Author: Praveen Swami
Publication: The Hindu
Date: November 11, 2007
URL: http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/28/stories/2007112854431000.htm
India's largest Islamist movement emerged
in a toxic landscape suffused with communal hatred.
"Mohammad is our commander; the Quran
our constitution; and martyrdom our one desire," ran the principal slogan
of the Students Islamic Movement of India.
Although it was proscribed in 2001, the outlawed
organisation remains the largest platform for radical Islamists in India.
Last week's serial bombings in Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi, the evidence
so far available suggests, were organised by networks raised from SIMI's ranks.
So, too, were at least half a dozen recent attacks in States as far apart
as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Despite SIMI's emergence as one of the principal
threats to India's internal security, neither the history nor objectives of
its cult of the Kalashnikov is well understood.
Like many other South Asian Islamist movements,
SIMI's genesis lies in the Jamaat-e-Islami. Established in 1941 by the influential
Islamist ideologue Syed Abu Ala Maududi, the Jamaat-e-Islami went on to emerge
as a major political party in Pakistan, fighting for the creation of a Shariah-governed
state.
In India, however, the Jamaat gradually transformed
itself into a cultural organisation committed to propagating neoconservative
Islam amongst Muslims. It set up networks of schools and study circles, devoted
to combating growing post-independence influence of communism and socialism.
A student wing, the Students Islamic Organisation, was set up in 1956, with
its headquarters at Aligarh. As Muslims in north India were battered by communal
violence, the Jamaat moved away from Maududi's hostility to secularism. It
began arguing that the secular state needed to be defended as the sole alternative
was a Hindu-communalist regime.
SIMI was formed in April 1977, as an effort
to revitalise the SIO. Building on the SIO's networks in Uttar Pradesh, SIMI
reached out to Jamaat-linked Muslim students' groups in Andhra Pradesh, West
Bengal, Bihar and Kerala. From the outset, SIMI made clear its belief that
the practice of Islam was essentially a political project. In the long term,
SIMI sought to re-establish the caliphate, without which it felt the practice
of Islam would remain incomplete. Muslims comfortable living in secular societies,
its pamphlets warned, were headed to hell.
Winds from the west gave this ideology an
increasingly hard edge. Its leadership was drawn to the Islamist regime of
General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. SIMI threw its weight behind the
United States-backed mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union and the socialist
regime in Afghanistan, and the forces of Sunni reaction in West Asia. "SIMI's
rhetoric," scholar Yoginder Sikand has recorded, "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."
Alarmed at this course of action, elements
of the Jamaat leadership sought to distance themselves from SIMI. Others in
the Jamaat, incensed at what they saw as the organisation's betrayal of Maududi's
authentic Islamism, resisted the moderates. In 1982, the Jamaat formally distanced
itself from SIMI, but both organisations in practice retained a cordial relationship.
Part of the reason for SIMI's spectacular
growth after 1982 lay in the support it gained from Islamists in West Asia,
notably the Kuwait-based World Association of Muslim Youth and the Saudi Arabia-funded
International Islamic Federation of Student Organisation. Generous funding
from West Asia helped it establish a welter of magazines - Islamic Movement
in Urdu, Hindi and English, Iqra in Gujarati, Rupantar in Bengali, Sedi Malar
in Tamil and Vivekam in Malayalam - that propagated the idea of an Islamic
revolution. SIMI also set up a special wing, the Tehreek Tulba e-Arabiya,
to build networks among madrasa students, as well as the Shaheen Force, which
targeted children.
Much of SIMI's time was spent on persuading
its recruits that Islam alone offered solutions to the challenges of the modern
life. In 1982, for example, it organised an anti-immorality week, where supposedly
obscene literature was burned. A year later, in an effort to compete with
the left in Kerala, SIMI held an anti-capitalism week - but held out Islam,
rather than socialism, as the solution. SIMI also worked extensively with
victims of communal violence, and provided educational services for poor Muslims.
SIMI's polemic appealed to the growing class
of lower-middle class and middle-class urban men who felt cheated of their
share of the growing economic opportunities opening up in India. Hit by communal
bias and educational backwardness, this class of disenfranchised youth was
drawn to SIMI's attacks on Hindu polytheism and western decadence. The organisation's
claims that there could be no justice for Muslims in any system other than
a Shariah-based order resonated with communities battered by decades of communal
violence, often backed by the Indian state. As Sikand perceptively noted,
the organisation provided "its supporters a sense of power and agency
which they were denied in their actual lives." By 2001, SIMI had over
400 Ansar, or full-time workers, and 20,000 Ikhwan, or volunteers.
It wasn't until 1991, though, that SIMI began
its turn towards terror. Soon after the tragic events of December 6, 1992,
and the pogroms which followed it, SIMI president Shahid Badr Falahi demanded
that "Muslims organise themselves and stand up to defend the community."
Another SIMI leader, Abdul Aziz Salafi, demanded action to show that Muslims
"would now refuse to sit low."
What that meant in practice was self evident
to some SIMI members. On the first anniversary of the demolition of the Babri
Masjid, SIMI-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives Jalees Ansari, Mohammad Azam
Ghauri, Abdul Karim 'Tunda' and Mohammad Tufail Husaini - the last now wanted
for his possible role in the November 23 serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh
- carried out a series of reprisal terror strikes across India. Their organisation,
the Mujahideen Islam e-Hind, is thought to have been a precursor to the Indian
Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for last week's attacks.
Growing numbers of SIMI members followed in
their footsteps, making their way to the Lashkar, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkat
ul-Jihad-e-Islami training camps, but SIMI leaders continued to insist their
organisation itself had nothing to do with terrorism. Its polemic, however,
became increasingly bitter. In a 1996 statement, SIMI declared that since
democracy and secularism had failed to protect Muslims, the sole option was
to struggle for the caliphate. Soon after, it put up posters calling on Muslims
to follow the path of the eleventh-century conqueror Mahmood Ghaznavi, and
appealed to god to send down a latter-day avatar to avenge the destruction
of mosques in India.
By the time of SIMI's 1999 Aurangabad convention,
the ground-level manifestations of this ugly polemic were only too evident.
Many of the speeches delivered by delegates were frankly inflammatory. "Islam
is our nation, not India," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad, one
of over a dozen SIMI-linked Lashkar operatives arrested in 2005 for smuggling
in military-grade explosives and assault rifles for a planned series of attacks
in Gujarat. Among those listening to the speech was 1993 bomber Azam Ghauri
who, by the accounts of some of those present, was offered the leadership
of SIMI.
When 25,000 SIMI delegates met in Mumbai in
2001, at what was to be its last public convention, the organisation for the
first time called on its supporters to turn to jihad. Soon after the convention,
Al Qaeda carried out its bombings of New York and Washington, D.C. SIMI activists
organised demonstrations in support of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, hailing
him as a "true mujahid," and celebrating the demolition of the Bamiyan
Buddhas by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
No idle polemic
It was by now clear this was no idle polemic.
Just eight months earlier, eight SIMI workers had been arrested for attempting
to bomb the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's headquarters in Nagpur. Investigators
discovered they had trained with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in Pakistan. Soon
after, evidence surfaced on SIMI cadres' links with Uighur secessionists in
China, and Islamists in Bangladesh.
Writing in 2001, in an article published just
after the convention, the commentator Javed Anand recalled seeing stickers
pasted "in large numbers in Muslim shops and homes, a thick red 'NO'
splashed across the words DEMOCRACY, NATIONALISM, POLYTHEISM. 'ONLY ALLAH!'
exclaims SIMI's punch-line."
By the time SIMI was proscribed, it had become
clear even to the most obtuse these slogans were being drawn in blood with
Kalashnikovs and RDX.
Proscription, though, has done little to disrupt
SIMI's networks. Several key leaders succeeded in escaping ill-planned police
sweeps against the organisation, and continued to work out of camps in Bangladesh
and Pakistan. Some States flatly refused to cooperate with police action against
SIMI, pointing to the Union Government's failure to act against Hindu fundamentalist
groups involved in violence, like the Bajrang Dal.
As early as 2002, SIMI operatives Sayeed Shah
Raza and Amil Pervez were arrested in Kolkata with large supplies of explosives.
In 2003, Intelligence Online reported that as many as 350 Indians working
in West Asia had been recruited by SIMI sympathisers to fight the United States.
SIMI's name again featured in investigations of the 2006 serial bombings in
Mumbai, when key suspects, notably Rahil Ahmad Sheikh, turned out to have
had past links with the organisation. In Uttar Pradesh, too, SIMI linkages
were thrown up in investigations of the 2005 serial bombings - just as they
have been in the course of the most recent attacks.
Fighting SIMI, it is clear, will take more
than arrest warrants and intelligence work: a coherent strategy to clean up
the toxic political landscape from which it arose is desperately needed.
