Inflammatory pamphlets rebuke the US and India while extolling bin Laden's virtues.

Insurgency has often thrived on the misconception that outlawing a subversive organisation will quell rebellion. The Government sought to feed this delusion in September last year when it banned the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Only for the unsavoury truth to be reiterated when 123 SIMI activists were arrested in Surat last week. For, even as India and Pakistan braced themselves for a military stand-off on the issue of terrorism, the Surat arrests revealed a robust regrouping of the fundamentalist organisation within the country. More significantly, it unearthed SIMI's hitherto unknown US connection.

The activists, now sentenced to a 14-day police remand, had converged on Surat under a spurious banner of the non-existent All India Minority Education Board, Delhi, with the purported objective of holding a conference on education. Abdulhai Abdulsattar Silavat, an assistant professor in Jodhpur University, along with two other persons, is believed to have planned the meet and even produced a half-page conference agenda to substantiate their claims. But as Surat Additional Commissioner of Police Ashish Bhatia says, "Their prime objective seems to be the recruitment of Muslim youth after the ban."

CAUGHT IN THE ACT: Suhel's e-mail account helped establish SIMI's connections in the United States

With members hailing from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat, the campaign is nationwide and probably the "first in a line of such meets". Many of the arrested people have several cases pending against them for inciting communal feelings and indulging in anti-national activities. The literature recovered from the site includes inflammatory pamphlets on Osama bin Laden, SIMI entry forms and other texts in Urdu and Arabic. Expectedly, the pamphlets castigate the US, India and Israel while extolling the virtues of bin Laden.

What has, however, caught the Government's attention are the messages in the e-mail account of a key SIMI activist from Ahmedabad, Suhel Patel. A US-born Indian from Paguthan village in Bharuch district of south Gujarat, Suhel has been living in Ahmedabad for nearly 15 years now. The messages offer vital information on the financial support being provided by two US-based organisations: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Chicago-based Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims (CCIM).

One of the messages dated December 11, 2001 carries a Rs 1.24-crore proposal forwarded by Suhel to one "mehman" for sustaining the SIMI movement following its ban. It seeks Rs 48 lakh for the families of the arrested leaders and Rs 25 lakh as legal aid for fighting their court cases. It asks for another Rs 7 lakh to launch a magazine "for making the world Muslim brotherhood aware of the fast-changing situation in the Islamic world" and Rs 12 lakh for scholarships to "those working full-time to fulfil our goal".

According to the police, Suhel has confessed to drawing up the proposal following a directive from SIMI President Shahid Badr, who is currently lodged in Delhi's Tihar Jail. In fact, reveals Suhel, one of his brothers-in-law Yasin Ghulamrasool Patel, an Ahmedabad-based printing press owner, is currently in Chicago collecting the funds. Suhel is also said to be in constant touch with Badr's legal adviser in Delhi, Anees, regarding the funds. In fact, six months ago, Suhel had written to a Jamaat-i-Islami leader in Pakistan, Tayyab Abu Adil, for securing the copyright of the Gujarati and Hindi versions of Quranic verses. Suhel believes he is only one of several persons recruited by Badr to amass funds for SIMI and that a massive fund-raising drive is currently on in various countries.

Cover

CONFESSIONS # Suhel admits he forwarded a proposal to raise Rs 1.24 crore from the US following a directive from jailed SIMI President Shahid Badr. # Says he is only one of the many people to have been recruited by Badr to raise funds from abroad. # Six months ago, he wrote to Tayyab Abu Adil, a Jamaat-i-Islami leader in Pakistan, seeking copyright of Hindi and Gujarati versions of Quranic verses.

Other e-mail messages in Suhel's account show how money is being transferred from the US to India for "Islamic causes". Rafik, his Chicago-based brother-in-law, has written to him about an ISNA conference in the US attended by delegates from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore and India on August 31 last year. He also talks of Maulana Sajjad Naumani who through his connection with the IMRC-an as yet unidentified organisation that Suhel claims no knowledge of-was raising a madarsa at a cost of $1million (Rs 4.8 crore) in Lucknow. similarly, Naumani's accomplice, Zakir Naik, an Indian, is said to have collected more than Rs 1.2 crore for the IMRC in just 20 minutes at the "Islamic foundation fund-raising dinner" in the US.

In yet another message in June last year, Rafik apparently passed on exhortations and advice by Chicago-based Professor Munnawar Hussein "of the Jamaat": "Try to expand SIMI's activities at all levels; focus on universities, unions, women, farmers and local field workers; and create a political wing of SIMI." Says Surat Police Commissioner V.K. Gupta: "We are forwarding the details of SIMI's US connection to the Union Government to be passed on to the FBI for further investigation in the US."

Rafik also advises Patel to delete every message as soon as it has been read. Below the message concerning Hussein, Rafik warns, "Don't reply to this message. Delete it and create a new message to respond." Says Assistant Commissioner of Police Narendra Amin who tracked Patel's e-mail account: "This clearly implies that even before the September 11 terrorist attack in the US, those connected with jehadi outfits in the US were aware they had to steer clear of the US detectives."

Suhel was also sent an article, "Good Bye Kashmir", written by Abid Ullah Jan of Pakistan, who rebukes Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf for capitulating to the western world. He rues that "after the turn of events in Afghanistan and Pakistan the Kashmir cause is lost to the Muslim ummah". The message adds: "If jehad is so irrelevant that we (Pakistan) remove jehad-related Quranic verses from school curriculum how can we force it in Kashmir? If religion is so irrelevant in Pakistan, so is our existence as a state and our demand for Kashmir."

Though the police have failed to establish a direct Pakistani connection, of late, fundamentalist Islamic groups have been active in Gujarat. This is in keeping with the ISI strategy of creating Islamic bases in states bordering Pakistan with pockets of sizeable Muslim population. In Bhuj last week, several Muslim leaders delivered provocative public speeches but the police refrained from taking any action. This was preceded by the recovery of three consignments of RDX from the Kutch-Banaskantha border in the past two months.

SIMI's role as a subversive outfit in India came to light for the first time in 1992 when the Gujarat Police recovered ammunition from Ahmedabad and arrested three SIMI activists. Their interrogation had revealed that Rafik Dadu from Gujarat-one of the 123 held last week-had taken arms training at an ISI camp in 1990. A decade down the line SIMI is as active and its objectives as undiluted. It will perhaps take sterner measures than an easily flouted ban to curb the fundamentalist fervour of a fanatic organisation.