Mere Ban on PFI Is Not Enough, Political Solution of Islamism Needs To Be Found
Ban on SIMI
Did Not Provide Solution To Extremism
Main
Points:
1. Extremist
religious views have become a mainstream trend.
2. Political
and social circumstances promote extremist views.
3. Global
presence of Islamism needs to be taken into consideration.
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By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
1 October
2022
An
office of the Popular Front of India (PFI) at Chandrayangutta in Hyderabad on
22 September 2022 | ANI Photo
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Praveen
Swami's article seeks to go to the roots of Islamism and extremist religious
narrative in India. In India, Islamism took roots before Al Qaida emerged on
the global scene. And it was banned with 9/11. But its ban did not eliminate
Islamism.
Though Al
Qaida was decimated it was not completely wiped out. Its ideology flourished in
the form of Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sahaba etc. Many mainstream Ulema and exegetes
overtly or covertly supported extremist views. So sometimes the line between
mainstream Islamic thought and extremist thought became blurred. This confusion
helped the extremists and terrorists. They quoted mainstream Ulema and exegetes
while defending their violence.
The social
and political conditions of India has also played its role. The deep rooted
sense of injustice and oppression as a result of communal riots, unemployment
and economic backwardness of Muslims due to bias of the government and the
bureaucracy was exploited by the extremist organisations to gain sympathy of
Muslims and spread their ideology.
PFI
flourished on the same sense of injustice and oppression of Muslims. So, Mr
Praveen Swami rightly says that if the government sincerely wants to root out
extremism and Islamism among the Indian Muslims, merely banning the PFI or SIMI
or the ISIS etc. will not serve the purpose.
Extremism
cannot be fought only with police action but with judicious political policies
that instils a sense of confidence and trust on the state institutions among
the Muslims. Policies that alienate the minorities will only aggravate the
problem. If the root causes of disillusionment of Muslims with the state
institutions are not found and addressed, another extremist organisation will
appear. Therefore, to end this vicious cycle, the government needs to chalk out
long term political action.
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PFI Ban
Is No Quick Fix For Jihadi Threat. See How SIMI Ban Birthed Indian Mujahideen
By Praveen
Swami
29
September, 2022
Late one
February evening in 2001, Sadiq Israr Sheikh received an invitation to tea at
the Medina Hotel, cradled inside the lanes of Mumbai’s Cheeta Camp. Like many
young Muslims of his generation, enraged by the demolition of the Babri Masjid,
Sheikh had joined the Students’ Islamic Movement of India. Within months,
though, the air-conditioning mechanic had become bored with listening to
impassioned speeches on Islam. Then, a year after he drifted away from SIMI,
came the meeting at the Medina—one which would leave deep scars across India.
Two weeks
after the carnage of 9/11, moved
to ban SIMI,
charging the organisation with sedition. Even though hundreds of key SIMI
operatives were arrested and interrogated, police forces and the intelligence
services missed the real story.
Following
his meeting at the Medina Hotel, Sheikh crossed the border into Bangladesh,
boarded an Emirates flight headed from Dhaka to Karachi through Dubai. From
Karachi, Sheikh
told police—in
testimony which under Indian law cannot be used against him during trial—he
drove on to a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp near Bahawalpur. There, he began training
with the core of former SIMI members who were forming the Indian Mujahideen.
Lessons
learned from the SIMI story help understand the prospects—and perils—of this
week’s decision to
proscribe the Popular Front of India (PFI). The SIMI ban choked visible
Islamist political mobilisation, but it didn’t cut off air to jihadist groups.
Worse, jihadist networks became more walled off, operating with a discipline
and secrecy that blinded India’s security services.
For almost
six years—from 2005 to 2011—India’s police and intelligence services were to
flail, clueless, in the face of the lethal urban terrorism campaign the country
had ever faced.
PFI’s Terror
Connection
Ever since
2016, the PFI has regularly faced allegations of its members joining
transnational jihadist groups like the Islamic State. Kerala resident Shajeer
Mangalassery Abdulla, accused by the NIA of recruiting for the Islamic State in
Afghanistan, was a supporter of the PFI’s political wing, the Social Democratic
Party of India (SDPI). Safwan Pookatail, a graphic designer with the PFI
house-journal Thejas, is alleged to be among
Shajeer’s recruits, along with Manseed Bin Mohamed, who researched Hindutva for the
now-banned group.
Kannur-origin
Muhammad Sameer—who took his wife, Fauziya, and three children to the Islamic
State caliphate in Syria, where they are suspected to be incarcerated in a
prison camp following his death—once served as sub-divisional convenor of the
PFI as Valapattanam.
Earlier
this year, police in Assam charged Maqibul Hussain, the former PFI district
head of Barpeta, of recruiting for Ansarullah
Bangla Team—a
Bangladeshi al-Qaeda affiliate that has carried out multiple attacks targeting
Left-wing secularists and the Hindu religious minority.
Telangana
police arrested PFI activist Abdul Khader on charges of providing Kung-Fu
combat training to hundreds of young men—although local media later reported that in this case, nothing more dangerous was
recovered than “three sets of loose paper bunches, three hand books, a
notebook, [and] some bus and train tickets.”
Long before
recent killings in Karnataka and Kerala, PFI cadre have been alleged to be
involved in religion-driven violence. Two members of the National Development
Front—one of three organisations that formed the PFI, together with the
Karnataka Forum for Dignity and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai in Tamil Nadu—were
charged with involvement in the hacking to death of eight Hindus at Marad in
2003. Far larger numbers of cadre of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the
Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) were,
however, reported to have been arrested..
Then, in
2011, PFI members chopped off the hand of Idukki college professor T.J. Joseph,
over a question he had set for second-year B.Com students during an internal
examination. In 2013, the Kerala Police discovered a camp in Narath, near
Kannur, where PFI members were receiving
trainingin
bomb-making and use of swords.
Like in the
case of SIMI, the exact connection between the organisation and jihadist groups
like the Islamic State isn’t clear. In most cases, Islamic State recruits were
former PFI members, rather than active cadres. The case of Sadiq Sheikh is
instructive. Failing to find jihadist opportunities in SIMI, Sheikh turned to
distant relative Salim Azmi—later killed in a controversial
shootout with police—to
make the right connections. Azmi is alleged to have put him in touch with the gang
lord Amir Reza Khan, who financed the training of the core Indian Mujahideen
members.
The
recruitment of former PFI members like Sameer into the Islamic State took place
in the diaspora, clouding the details of their stories. Islamic State
recruiters, moreover, have drawn several Indians with no known PFI
link—underlining the influence of personal ties and online propaganda.
Politics
of Piety
From the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, SIMI’s language had become explicitly
pro-jihadist. At its Kanpur convention in 1999, seven-year-old Gulrez Siddiqui
was held up before an estimated 20,000 cheering members: ‘Islam Ka Ghazi,
Butshikan, Mera Sher, Osama Bin Laden,” the
child intoned [‘warrior of Islam, destroyer of idols/My lion, Osama bin Laden’].
SIMI called for a caliphate, claiming democracy had failed India’s Muslims, and
even appealed to God to send an avatar of the temple-pillaging eleventh-century
conqueror, Mahmud of Ghazni.
Learning
from SIMI’s mistakes, the PFI has studiously avoided inflammatory language. The
organisation’s constitution, researcher Mohammed Sinan Siyech notes,, commits it to “upholding the country’s democratic and secular order,
working for peace, [and] advancing the cause of minorities.”
Through an
extensive network of social-work organisations, the PFI also engaged in
large-scale welfare activities. The organisation’s cadre, for example, built
schools for poorly served Bengali-speaking Muslim
communities in Assam. The organisation engaged in anti-drugs programmes in Kerala, and
medical outreach across north Indian states. Funding for these programmes came,
the
PFI claims, through Rs 10-a-month donations from its 500,000 members, as well as
affluent donors across India and West Asia.
Early in
its trajectory, SIMI had used the same tactics. In 1982, for example, it organised what was called an “anti-immorality” week,
burning purportedly obscene books. It won approval among communities with
programmes seeking to draw young people away from drugs and alcohol.
The
historians Irfan Habib, Iqtidar Alam Khan and KP Singh observed in a 1976
essay, that
SIMI’s social service wasn’t altruistic: Its motive was “preservation of Muslim
separateness, not the end of Muslim backwardness.”
The Dangers
Ahead
Like the
PFI, SIMI thrived, scholar Yoginder Sikand has perceptively observed, because it gave its young Muslim supporters “a sense of power and
agency which they were denied in their actual lives.” The organisation
flourished in a political landscape where Muslim political representation
within the large mainstream parties had atrophied. This created a vacuum which
Islamist organisations like SIMI could fill, their rhetoric offering the
illusion of a solution to the challenges faced by Muslims.
The ban on
SIMI ensured an end to the toxic Islamism the organisation peddled, which could
have led to a dangerous escalation of communal violence. This came at a cost,
though. Large-scale arrests of young Muslims accused of SIMI membership, most of whom were acquitted, engendered deep bitterness. Former SIMI president Shahid Badr
Falahi—ironically, among a group of political Islamists who sought to resist
the jihadist current—spent fourteen years under trial accused of having pasted a sticker
on a wall.
Local
police, moreover, found SIMI members a
convenient scapegoat for the Indian Mujahideen bombings which began in 2005—allowing the real
perpetrators to continue their attacks for years, unchecked.
The toxic
influence of Islamism represented by the PFI shows a complex matrix of deeply
embedded political and social problems. The fight against it needs political
action, not just police.
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Source: PFI
Ban Is No Quick Fix For Jihadi Threat. See How SIMI Ban Birthed Indian
Mujahideen
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/ban-pfi-political-solution-islamism-/d/128076
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