WHEN DELHI lawyer Humam Ahmed Siddiqui saw a break in the hectic schedule of the SIMI tribunal underJustice Geeta Mittal, he headed straight to his father-in-law’s home in Gonda in Uttar Pradesh to fetch his children from there. Defending SIMI, Siddiqui had since May attended the tribunal’s sittings at Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. A veteran of three tribunals and an ex-SIMI officebearer, Siddiqui knew every case past and present, the best defence arguments, and, most importantly for SIMI, the loopholes in the prosecution’s case. At 8 am on June 23, 2008, as he stood at the Gonda railway station, the anti-terrorism squad swooped down and arrested him.
Siddiqui’s case dates to 2001. Police say that on September 15 that year, he and ex-SIMI president Shahid Badr Falahi made speeches against Hinduism at a madarsa in Gorakhpur city, 800 km east of Delhi. (Falahi was given bail in this case five years ago.) The police had also created another FIR against four local Muslims for attending that meeting. Neither FIR showed how the police got wind of the meeting. Intelligence agents, who claimed to have attended the meeting, were the only prosecution witnesses. That the police registered the FIRs six days after the alleged incident immediately raised doubts that the cases were fabricated. The other four accused secured bail, though by then they had spent two months in jail.
Seven years later, the state government is yet to give a routine sanction to start prosecution against Siddiqui and Falahi. Yet, though virtually dead for seven years, the case suddenly came alive miraculously with Siddiqui’s arrest in June. Presenting Siddiqui before the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Gorakhpur on June 23, the police claimed he had admitted to his role in blasts that had rocked Gorakhpur in 2007. Police said they had sent Siddiqui notices and warrants to his father’s house in Sultanpur city and then attached his house in a village in the Sultanpur district. But the house they attached is an ancestral property that Siddiqui hasn’t visited in a quarter century. As for the court notices, Siddiqui says he never received them at his father’s house.
NOT ONLY has Siddiqui been part of the defence team for Shahid Badr Falahi at all the SIMI tribunals, he had deposed before the first tribunal in 2001-02 and was crossexamined by the Home Ministry’s lawyer. Siddiqui’s name is printed on the reports of the three tribunals. Yet, the Gorakhpur police say he was absconding. His former associate, Supreme Court lawyer Satyanarayan Vashisth, told TEHELKA: “Siddiqui’s arrest could be the government’s way to cripple the defence at the tribunal.”
Siddiqui languished in jail for exactly a month. Gorakhpur lawyer Radheshyam Pandey finally managed bail for him on July 16. In a total mockery of police and jail accountability, Siddiqui could walk out of his cell only a week later, on July 23, because processing the paperwork took that long. By then, the hearings at the SIMI tribunal had already been held at Udaipur, Bhopal, Aurangabad and Mumbai, where the defence was forced to appear without his valuable support. Siddiqui thought better than to rejoin the defence team.
Ever the lawyer, Siddiqui won’t talk about the case as it is pending trial. But he denies he confessed to his involvement in the Gorakhpur blasts. He may be free now but his reputation is in shreds, vilified in just a month. The media widely published a news item released by a news agency, which quoted a top Uttar Pradesh police officer as saying that Siddiqui had confessed to “managing funds” of the banned organisation and that he sent money to members in different states. The report claimed Siddiqui was in touch with ex-SIMI general secretary Safdar Nagori, who was arrested in Indore in March this year.
The widely internalised prejudice against SIMI was perhaps revealed most starkly when a Hindi newspaper reporter visited Siddiqui’s retired father in Sultanpur while Siddiqui was still in jail in Gorakhpur. In the course of the interview, Siddiqui’s father told the reporter that as a government servant he had lived in many cities and named a few. The reporter got stuck on one name: Azamgarh. The newspaper report he wrote suggested that Siddiqui must have got close to ex-SIMI president Falahi, who is an Azamgarh native, when his father was posted there.
“You know something?” Siddiqui says with dismay. “I wasn’t even born when my father lived at Azamgarh.”
Reported by Anil Varghese from Gorakhpur and New Delhi
The Case Of The Absconding Lawyer
The Cry Of The Beloved Country
ALTHOUGH THE police in the various states made a huge ruckus with their presence on the two or three days the SIMI tribunal held its hearing in their cities during June-July, 2008, the overwhelming dominance of the police was nowhere more evident than in Bhopal during July 1-3, where the Centre presented SIMI-related cases from Madhya Pradesh. As uniformed officers and their subordinates with guns holstered had the premises in their control, many plainclothesmen also moved around the government building where the makeshift courtroom had been prepared for the tribunal, perhaps keeping an eye out for troublemakers.
It was, then, no small act of courage when a fear-stricken group of Muslims, numbering about a dozen and clearly of little means, landed at the tribunal hearings most tentatively and, speaking meekly, urged their plea be taken up. All travelling to Bhopal from small towns near and far, they had only heard from newspaper inserts that a tribunal somehow connected with SIMI had arrived in the state capital. Though they had no idea about its framework of inquiry, they still decided to take their chance. They were led by a local lawyer, a Muslim, most sincere and earnest but, certainly, not much tuned into the possibilities that this tribunal could offer this group. Each one of them has a tragic tale to tell with brothers and sons arrested by police over patently fabricated charges of being SIMI members. The tribunal did accept their affidavits, but that was more for the record. Justice, or rather help, of the sort they sought was not to be found here.
Outside the tribunal, this reporter spoke to a few of this group and found a disturbing pattern to their stories. It was clear that these scared people had little idea that they could actually be looking at a much longer haul than they realise now. Here are some of those chilling stories:
Tabrez Husain, 28, runs a photo studio some 150 km from Bhopal, in a tehsil called Narsinghgarh where his family has lived for 40 years. On April 2 this year, a dozen policemen landed at his house in the middle of the night and dragged his younger brother, Faisal Husain, away with them. “For three days we didn’t know where he was,” Tabrez told TEHELKA. On the third day, he read in the newspapers that a SIMI activist had been arrested and wondered if it was his brother. On the night of April 5, the police returned with Faisal and searched the house. “They found nothing,” Husain says. When the family asked for a panchnama — the official record — of the search, the police ignored their requests. Shortly, the police left with Faisal.
On April 8, Tabrez and his two other brothers, Aftab and Intekhab, had gone to the local court to appear before a judge in an eight-year-old case of rioting in which all the four brothers were implicated by the police. All of a sudden, someone called from the nearby village, where Aftab runs a shop as an optician, to say that the police wanted to search his shop. Aftab and Intekhab went across to be present during the police raid. After the search, the police took them along. Within hours, the two brothers were arrested on charges of sedition and unlawful activity, and for being a member of a terrorist organisation, which is punishable with life imprisonment.
The History Appraiser Caught With His Books
ON AUGUST 15, 2006, in his hometown of Kottayam in Kerala, Abdul Razik boarded a 6 am bus for a three-hour journey to a village up north. To mark Independence Day, the village Muslims had invited Razik, a scholar of some repute in the community, to speak on the role of Muslims in India’s freedom struggle. At 10 am, a group of 18 assembled at the ironically named Happy Auditorium. When Razik started his lecture, three policemen he had earlier seen in a jeep outside entered the hall. “They browsed through my notes and questioned me,” Razik told TEHELKA during an interview at Thiruvananthapuram.
The entire group was taken into custody but 13 were let off. Five, including Razik, were arrested and charged with (a) criminal conspiracy to commit an offence punishable with death or life imprisonment; (b) sedition by way of attempting to bring hatred or contempt against the government and “excite disaffection” towards it; (c) being a member of an unlawful association (yes, SIMI, again); and (d) participating in its meetings to incite unlawful activity. So off went Razik and the other four to jail.
The police claim this was a secret meeting called by SIMI, but cite no proof. The organisers deny any SIMI link and say they put out notices in the area, including at the mosque. Happy Auditorium sits squat in the middle of the village, with bustling shops around, including a well patronised bakery- cum-teashop. The law says the police must get “independent and respectable inhabitants of the locality in which the place to be searched is situated” to stand witness. One imagines there would have been no dearth of witnesses around a place like Happy Auditorium. But the FIR against Razik does not cite any such witnesses, nor does it state whether the police even tried to find any. The only witnesses cited are two policemen.
The police say the five arrested were SIMI activists. The host of the meeting, a local by the name of Nizamudheen, denies associating with SIMI. This should be easy to settle: the police have a list of SIMI members seized from its office sealed at the time it was banned in 2001. But the police make no reference to that list. Instead, they say they collected the list of SIMI members from the Intelligence Bureau, without explaining how that list can be deemed incontrovertibly genuine.
From Razik, the police seized a book titled Mass Resistance in Kashmir: Origins, Evolutions, Options. This book is authored by a Pakistani scholar, Tahir Amin, and is published by the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad. The book was issued to Razik by a library run by the Jamaat- e-Islami in Kerala. It certainly reflects the typical Pakistani position on Kashmir. But is the possession of this book unlawful? The Kerala police wrote to the Centre asking if the book is banned. The Centre hasn’t yet answered. The police have initiated no action against the Jamaat library that owned it.
The “banned SIMI literature” police claim to have seized includes back issues of SIMI’s Malayalam magazine, Vivekam, published before the ban. Vivekam was registered with the Registrar of Newspapers of India and sold by subscription and on newsstands. The issues allegedly seized are of 1993, 1994, 1998 and 2000. No cases were made out against Vivekam in those years or afterwards. The police also seized from Razik a booklet with articles on the “repression of Muslims” by state agencies. Alleging misdeeds by the State can’t be seditious, can it?
Yet, Razik spent 65 days in jail. The Kerala High Court denied him bail thrice, relenting only when the police failed to submit an update on the investigation, which the judge had repeatedly ordered. This February, the police requested the district collector’s sanction to begin prosecution. Six months later, such sanction is still awaited. The chargesheet is yet to be filed. The trial is yet to begin. Razik, 29, says he has been framed because he was a SIMI member from 1996 until the ban. Razik holds MA and B.ED degrees. He has worked as an editor of religious books in Urdu and Malayalam. His harassment by the police and intelligence agencies began with the ban. His house was often searched; he was often questioned. Never was a case found against him. Even though the ban on SIMI is lifted, the Damocles sword still hangs over him. “I wasn’t angry when I was in jail,” Razik says. “I kept praying to god. I was mentally prepared to be in prison a long time.” •
The Left Hand Doesn't Know, Or Doesn't It?
AN URDU couplet is always at hand as Ziauddin Siddiqui explains life’s small and big events. With a mien more Sufi than fundamentalist Islamist, the 46-yearold pharmacist in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad is unruffled as he slowly details the criminal cases against him, each more bizarre than the other. The case that takes the cake is the one in which Siddiqui and 95 others were implicated on December 6, 1999, when they held symbolic protests in the city to mark the seventh anniversary of the demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid at the hands of Hindu zealots in 1992.
That day in 1999, about a hundred activists belonging to a local organisation called the Muslim Action Committee gathered at a city square in Aurangabad and, as in every year since 1992, courted arrest. Around the same time, an equal number of activists from the local Samajwadi Party unit, which always has an eye on the Muslim vote, did likewise on the same issue. Both sets of protestors were taken and held together in a stadium ground next to the police headquarter.
As per practise, all of them would have been let off after some paperwork. But there was some altercation and the police and the protestors clashed. The police fired. One protestor died. Ninetysix were very badly injured.
So badly injured were they, in fact, that the whole event spun out of the administration’s control. Siddiqui suffered grievous injuries on his spine, face, nose, eyes and ears. When the government hospital couldn’t treat him and others similarly injured, they were sent to the KEM Hospital in Mumbai. A letter from the government hospital’s medical officer to the Mumbai hospital said, “The government has assured treatment free of charge”. The government also announced payments of Rs 10,000 to each of the injured. It also appointed AD Mane, a retired High Court judge, to head a commission of inquiry into the event. Justice Mane’s report blasted the police for using excessive force against the protestors who had courted arrest. He suggested that the police be sensitised to human rights. The state government accepted his findings and issued an Action Taken Report, which absolved the protesting outfits of blame.
Yet, the police filed a case against 96 people for their December 6, 1999 protest, and accused them of sedition, rioting, calling an unlawful assembly, assaulting a public servant, endangering public safety, and even “mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to cause damage to the amount of one hundred rupees”.
ALL THOSE injured and given Rs 10,000 as compensation were also implicated. But that is not all. In the nine years since the incident and the alleged crime, no chargesheet has been filed. No charges have been framed. So, the trial hasn’t begun. Some 29 accused are on bail. The rest are shown as absconding. “They broke my nose and I lost my sense of smell forever,” Siddiqui recalled in an interview with TEHELKA in Aurangabad. He can barely see with his left eye.
Siddiqui was SIMI’s all-India general secretary from 1984-92, and had retired at the end of that tenure upon turning 30. Of course, once the police decided that Siddiqui was a SIMI member — even though he had left it in 1992 — there was no stopping them. In March 2001, the second criminal case against him was registered. Following an incident of burning of the Quran in New Delhi, public protests were called in Aurangabad by a federal body of Muslim organisations. Midway, the protest had turned violent, and the police had fired. No one was killed, none injured. SIMI hadn’t yet been banned so its office- bearers issued a press release criticising the police for the firing. The police retaliated by filing a case against SIMI alleging it called that protest, and arrested 10 people including Siddiqui. Once again, the accusations were the same as in the December 1999 case; in addition, they were also accused of hatching a criminal conspiracy. They were let off on bail after three days. Seven years later, the judge is yet to accept the chargesheet and start the trial.
On the day SIMI was banned on September 27, 2001, Siddiqui was picked up from home. “I phoned the police officer to ask why but he said he just wanted to talk with me.” When he went there, Siddiqui was arrested and had to spend the night in the lock-up; he got bail the next day. He was accused of inciting people to violence to protest the ban. After six long years, the charges in that case were framed only earlier this summer. “God knows when the trial will begin,” Siddiqui says. He is also implicated in the mother of all SIMI cases, the Surat Case, which is detailed in another column.
‘They just want Muslim boys to always be in jail’
AN ENGINEERING student forced to give up studies because of cases of sedition and terrorism against him, 22-year-old Moutasim Billah of Hyderabad would do a lawyer proud with the way he reels out sections of the Indian Penal Code. Sadly, Billah is familiar with these sections only because he has suffered them for seven years. Billah was arrested on March 5, 2008, after his name came up in alleged confessions of other young Muslims randomly arrested and tortured with electric shocks by the police during investigations of last year’s bomb blasts in Hyderabad. Nine people were killed in the May 2007 blast outside a mosque called Mecca Masjid near the Charminar. Forty more were killed in two simultaneous blasts at a snack shop and in a park in August.
When the police found no grounds to implicate Billah in the two blasts, they slapped a patently bogus case on him, saying he and the other men secretly met at a cemetery to hatch a terrorist conspiracy and incite Hindu-Muslim violence. The police claim to have raided the meeting and arrested seven persons, but say Billah absconded — until his arrest in March. He was in prison for 90 days until the High Court gave him bail. The only evidence cited against him were some “inflammatory” CDs allegedly found in the cemetry.
“The police want Muslims boys to always stay in jail on some pretext or the other,” Billah told TEHELKA in an interview on June 12, 2008 at his home in Hyderabad, just hours after he was released. Billah’s narrative is a good primer on how the Indian police trap innocent people and makes their lives a living hell. His story began when as a 15- year-old, Billah joined demonstrations in Hyderabad called by local Muslims in 2001 to protest US President George Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan. For some reason, police decided this was a crime in India. They registered cases against scores of protestors, including Billah. Despite there being no independent witnesses or evidence, the case has dragged on for seven years, during which Billah has attended more than 50 hearings. In 2002, he joined another protest, bringing on another FIR that is still a live grenade.
In 2004, a tragic event occurred. Billah was its victim, but the police made him an accused and slapped serious charges on him. Readers will recall that last week TEHELKA exposed the police lies against Maulana Nasiruddin of Hyderabad and two of his sons, all of whom are in jails in different states. Billah’s family and Maulana Nasiruddin are neighbours in the Muslim neighbourhood of Saidabad in Hyderabad. To recap: in October 2004, Nasiruddin went to the local police station for a routine attendance in an earlier case when policemen from Gujarat waiting there arrested him on a charge of conspiracy to enact terror in that state, including the murder of its former home minister, Haren Pandya.
When a few Muslims who had accompanied Nasiruddin to the police station protested, a Gujarat police officer fired at them, instantly killing one protestor. That protestor was Billah’s older and only brother. Forget about getting justice for his brother’s death, Billah was made an accused in the criminal case filed against the protestors, charging them with the very serious crime of obstructing police officers from doing their duty: in this case, taking custody of Nasiruddin. The protestors forced the police to file a case against the Gujarat officer. Billah is listed as an eyewitness in that case.
Inside The Whale: State Vs Shahid Badr Falahi
‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act’
GEORGE ORWELL
AS WE entered the jail, the boys asked me: when will we be freed?” recalls SIMI’s ex-president, Shahid Badr Falahi, after he and three others were arrested on September 27, 2001. The government portrayed Falahi as the mastermind of a sinister jehadist group working with Pakistan to destabilise India. But the criminal cases against him did not match his stature in the government propaganda.
Eleven days before his arrest, Falahi had addressed a daytime meeting of Muslims in the Bahraich town of Uttar Pradesh, some 500 km east of Delhi. Police permission had been obtained to hold the meeting at a girls’ college, a stone’s throw from the local police station. The police had video recorded the event. After three days, an FIR was registered against Falahi saying his speech spread hatred, contempt and disaffection against the government and incited communal disharmony. “Be a good citizen. Make your parents proud of you,” Falahi says he had told the Muslim youth there. He had also held US policies responsible for bringing on” that week’s terror attacks there.
Of Falahi’s speech given before hundreds, only policemen were cited as witnesses. The judge asked the police: why did you take three days to book him? Why did no communal violence occur then or since if that’s what he incited? Yet, Falahi and 11 others spent time in jail. This was a “fast-track court” but the case dragged on for five years, whereupon it was — you’ve got to believe this — withdrawn by the government. The reason given: “inherent lacuna and insufficient evidence”. The government lawyer admitted that senior district and police officers had attended the gathering. In the court, there was high drama as local Hindutva lawyers moved the judge against withdrawing the case. The judge questioned their locus but agreed to review Falahi’s speech. The police video was played in a packed courtroom. The judge realised the FIR didn’t truly reflect the speech. He said it was disturbing that in his speech, Falahi suggested that the Muslim be allowed to bear a sword as the Sikh bears his dagger and the Hindu sadhu his trident. “But mere suggestion is no crime,” the judge said and allowed the government to withdraw the case in September 2006.
Falahi’s woes have been many. Upon his arrest in Delhi in September 2001, police had slapped three cases against him. In one of these, he was accused of carrying “in his right hand” a calendar that “wrongly portrayed” the history of Kashmir in that it claimed Muslims had been persecuted during the rule of the Hindu kings. Once again, Falahi was accused of treason, spreading contempt, hatred and disaffection, etc., etc. He was denied bail, including from the high court. In the trial court, an exasperated judge asked the government lawyer to go study Kashmir’s history and summarise it a week later in his court. Needless to add, the government lawyer failed the history test. The two “independent” witnesses of the calendar’s recovery from Falahi told the judge that the police were forcing them to falsely testify against Falahi. As the other witnesses were policemen, the judge threw out the calendar case in 2003 and acquitted Falahi.
The third case against Falahi belongs to the night he was arrested from his Delhi office a few hours after SIMI was outlawed on September 27, 2001. The police said that, past midnight, Falahi gave a speech (again: contempt, hatred, disaffection) to a group of Muslims and shouted “Hindustan murdabad”. The police said they tried to reason with him but he wouldn’t listen. A week later, on October 4, the police allegedly seized evidence from Falahi’s office: a CD with the photo of a gun, and some cassettes. The judge asked the police: why didn’t you seize the material the night you arrested him? The police said: we forgot. Still, this case lasted 14 months after which the judge dropped the charges of “promoting enmity on religious lines”. He said Falahi would be prosecuted only for being a member of an unlawful organisation, and sent the case back to the Metropolitan Magistrate. For the last nearly four years, that case hasn’t moved an inch. For the nth time, Falahi will have traveled to Delhi from his native Azamgarh on August 8, 2008 to appear in this case, and, inevitably, be given another date.
In yet another absurd case, Falahi was allegedly caught pasting a sticker on a wall of Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi. The sticker had a picture of the Babri Masjid and a slogan in Hindi: “God willing, we’ll pray there one day.” The judge asked the prosecution: isn’t it a bit farfetched that the head of a national organisation would go around pasting stickers on roadside walls? He also asked: what exactly is the offence here? A public witness said he was forced by the police to falsely testify against Falahi. The judge acquitted Falahi. If these were absurd, then a case in Azamgarh is alarmingly sinister. In 2000, Falahi held a press conference in that city to slam BJP leader Kalraj Mishra for demanding a ban on SIMI. The police said this created communal disharmony and booked a case against Falahi. Falahi was in jail on this, too. For four years, the police didn’t file a chargesheet. Falahi was denied bail by the local courts and had to move the Allahabad High Court to get it.
ANOTHER PENDING case goes back to 1999. As editor of a SIMI publication, Islamic Movement, Falahi published a verbatim translation in Hindi of a feature published in an English language newspaper, The Asian Age, that contained uncharitable remarks against Lord Krishna. Of course, there isn’t any case against The Asian Age on this.
In all, Falahi spent 30 months in jail related to these bizarre cases. Ecstatic at the tribunal’s decision to reject the ban, Falahi isn’t much troubled that the Supreme Court has stayed the tribunal’s order, and is confident that SIMI will soon be a legitimate group again. Yet, he knows that the criminal cases against SIMI activists may continue for long. “As we entered the jail, I told my boys not to worry as everything happens by the mercy of Allah,” Falahi says. “He will decide when the cases end. He will decide when our test will end.”
Terror Has Two Faces
THERE ARE two versions of what SIMI is. One is SIMI’s own, the other is that of the rest of the world. For all purposes, the rest of the world has been led by the Indian government for the last seven years since SIMI was first banned on September 27, 2001. The government’s averments about SIMI are said to be based on supposed intelligence from its secret agencies and the police across India. There are, of course, scholarly Internet sites holding forth on the organisation. But it is clear on their first reading that their text is dictated by none other than the intelligence agencies.
Sadly, it may perhaps never be known for sure what SIMI’s character and activities before the ban was — or what it has been since, for that matter. The reason is that the two versions, SIMI’s and the government’s, stand at absolutely opposite ends of the spectrum. The government’s version is suspect for the obvious reason that it is propagandistic; besides, there isn’t any way to crosscheck it. The government had seven years to bring proof of its claims about SIMI, but it hasn’t yet done so and it appears doubtful it will bring some dramatic proof anytime soon.
As for the SIMI version, its truth or lie could perhaps have been nailed by investigating documents and other material in its dozen-odd offices across the country that were sealed at the time of the 2001 ban. But now, it is impossible to know if the insides of these offices have been maintained exactly as they were then. SIMI’s last president, Shahid Badr Falahi, thinks that opportunity is gone. “I passed by my former office after leaving jail four years ago,” Falahi told TEHELKA, referring to SIMI’s national headquarters in Delhi’s Muslim neighbourhood of Zakir Nagar. “I was dismayed to find it was missing doors and had turned into a den of gamblers.”
So the only way to sift the SIMI fictions from the facts is to juxtapose the two versions. This reporter leaves it to the reader to decide which version she finds credible.
The very first page of the background note issued with the Centre’s notification banning SIMI in February this year had this to say about the controversial outfit: “The stated objectives of the organisation (SIMI) are a) Governing of human life on the basis of Quran, b) Propagation of Islam, c) ‘Jehad’ for the cause of Islam, d) Destruction of Nationalism and establishment of Islamic Rule or Caliphate…”
The government says SIMI is a widely spread organisation with Muslims of all ages and persuasions as its members, who are underground and active across India. It says SIMI is linked with international terror groups; that it trains itself in arms, raises national and international funds from the Gulf and other Muslim countries, hatches conspiracies and carries out bomb blasts. Says the background note: “[SIMI] does not believe in the nation state, as well as in the Constitution, or the secular order; it regards idol worship as a sin and its holy duty to end it… SIMI aims to replace [Indian nationalism] with an International Islamic Order.”
The Good Doctor's Complications
AS A Muslim doctor, it is my duty to serve the poor,” says Mohammad Hasan, 34, a government doctor in Rajasthan. When SIMI was banned in 2001, Hasan was serving at an anti-malaria medical camp in a Jaisalmer village. Hasan first heard of the ban on September 29, two days after it was promulgated, from newspapers reaching his camp. A week later, on October 6, the police arrested him and charged him for being a member of an unlawful organisation. Hasan was given bail the same day.
The police claimed that on September 29, Hasan distributed seditious literature, including pamphlets in Rajasthan’s Pali district. But Hasan had a watertight alibi: the attendance register at the Jaisalmer anti-malaria camp. “The police obviously thought I would be at Pali where I was then posted,” Hasan laughs. “They probably hadn’t heard that I was on deputation at the medical camp in Jaisalmer.”
Should have been an openand- shut case, right? Wrong. After the case against him was registered, the state government suspended Hasan from his job. He moved the Rajasthan High Court. A single bench ruled in his favour. The government refused to reinstate him. Hasan appealed before a two-judge bench. This, too, ruled in his favour. The government appealed before the Supreme Court. In July 2003, nearly two years after his suspension, the Supreme Court ordered Hasan’s reinstatement — with back wages, increments and allowances. Ten days later, he was back in his job.
Hasan devoted himself to further studies alongside his job. Last year, he earned an MD in Radio Diagnosis. He is currently serving as Medical Officer at the district hospital in Dholpur city. In 2005, Hasan cleared the prestigious Rajasthan Public Services Commission exam to be elevated as a doctor in the state cadre. But the Health Department rejected his appointment as the routine police verification showed he had been a SIMI member. Hasan has moved the High Court again. On another petition, the High Court has stayed his criminal trial in the original case.
The stigma of SIMI is a social handicap for Hasan, a shadow that never leaves his side. “No one rents me their houses,” says Hasan. He changed houses thrice in Bikaner. At Dholpur, he has been living at the hospital guesthouse since last year. His wife and two small children live with her parents at Jaipur. Wherever he goes, Hasan is followed by state intelligence personnel.
Of course, Hasan was once a member of SIMI. In fact, at the time of the ban, he was SIMI’s national general secretary. But until the ban, no case was ever filed against him.
“I am no criminal or terrorist,” Hasan says. “I am a Muslim and a doctor and I’ll always serve my people.”
The Haunt Of Our Past Lives
MH JAWAHIRULLAH, 48, is a Muslim leader in Tamil Nadu. He often leads delegations to the government on issues concerning Muslims. In September 2007, his organisation, the Tamil Nadu Munnetra Kazhagam (TMMK), played a crucial role in securing reservations for Muslims in government jobs. Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi graced a TMMK public function and commended its work. Karunanidhi donated two ambulances to TMMK, which now runs 42 ambulances offering free services across the state. Hundreds of volunteers of the TMMK had jumped to rescue work in 2004 when the tsunami struck the state’s coast. District officials of the worst-hit Nagapattinam city wrote them letters of thanks. In 2007, TMMK won an award for bringing the highest number of blood donors in emergencies.
Imagine, then, Jawahirullah’s shock when he found that the background note the Centre issued with the February 7 notification banning SIMI said: “SIMI was closely associated with… TMMK and was involved in various incidents of violence relating to killing of Hindus, especially persons associated with RSS/ Hindu Munnai organisations, since August, 1993.” When the tribunal travelled to Chennai in June, the feisty Muslim leader landed before it and appealed that his organisation’s name be struck off the background note. “What is the evidence against my client?” his counsel asked. Although the Central government’s lawyers had made such a sweeping remark against TMMK, they had no clue if they had evidence.
So they asked for a day. The next day, Jawahirullah deposed before the tribunal. The Central government’s lawyers cross-examined him. Of course, said Jawahirullah, he was a SIMI member, but left it way back in 1989 when he turned 30, the age of superannuation. SIMI was then a legitimate organisation. Jawahirullah admitted that, as SIMI’s state president, he had taken on rent an office from the local mosque. But after he left SIMI, he had nothing to do with that transaction. At this, the Central government’s lawyer claimed that Jawahirullah had been paying the rent for that office until the year 2000, which established his links with SIMI. Grandly, the Centre’s lawyer waved alleged rent agreement letters between SIMI and the mosque committee for the years 1997 and 2000 saying it was written in Jawahirullah’s name. The judge asked to see it. Turned out it had no signatures from Jawahirullah. Too bad, said the judge, can’t be used against him, can’t be taken on record. So much for the Centre’s watertight case against SIMI and TMMK on “violence relating to killing of Hindus”.
“Innocents are being caught and the real culprits are left scot free,” Jawahirullah said to TEHELKA on the sidelines of the Chennai hearings. “In the end, only Muslims suffer.” •
The Kafka Project
“Naturally the common people don’t want war… That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
HERMANN WILHELM GOERING, Nazi Party leader
ON THE morning of September 27, 2001, Shahid Badr Falahi, a doctor of the alternative medicine system of Unani and the president of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), sat with a few colleagues in the SIMI office in a Muslim neighbourhood of South Delhi, wondering what’s next. Fatigued from two weeks of public meetings across Uttar Pradesh from where he had returned only the previous night, Falahi had just finished speaking with SIMI’s office-bearers across India. Using the local STD booth as his office phone had been dead for hours, call after call fetched an echo: anxious SIMI activists in Mumbai, Lucknow, Indore, Kolkata, Chennai, Kozhikode, Patna and other cities said the police had sealed their offices the previous night without explanation. At 4 pm, Falahi got to know why. The television news announced that the Union Home Ministry had invoked a 1967 law against “unlawful activities” and banned SIMI for two years with immediate effect.
“The nature of this organisation had become apparent and preliminary information sent by various state governments only confirmed its tendencies,” LK Advani, then Union Home Minister, told reporters that evening. The notification his ministry issued that day banning SIMI qualified Advani’s assertion. “SIMI has been indulging in activities which are prejudicial to the security of the country and have the potential of disturbing peace and communal harmony and disrupting the secular fabric of the country,” the terse, six-paragraph notification said, strongly suggesting that the government had a watertight case against SIMI with unchallengeable proof.
Other grave charges levelled said SIMI:
• Was in “close touch” with militant outfits and supported “extremism/militancy in Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere”
• Supported claims for seceding parts of India’s territory and groups fighting for it, and thus questioned India’s territorial integrity
• Was working to establish an “international Islamic order”
• Published objectionable posters and literature “calculated to incite” communal feelings and question India’s territorial integrity
Most damning was the government’s claim that SIMI was “involved in engineering communal riots” across India. The notification said SIMI’s anti-national and militant “postures” were “clearly manifest” at its various conferences. “The speeches of the leaders [at the conferences]… glorified Pan Islamic Fundamentalism,” the notification read, claiming to expose SIMI’s nefarious designs. “[The leaders] used derogatory language for the deities of other religions and exhorted Muslims for Jehad.”
