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THE NATION: SIMI
Rooted In Muslim Antipathy
What makes SIMI
the most dreaded emerging acronym on India's internal security landscape?
The group is not new. Founded on April 25, 1977, in Aligarh, SIMI is headquartered
in a tiny two-storeyed building in Zakir Nagar, a ghetto in otherwise
plush south Delhi. Intelligence reports available with india today suggest
that over the years, particularly since 1991, SIMI has grown into a secretive,
cadre-based organisation with one overriding agenda-jehad.
Like the Taliban-which too began as a students'
movement-it is rooted in Muslim antipathy to "degenerate" western
ideas. It opposes "democracy" and "secularism" with
the same ease with which it supports Kashmiri terrorists. Live speeches-the
product of a telephone hooked on to a public address system-by such demagogues
as Qazi Hussain, the Jamait-e-Islami chief in Pakistan, and Sheikh Mohammed
Yasin, leader of the pan-Islamic Palestinian group Hamas, are heard at
its conferences. When SIMI's Madhya Pradesh wing sent two "social
workers" to assist quake-relief efforts in Gujarat, both were arrested
as "dangerous elements".
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| INFAMY AND AGONY: Posters showing the Quran
being burnt appeared in Kanpur before the violence, serving SIMI's
purpose |
Young by definition, a SIMI member has to be
below 30. Full membership-the status of an Ansar-is granted after a careful
assessment of the applicant's knowledge of Islam and his-and occasionally
her-willingness to lead an austere and regimented lifestyle.
Scrutiny, in fact, is so strict that over the
past 24 years SIMI has been able to build a core of only 500 Ansars. Apart
from the elite Ansars, there are some 10 lakh SIMI members all over India
(see graphic). Recruitment is ruthless business. "It is not easy
to become a member of our organisation. Not everyone can practise what
we preach," says Safdar Nagori, SIMI's articulate secretary-general
(see interview).
The first case against SIMI was registered on
January 11, 1991 at Delhi's Jama Masjid police station. It followed a
speech by Ziauddin Siddiqui, then SIMI's secretary-general, that was "rabidly
anti-Hindu", and "peppered with anti-national sentiments".
The trend persists and the Intelligence Bureau dossier on SIMI is decidedly
bulky.
For instance, on January 8, 1997, at a SIMI
convention in Aligarh chief guest Syed Ali Shah Gilani-then secretary-general
of the All Party Hurriyat Conference-posited Islam's global unity against
"meaningless" nationalism, which was held responsible for atrocities
on Muslims. The convention had been organised by Abdul Mubeen, then secretary
of SIMI's Aligarh Muslim University unit. Mubeen was arrested a year ago,
charged with engineering bomb blasts in Agra, Faizabad and Kanpur just
before the then US president Bill Clinton's visit to India.
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| CRY FROM THE PAST: A SIMI poster evokes Ghazni
on the Babri issue |
SIMI's politics is centred on a deft exploitation
of a community's insecurities, real or imagined. The Musalmaan, goes one
SIMI line, is "exploited everywhere, even in the 52 countries where
Muslims rule". Indian symbols are a particularly favourite target.
On September 6, 1998, SIMI President Shahid Badr Falahi announced in Kanpur
that the national song, Vande Mataram, was an open attack on Islam. "Singing
it would be a disgrace," he declared.
At conferences held in 1999 at Ujjain, Aurangabad,
Kanpur and Malappuram, SIMI leaders openly called for a jehad to establish
an Islamic state in India. Among SIMI's heroes are billionaire Saudi bankroller
of terrorism Osama bin Laden, Maulana Masood Azhar and the hijackers of
the Indian Airlines flight ic-814 to Kandahar. SIMI's list of villains
ranges from the usual suspects, Vajpayee and Home Minister Lal Krishna
Advani, to Sonia Gandhi, and the CPI(M)'s H.S. Surjeet. Right or left,
yellow or pink, it doesn't matter. If you are Indian, you are satanic.
Fraternal ties exist with the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizb-ul Mujahideen,
two of the biggest terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir. When it's not
glorifying Mahmud of Ghazni's sack of the Somnath temple a millennium
ago, SIMI is observing "Chechnya Day" in protest against the
Russian Government's assault on separatist Muslims.
The foreign links are more material too. SIMI
is generously funded by "well wishers" in Iran, Libya, the Gulf
emirates, particularly the Riyadh-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth
and the Kuwait-based International Islamic Federation of Students' Organisations.
Other overseas friends of SIMI are the Consultative Committee of Indian
Muslims (Chicago) and various student wings of the Jamait in Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Nepal. Says ACP Rajbir Singh of Delhi Police (special
cell), which monitors SIMI's activities in the capital: "Its links
with hardcore militant groups make SIMI the potential No. 1 enemy within."
Back in Kanpur-where local Muslims on their
part are upset with the "partisan role" of the Provincial Armed
Constabulary-security agencies are not concerned merely with SIMI's "potential".
They are talking of the clear and present danger.
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