Author: S Gurumurthy
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: August 21, 2008
URL: http://www.newindpress.com/newspages.asp?page=m&Title=Main+Article&
A few publicly known facts expose the state
of the Indian debate on- Islamist terror. The Ahmedabad serial blasts of July
26 killed over 50 people and injured over 200. The serial blasts in Bangalore,
a day before, did not yield the same rich harvest of blood. After the blasts,
day after day, the Gujarat police kept uncovering and defusing dozens of live
bombs in Surat that fortunately did not explode.
Even as the recovery of such bombs was being
telecast live on all channels, on August 5, a court in Delhi annulled the
ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), faulting the UPA government
for providing "no fresh evidence" to continue the ban.
How did the "seculars" react to the court lifting the ban on SIMI?
Mulayam Singh and Lalu Yadav said that the ban was wrong in the first place!
Congress party spokesperson Shakeel Ahmed said the order was "no setback."
He went one step further and said, "Wherever terrorist attacks have taken
place in the recent past - Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat - it
is the state governments that are investigating the matter. It is their responsibility
to submit the evidence against SIMI to the Central Government," almost
implying that, as the state governments had not provided any, no evidence
existed against SIMI. Other secular parties, the "seculars" in the
NDA included, were careful not to fault the government for allowing SIMI to
escape the charge of terror.
Stunned by the court's view that "fresh
evidence" of terror was necessary to keep the ban on, the state rushed
to the Supreme Court and got the ban continued.
It was against the background of such prevarication
on SIMI that the Gujarat police announced on August 16 that it had arrested
10 top SIMI officials and activists who had masterminded the Gujarat blasts;
and also the blasts in Rajasthan and elsewhere. It also came out with an irrefutable
story of how the terrorists conspired, how many of them and when and where,
with identities, dates, sequences and locations.
When the secularists were handing out negative
certificate of good conduct to SIMI, thanks to the court order, a study by
the Institute of Conflict Management headed by KPS Gill, the terror of the
Punjab terrorists, had already catalogued over 100 incidents from 2000 to
July this year, that characterised SIMI as a terror outfit. Its cadre had
been charged as motivators and perpetrators in major attacks from 2002 to
2008.
State governments, including Congress and
communist governments and the UPA government at the Centre, had told courts
and the Parliament at different times that SIMI was an anti-national, terrorist
organisation; that it was linked to Lashker-e-Toiba and other Islamist terror
outfits; that huge quantities of arms and ammunition including RDX were seized
from their hideouts and cadres.
In February 2007, holding that the SIMI was
secessionist, the Supreme Court said that it had not stopped its activities
when its counsel pleaded that, after 2003, there was no evidence to link it
to anti-national activities. Moreover, it is the secular Maharastra government's
police that alleged in a chargesheet that SIMI was linked to Pakistan!
And now a brief note on SIMI. It was founded
in 1977 by Mohammad Ahmadullah Siddiqi, Professor of Journalism and Public
Relations at Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois, but originally
from Lucknow!
To make "the Holy Koran the governing
text of human life, propagation of Islam, and jihad in the cause of Islam"
were its founding goals.
Javed Anand, a secular icon, has this to say
about SIMI: "True to its ideological mooring, in the '80s, SIMI produced
eyecatching stickers proclaiming "Secularism, no; Democracy, no; Nationalism,
no; Polytheism, no; Only Islam." But no one seemed unduly perturbed by
this dangerous drift of a section of Indian Muslim youth spreading wings under
the loving care of its patron, JeI (Jamait-e-Islami Hind). It was only in
the late '90s that the JeI officially snapped the umbilical cord that organically
linked it to SIMI." But Javed Anand wrote this not in the 1980s, not
in the 1990s, not even till August 15, 2008, but only on August 16, after
SIMI was seen as the culprit in the Gujarat blasts.
How did SIMI grow to these menacing proportions?
The plain answer is that it was receiving open and clandestine political patronage
from the seculars. The NDA government first banned SIMI in September 2001
and extended the ban in 2003,which continued till September 2005. The UPA
government, which came to power in 2004, did not extend the ban when it expired
in September 2005, helping to revive a disintegrating SIMI. This, according
to Wikipedia, was the state of SIMI after the second ban: "It was unable
to function in any manner because all its members were demoralised or had
crossed the age of 30 years which automatically disentitled them to continue
as a member of SIMI ... and due to lack of offices and as all its accounts
were frozen, some of the erstwhile members also had to fight criminal cases
foisted against them by the state."
But why did the UPA not continue the ban?
Because Sonia Gandhi and her party opposed the first ban on SIMI in 2001.
They were not only admirers of SIMI, but also its advocates - yes, really,
advocates as Salman Khurshid, president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress committee,
was the counsel defending SIMI in the high court and in the Supreme Court
against the ban.
See how these secular admirers of SIMI defended
a terror outfit that was anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-India according
to Javed Anand, when the NDA government first outlawed it in 2001. While speaking
against the introduction of POTA in the special Parliament session in 2002
Sonia censured the government for banning the SIMI, which was not involved
in terrorist activities!
Sirprakash Jaiswal, UPCC president in 2001,
said the Vishwa Hindu Parishad was a greater threat to the nation than SIMI."
The government of the same party had to re-impose
ban in 2006 after its own Maharashtra government found SIMI involved in the
Mumbai train blasts in 2006. Later, the very same Jaiswal, as junior minister
for home affairs in this government told the Rajya Sabha on April 23, 2007
and the Lok Sabha earlier, that SIMI was linked to LeT and was anti-national
and that huge caches of arms and ammunition were seized from its cadre! But
this was after SIMI had grown to gigantic proportions and struck at India
some 10 times between 2004 and 2008 before it struck again in Gujarat on August
26. Even now, Sonia has not uttered one word against SIMI. Does it mean that
she admires it still? Or she is so saintly that, like one of the three noble
monkeys of Mahatma Gandhi, she sees no evil whether it is SIMI or LTTE or
Nalini or Afzal - the RSS and its allies being the only exceptions!
- comment@gurumurthy.net
About the author: S Gurumurthy is a well-known
commentator on political and economic issues.