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Revoke The 13 Year Long Ban On SIMI

By DSU

08 May, 2014
Countercurrents.org

Resist and defeat the politics of Islamophobia and minority witch-hunting in the name of ‘war on terror’!

“Till date, not a single allegation against SIMI has been proved while the planned attacks of the Sangh Parivar against Christians, Dalits and Muslims have been exposed by various inquiry commissions.” - Shahid Badr Falahi, President of SIMI in 2001 just before the ban on SIMI

In an unjust system, to paraphrase Eduardo Galeano, ‘justice’ is a snake that always bites the barefoot, the oppressed. This has been amply exemplified by the Indian state and judiciary time and again. The judicial murder of Afzal Guru to “satisfy the collective conscience of the country”; the acquittals of all the dominant caste butchers of the Laxmanpur Bathe, Bathnanitola and Tsunduru Dalit massacres; the evocation of ‘faith’ as the basis in the Babri Masjid judgment – are but a few of such instances of the morbid ‘justice’ that the Indian state has produced over the years. The 13 year long and still continuing ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) is yet another instance of the same travesty of justice. Despite the complete inability of the state to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate its bogus claims against SIMI and a large majority of SIMI activists arrested on trumpeted charges having been acquitted, the present government is now pushing for the 7th consecutive ban on the organization. A writ petition filed by the SIMI lawyers challenging the unjust ban was heard by the Supreme Court last Friday (2nd May) which has now referred it to a larger bench of three judges, the hearing of which is scheduled on 12th August. DSU out rightly condemns this continuing ban on SIMI and demands its immediate revocation.

The ban on SIMI was not simply a ban on a students’ organization, it was a declaration of loyalty on the Indian state’s part to US imperialism and its’ propaganda called ‘war on terror’. The SIMI was first banned on 27th Sep 2001 – just a couple of weeks after Bush declared the bogus ‘war on terror’, which is nothing but a euphemism for imperialist wars, occupation and persecution of muslims. The Indian state was one of the first countries to declare its complete support to this imperialist agenda, not just in words but also in deeds – the ban on SIMI being the first such act. SIMI as a students’ organization had been active since 1977 but began to be profiled and hounded by the state from 1998 onwards after the BJP led NDA govt came to power. False cases were slapped against its activists and the organization was subsequently banned. At the time of imposing the ban, the NDA government claimed that SIMI had links with Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Hamas. They were also accused of circulating anti- national audios and videos, distributing ‘pro-Taliban leaflets’; but all these claims - central in the government’s case against SIMI - have never been substantiated with absolutely any detail or evidence since the year of imposition of the ban till today. Paradoxically, the then Home Minister L. K. Advani, whose own blood ridden rath yatra led to hundreds of communal-massacres across the country now claimed that SIMI was “engineering communal riots across India”(of course once made, the charge needn’t be ever substantiated).

The imposition of the ban on SIMI gave the state agencies a complete impunity to torture, arrest and implicate Muslim youth in false terror cases, whether or not they were affiliated to SIMI. Within a day of the ban, as per government’s records 240 SIMI activists were arrested. A few examples reveal the ridiculousness of the government’s claims against SIMI and a sinister pattern of cases where prejudice supplanted the need for any evidence:

• Public protests organized by SIMI in March 2001 against burning of Quran were cited as evidence of its “unlawful” activities to justify the ban.

• In Dec 2001, the Gujarat police swooped down on a seminar in Surat organized by the All-India Minority Educational Board on the “Constitutional Provisions for Minorities’ Educational Rights” and arrested 124 people alleging that it was a SIMI meeting and the participants in the seminar were hatching a conspiracy. There was no evidence in the case, a point accepted by the Gujarat High Court later, and the only witnesses to testify to the police claims and seizures were police officers themselves – one of them being Narendra Amin who was involved in the Kausar Bi fake encounter.

• In another case, Narendra Amin opened fire on protesters killing one of them point blank when they tried to resist the unlawful arrest of Maulana Nasirruddin from Hyderabad in 2004. Later, the deceased’s brother, 18 year old Moutashim Billah was implicated in a case where he was charged with obstructing the police from doing their duty. Four years later, despite the fact that he was never a member of SIMI, Billhah was implicated, arrested and charge-sheeted as a key SIMI operative in the Mecca Masjid blast case (later revealed to be the handiwork of the sangh). Some 7 years earlier, he had also been booked in a case of ‘anti-national activity’ when as a 15 year old he had participated in protests against US invasion of Afghanistan!

• Yasin Patel, who was the UP Secretary of SIMI in the 80s, was arrested from his house in May 2002 and booked under POTA for pasting “anti-India” posters. But what was exactly the content of these “anti-India” posters? The posters showed the maps of the five members of UN Security Council –US, Britain, France, China and Russia - and criticized the UN for having become their puppet rather than staying neutral! Despite this, he spent 27 months in jail.

• SIMI lawyer, Humam Ahmed Siddiqui, was arrested in June 2008 and framed in a bogus 7 year old case, only to be released a month later. But by then it had already served a purpose for the state. In that period, key hearings of the SIMI tribunal had already been held at Udaipur, Bhopal, Aurangabad and Mumbai, where the defence was forced to appear without his valuable support.

• In several cases, the police told the courts that the use of internet by SIMI activists and that some of them knew swimming and horse-riding was evidence of their anti-national and illegal activities!

A pyramid of lies, fabrication and falsities, that has what the state’s case against SIMI has been all about from day one. When the fourth tribunal headed by Justice Gitta Mittal threw aside the case in August 2008, stating that there was not a single piece of evidence, not a single credible witness to prove even a single case against SIMI, it took the govt less than 24 hours to get a stay order on the judgment by appealing against it in the Supreme Court. This was despite the fact that appeals by SIMI against the previous three tribunal’s judgments were still pending in the Supreme Court and were never heard. Subsequently, the ban has been again extended by the government in 2010, 2012 and now again this year. Interestingly, ever since 2008 when the case against SIMI began to fall apart, the government replaced SIMI with the fictitious Indian Mujahideen (IM) as the main “terror outfit” responsible for bomb blasts, while the witch-hunt of Muslim youth continued. The continuing absurdity of the police claims can be gauged from the fact that when one intelligence officer was asked about the genesis of IM, he replied saying that it was an off shoot of SIMI which is easily discernible by removing S and I from the word SIMI, which leaves one with IM! Banning an organization is one of the most extreme form of fascist tactics employed by the Indian state which only exposes the hollowness of all of its democratic claims. The silence of a large section of the civil society that claims itself as left and progressive, on the ban on SIMI is also very deafening and only exemplifies their own double-standards. DSU appeals to all genuinely progressive, democratic forces to come together in the coming days and build a political movement so as this fascist state is forced to revoke the ban on SIMI.

DSU, JNU

 


 



 

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