SIMI8217;S SECOND COMING

Around May 2007, Yahya, a father of three children, was forced to leave his company after he was allegedly found stealing software to create products for a company he was secretly running on his own from Dubai.

There is now another, darker side emerging to Yahya Kammukutty as he stands in the centre of an investigation in Karnataka into an alleged attempt to rebuild a network of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.

Officials of the Corps of Detectives of the Karnataka Police investigating the case suspect say Yahya could be at the top of the banned group8217;s discreet, controlling hierarchy in southern India.

Yahya8217;s contact details feature in the list of a total of 32 men in the age group of 20 to 30, who attended three secret meetings in northern Karnataka in the second half of 2007, allegedly to plot terror attacks.

So far eight people, including Yahya and his friend Syed Sameer, an electrical contractor and another Bangalore resident, have been arrested from the groups that met at Castle Rock on the Karnataka-Goa border, a farmhouse and a dargah in north Karnataka. The Karnataka Police have identified all eight as active members of SIMI.

While SIMI8217;s footprints, often in collusion with that of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, have been seen in several major terror attacks in India since the outfit came into existence in 1977 in Uttar Pradesh, even after the 2001 proscription, the outfit has never until now been identified as being a dangerous presence in Karnataka.

Since being banned, the outfit has been organising students under various alter egos in order to work around the ban, especially in the coastal and northern parts of Karnataka. Organisations like the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, and various forums for young professionals, are frequently on intelligence scanners as possible screening grounds for the recruitment of dedicated cadre for SIMI.

So, what has brought SIMI back into action? According to experts a fraction of young, educated Muslims in Karnataka want to build their own defence force because they felt insecure after establishments such as the Sangh Parivar became important political forces in Karnataka over the past two years.

The emergence of the Karnataka Forum for Dignity in coastal Karnataka, comprising largely youths and closely connected to alleged new avatars of SIMI in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, like the NDF and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai, is often cited as an example.

The new lot in SIMI is tech savvy. Medical students Mohammed Asif, 22, Mirza Ahmed Baig, 23, Allah Baksh Yadavada, 23, ayurvedic medicine student Asadullah Abubaker, 22, are all children of the Internet age. Jihadi literature sits side by side with pornography on their computer hard drives. They hold deep religious discussions on social networking sites, Islamic forums and know the intricacies of cell phone and email usage8212;even how to avoid being caught on account of digital evidence.

8216;8216;Recruits seem to be carefully picked. Apart from religious commitment recruits are usually from modest backgrounds needing assistance with education or from families that have borne the brunt of communal violence,8217;8217; says a CoD investigator.

DEGREE OF DIFFERENCE

Unlike in the past, the SIMI cause is drawing the educated in Kerala By -Rajeev pi

Posturing apart, we were into nothing more than polemics in our time. SIMI was never really militant,8217;8217; claimed the man, a former leader of the Students Islamic Movement of India SIMI, who now edits a newspaper run by one of Kerala8217;s barely concealed Islamic fundamentalist outfits, in Kozhikode. SIMI, he maintained, can8217;t be held responsible for what some of its men may do once they leave.

Kozhikode was once Kerala8217;s biggest SIMI base from the days of its controversial mid-1980s campaign for 8216;8216;Liberation of India through Islam8217;8217; until the outfit8217;s proscription immediately after 9/11.

Increasingly under the intelligence scanner now, many former SIMI men ensconced in other Islamic outfits and political parties in Kerala still take pains to insist that even that slogan was just an ideological pivot, not a goal really.

But what many former SIMI men in Kerala are accused of by far exceeds the realm of mere polemics. Take the case of C.A.M. Basheer, an aeronautical engineer from Ernakulam, said to be based in the Gulf and one of SIMI8217;s high-profile leaders in Kerala. Intelligence sources say Basheer, who is a suspect in the Mumbai bomb blasts, has been one of the key remote SIMI handlers in Kerala after the ban.

They add that even Yahya Kammukutty, who the Bangalore police caught last week, was being tracked for his connections with Basheer. The police was on his vigil after a Lashkar-e-Toiba 8216;commander8217;, Muhammad Fasial Khan alias Abu Sultan8212;whom the Mumbai cops killed in an encounter later8212;reportedly sojourned in Kerala with Yahya, allegedly at Basheer8217;s behest.

There are also the likes of Sahduli, a graduate electronic engineer, and Rafeeq, a trained postgraduate teacher, who were among a bunch of men that the cops caught in Aluva last year with SIMI pamphlets and 8216;8216;seditious8217;8217; books.

Unlike in the past, the SIMI cause obviously has been drawing a good crop of the educated in Kerala. The state intelligence is now also tracking a well-developed girls wing that the SIMI has supposedly put in place in the state.

Time was when SIMI, before and even after the parent Jamaat-e-Islami JeI disowned it in a huff, pitched eagerly into everything that could strike a popular, albeit decidedly Islamic, chord in Kerala. Initially, these ranged from campaigns to spread Islamic morality, including by blackening movie posters showing a woman8217;s cleavage here or a leg there, and stopping cabaret dances in local bars to taking out anti-US processions. Its membership in Kerala kept swelling even after the break with JeI, which eventually came after SIMI men waved black flags at visiting Yasser Arafat in New Delhi, calling him a US stooge for the Camp David talks.

Soon, Kerala saw a rash of unprecedented extremist activity, especially in its north. The kidnapping and disappearance of free thinking Muslim cleric Chekannur Maulavi, the cigarette-bombs once regularly hurled at village movie theatres, the deadly pipe bombs; all these traced the state8217;s emerging fundamentalist picture. SIMI was among the key suspects, but its role was never conclusively proven.

No SIMI man had been convicted in Kerala for any terror strike since the ban, and many of its leaders are now high profile leaders of other Islamic outfits, some they founded and others they penetrated. They include P. Koya and E. Aboobacker, Supreme Council Members of the innocuously named National Development Front NDF, the outfit that state intelligence claims to be Kerala8217;s most elusive and dangerous communal outfit. The current state Amir of the JeI, Arif Ali, and high profile community leaders like Sheikh Mohammed Karakunnu were top SIMI men, as were several others in a slew of lesser Muslim organisations.

In politics, the CPIM8217;s revolutionary poster boy for Muslims in north Kerala in the last Assembly poll, K.T. Jaleel, was an important SIMI leader.

But a couple of years ago, the state Government, in its submission to the tribunal examining the legality of the SIMI ban, had underlined the more worrying portends. It said SIMI men had dispersed into at least a dozen front outfits in the state and that it has developed links with the Lashkar-e8211;Toiba. The submission also stressed that several of these front outfits were being used to spread 8216;8216;extremist religious ideas8217;8217; among the youth and that many operated under such labels as 8216;8216;counselling and guidance centres working for behavioural change.8217;8217;

One of SIMI8217;s front outfits under the intelligence scanner is in central Kerala, founded by a former SIMI leader in the state, who is also the brother-in-law of a top NDF leader. This outfit is in the publishing space, mostly printing and marketing Islamic publications. Intelligence sources, however, maintain that it has also been printing and distributing incendiary leaflets and notices on the sly for both SIMI and the NDF, mostly aiming non-resident Keralites working in Gulf countries.

Others, like the recently floated Islamic Students Association ISA aiming to 8216;8216;tap the campuses for the energy to grow,8217;8217; has a liberal sprinkling of former SIMI men. 8216;8216;But we have nothing to do with SIMI, we are different,8217;8217; insists its secretary, E.K. Naufal.

The seven-year-old ban has not prevented former SIMI men from getting together, rarely getting noticed for it. Some 25 of its top former men had met in Kozhikode in 2005, five SIMI men indoctrinating a bunch of raw recruits were hauled up in Ernakulam, regular get-togethers of SIMI men still happen in places like Thrissur, Malappuram, Kozhikode and elsewhere under cover of the paper outfits, say sources.

Intelligence sources say the SIMI may not dare an obvious regrouping in the state even under the label of front outfits, but it is far from withering away.

Apparently it has hardcore sleeper cells in many organisations.

There are two distinct ex-SIMI groups active in the state. One is holding on to the outfit8217;s traditional pro-Iran line and the other comprising the independent conservatives. There may also be a third pro-Saudi Arabia group as well but it is an insignificant player.

The organisation may be banned but its funding sources are alive. When police raided the SIMI8217;s state headquarters in Kozhikode soon after the ban in 2001, the seizures made included account books that showed a massive inflow of money from the Gulf countries through the hawala route.

8216;8216;We have already estimated that the state now has at least Rs 10,000 crore coming in every year from the Gulf by the hawala route,8217;8217; says Kerala8217;s intelligence chief, Additional DGP Jacob Punnoose.

Where that money might be headed is still not clear.