the Indian Union Muslim League, ''but in theory and from a
historical perspective, it is a kind of colonial revenge. Heroin, for example,
is produced in the third world and consumed in the West. Call it reverse
imperialism.''
It is a wierd logic. To Ahmed Kutty,
another resident of Malappuram, ''Such logic stems from defensiveness,
from the belief that we reside in the Dar-ul-Harb or House of War. The
Koran demands that we live in Dar ash-Shahada or House of Witness, in which
believers and unbelievers compete in doing good works to prove the truth.''
For Malappuram's sake, the witness
will hopefully prevail over the warrior.
Footsoldiers of faith
THERE are three reasons, Shahul
Hameed reveals, why he prefers a C-4 device. First, it is a plastic explosive
and the extra coating makes it safer to handle. Second, it allows remote
switching mechanisms and hence leaves little or no electronic signature.
The third reason is ideological or, probably, madly idiosyncratic: the
C-4 is malleable and can be pointed in a particular direction. Hameed prefers
his victims be oriented towards Mecca when his bombs explode.
After its ban, the Students' Islamic
Movement of India (SIMI) is known to operate in southern India primarily
through the NDF and Islamic Youth Front in Kerala and the Tamil Nadu Muslim
Munnetra Kazhagam. These are above-ground organisations that reportedly
use hospitals as meeting places and influential people's cars and homes
to ferry and hide fugitives.
Police sources say they bury caches
of arms near mosques and launder funds for militant activity through local
charity or zakat committees. One thing these organisations truly value
is their ''engineers'' - a euphemism for expert bomb-makers.
THE Sunday Express set out to meet
some of these people. As per our SIMI contact Naushad's instructions, we
did not take a bus or an auto-rickshaw but walked a good 45 minutes from
the Coimbatore railway station to a particular locality that must go unnamed.
It is a teeming place and on both sides of the narrow streets the once
audacious green of most houses bear slender crescents on their doorways.
A canal runs beside the road, its water oily and black after flowing through
half the city. In the early evening the exhaust from passing vehicles raises
a vile smog.
Following instructions, we barge
into a sleazy hotel where rooms are rented by the hour. The man at the
desk is surprised to see two men, but, anyway, he accepts the advance and
gives us a room. We spend 24 hours staring at the ceiling, till a teenage
boy comes to the room and whispers an address.
MEETING Hameed in a suburban residential
area, the first thing one notes are the disconcerting eyes, like shards
of mirror that seem to dare the person before him: do you see what I see?
''Splinters from a premature explosion, though prompt medical attention
saved my sight,'' he explains, and laughingly adds, ''it is part of our
trade. I know some who are dead because they relaxed for a moment.''
His chaste Tamil occasionally betrays
a Malayalam accent. For this former ''commando'' of the disbanded Islamic
Sevak Sangh, the past decade has been one of safehouses, disguises and
the perpetual possibility of imminent arrest or death.
On a table are a smattering of booklets
and blurry photocopies. They are all English or Tamil translations of original
fatwas, issued in Arab by Wahabbi clerics. One speaks of a hadith where
the Prophet purportedly singles out India as a special target for jihad.
''Whosoever will take part in jihad
against India,'' Markaz leader Muhammad Ibrahim Salaf claims in the booklet,
''the Prophet has declared, 'Allah will set him free from the pyre of hell'.''
Another is a tirade against President
George W. Bush, demanding he stand trial before an interational court and
take ''responsibility for the September 11 bombings carried out by the
Zionists''.
THERE are no telltale signs of the
''engineer's'' true trade in the room. But Hameed doesn't disappoint us
with details. He speaks of how C-4 blocks are made by mixing RDX powder
with water and a bit of engine oil, to form a slurry, then distilled. And
that the final product has the consistency of hard clay.
He is lucid in describing his craft:
''It takes considerable energy to set off a C-4 explosion. Choosing the
right kind of detonator is crucial. A pound of C-4 can blow up a truck
and its chemical reaction is so fast, nothing can outrun the explosion.''
Imagine a few pounds of the stuff
going off in a crowded marketplace or a train and it becomes clear why
security agencies are so frantic about taking out these ''engineers'' and
the networks that disseminate bomb-making skills to a generation of militants.
Coimbatore, of course, is the city
that saw a series of 12 bomb blasts on a single day in February 1998, a
day when L.K. Advani addressed an election meeting there. Then home minister
Indrajit Gupta blamed ISI-backed militants for the blasts, which killed
nearly 50 people. Simple past, complex presences
IN A mosque near Kondotty, north
Kerala, you are softly assaulted by muted colours, tiled floors and curvilinear
faux-wood. It is the time of the maghreb or evening prayers and the men
are reciting aurad (litanies). The devotion is apparent on their faces,
their stooped postures, their silence during the khutbah (sermon), and
subsequently in their tortured expressions following the du'aa' (supplication)
with the imam.
All along the old Tipu Sultan Road
in Malappuram district, the antique beauty of mazhars and dargahs, so inconspicuous
against the undulating landscape, are a dwindling force in lives to which
they not so long ago gave meaning.
Replacing them are marble and glass
mosques - bland, clean, expensive. The new architecture seems to be echoing
the vision of a single, simple Islam. It rests on close fidelity to the
words of the Koran, is rid of ties to any particular place or period, is
concerned with ''family life'' and Sharia and is underwritten by extensive
global funding networks.
Naushad is one Malayali who is in
the vanguard of such an Islam. He is an ansar of SIMI, whose proclaimed
aim is ''the liberation of India through Islamic inquilab''. As a full-time
underground worker, he says he models himself on the small but elite cadre
of believers who helped the Prophet recapture Mecca.
IT all changed so fast. ''Until
the demolition of the Babri Masjid,'' says Naushad, ''I never saw myself
as all that different from other Indians. But after December 6, 1992, how
could I deceive myself? Whatever doubts might have remained died with Gujarat
in 2002.''
He holds a mildewed Koran, its spine
cracked with age. The Koran looks odd in his large, calloused hands, which
seem more accustomed to carrying vice grips and OHM meters.
Multicoloured ribbons allow him
to turn chunks of pages at one go and jump from one favorite verse to the
other: a green ribbon opens to Sura 3:28 ''Let not the Believers take for
friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers; if any do that, in
nothing will there be help from Allah''; a yellow one is on Sura 30: 1-4:
''In a land close by; but they (even) after (this) defeat of theirs, will
soon be victorious.''
If there is a certain stereotype
of the gun-toting Macho Muslim Militant, all flowing beard and suspicious
of his very shadow, then Naushad negates it. For one, he is clean-shaven.
And he never once raises his voice.
The worshippers in the mosques have
dispersed. Naushad takes us to a home where we tuck into modest lentil
soup and dates, a diet that is ''very mustahhab (recommended)'', he suggests,
and then sit and talk.
''The first time the true power
of the ummah (community) hit me was during the protests against Rushdie's
blasphemous book. I became aware of what a fatwa could do. Soon afteraqwards
Ayatollah Khomeini died and there were these images on TV of the mourners
flowing around him like lava,'' Naushad remembers.
BY then he had already spent eight
years in Secunderabad toiling away in sundry auto-workshops and bakeries.
He had left his native Malappuram after graduation, haunted by an ethos
that interprets lack of a government job as personal failure.
Successively in Mumbai, Lucknow
and Secunderabad it dawned on him that, the signs of an expanding economy
notwithstanding, a dignified future would forever elude him. ''In these
cities I lacked real connection with anything. People came and went. There
was much false intimacy. People didn't take responsibility for each other,''
Naushad says.
Confronted with a choice, the asperities
of a rigid Islam seemed better than the self-destruction urban alienation
seemed to inevitably lead to.
EARLIER in the day, we had stopped
beside a wayside dargah in the same district. Till not so long ago this
tomb was the meeting-place for diverse groups: the medieval pir himself
in his grave, and around him pilgrims, sellers of pious artifacts, sherbet
vendors, tattoo painters and fortune-tellers. Hindu mothers brought their
children here for good health, Muslim women sent offerings to the nearby
kavu bhagavathi or mother goddess for an auspicious marriage.
The marble balustrade of an imposing
new madrasa now overshadows the tomb. We hear children rhythmically chanting
the Koran in Arabic. This madrasa has no Hindu pupils and teachers on its
rolls, let alone regular Hindu donors, as used to be the case in the older
institutions.
''Muslims represent the forces of
truth (haq) while Hindus and Christians embody the forces of apostasy (batil),''
insists Naushad, adding, ''borrowing from Hinduism is akin to shirk, which
is unlawful and a sin.''
BESIDE us a man is furtively forcing
his goat to perform a full prostration to the pir's tomb before dragging
it off to be sacrificed. By preaching a ''pure'' Islam isn't Naushad peddling
a version of faith unrecognisable to tradition and piety alike?
As we hurtle down dust roads he
looks out the car window at the plantain groves and bubbly streams. He
went to school not far from here, sat on straw mats and memorised maths
tables. In the afternoons he and his friends, both Hindu and Muslim, stripped
off their shirts and played seven-a-side football on the school ground.
Naushad has been unusually candid
throughout, displaying warmth and humour. Yet once in a while, he catches
himself and draws back. His lips purse, sentences become monosyllables
and you lose him.
Like now, when he replies: ''I have
developed an inability to mourn ... Faith means forgoing everything for
the future.'' Somehow in that disturbing future, Kerala is losing the certitudes
of its past.
