What is your reaction to the lifting of the ban on SIMI?
Our case has always been strong. The government used to create an external situation that put pressure to get a favourable verdict. When the first tribunal was about to give its report in 2002, Godhra happened and SIMI was named. Obviously, the tribunal was influenced. When the second tribunal was to give its report, Mulund and Ghatkopar blasts took place, then again SIMI was named without any proof. And when the third tribunal was to give its report, Mumbai train blasts of July 11, 2006, happened, and the verdict went against us. Though if you read that tribunal’s report you will wonder why the judge didn’t apply his mind. But this time, the government’s manipulations fell flat. Earlier verdicts, too, would have favoured us had the circumstances been different. This verdict absolutely matches our expectations. The case against us was a castle of sand and we knew it would be blown away. We are happy.
Why do you say the third tribunal’s judge didn’t apply his mind in giving his verdict in 2006?
If you read the judgement you will see that the foundation of the judgement is that all the things that have come into the picture are false but it seems that Shahid Badr is not telling the truth. The word the judge has used is ‘evasive’. He said he ‘felt’ that I wasn’t telling the truth. So the judgement was made on the basis of ‘feelings’ and not evidence.
What do you have to say about the Supreme Court’s stay on the judgement?
The stay from the Supreme Court is a murder of justice. Three previous tribunals ruled against us and we appealed against those orders, but the Supreme Court didn’t hear us. But now the Supreme Court intervened immediately. If it had been so prompt with our petitions, then our previous bans would have been thrown out long ago. But we have not lost hope even after seven years of being banned. And now we have already got the notice of lifting of ban for a few hours and even this time we won’t lose hope.
 

Why is it that SIMI has been constantly accused of being unlawful and seditious, be it the BJP-led government or the Congress- led? There must be some reason?
We have faced not one but a thousand allegations. But we never backed out in the legal proceedings and demolished every argument and evidence against us to prove that we are not guilty. If anyone takes out the time to come to us and read all the documents with the allegations against us and our responses to it, he will wonder how on earth the castles of sand became so strong. We are not afraid of any accusations. They thought that if this group of Muslims which is young and educated can be crushed then the entire community will be weakened. RSS and its sympathisers are present in all other parties and they have always opposed us. But we are not afraid of them.
Why do you think the Centre is adamant to keep SIMI banned?
The BJP-led government had taken advantage of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US and banned us in order to raise their position with the US. Now, everybody is trying to show their loyalty to the US.
It is said that SIMI’s ideology does not believe in the Indian Constitution, that it is pan-Islamic, that it rejects India’s nationalism.
These are only allegations. We have given our detailed written explanations to the courts. Please read them if you can. I believe that in a land where everybody is allowed to follow his religion and principles and popularise those ideals, we also want that all those who live on this planet should live like Allah’s people, and live their lives as per the teachings of Allah and Prophet Mohammad. This is our desire. But we do not use any force for this, because Allah Himself has rejected force. But is it wrong to make one’s ideologies public and propagate it in a decent manner? No.

SHORTLY AFTER the 9 pm news began rolling out on major television networks on August 5, 2008, “sources” in the Union Home Ministry quietly let out that Delhi High Court judge Geeta Mittal had rejected the Centre’s ban on the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) citing insufficient evidence to connect the group with unlawful activities as alleged by the Centre.
Media reports said that the tribunal judge had sent her report in a sealed cover to the Union Home Ministry. Certainly, her order had not been pronounced in an open court. Even the legal team that had contested the ban on behalf of SIMI’s ex-president, Shahid Badr Falahi, had heard of judge Mittal’s decision — certainly very welcome to them — only from the television networks.
Yet, the next day, on August 6, while the fact of the order having been passed had still not been communicated to either Falahi or his lawyers, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Gopal Subramaniam appeared before Supreme Court Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan and sought a stay on the order of the tribunal — and got the order he wanted. The Supreme Court immediately stayed the order of the tribunal and ruled that the ban on SIMI will continue for at least three more weeks. The apex court also issued notices to SIMI asking it why the ban against it should not be maintained.
“The Supreme Court’s stay on the tribunal’s order is a murder of justice,” Falahi told TEHELKA (see interview on page 43). Falahi certainly has reason to feel the Supreme Court is being unfair to him on the matter. As per the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, under which SIMI was banned, a tribunal headed by a sitting high court judge has to be constituted within 30 days from the day the ban is notified, “for the purpose of adjudicating whether or not there is sufficient cause for declaring the association unlawful”. The law also clearly stipulates that such a tribunal must declare its finding “within a period of six months from the date of the issue of the notification” banning the organisation. (As the last ban was imposed on February 7 this year, Judge Mittal’s report was due no later than August 6.)
SIMI was banned thrice before in 2001, 2003 and 2006. Each time, a new tribunal was constituted. Each tribunal returned its finding in favour of the government, upholding its ban on SIMI. Each time, Falahi appealed before the Supreme Court against the tribunal’s decision. While the Supreme Court showed great alacrity on August 6 in responding to the Centre’s plea to stay Judge Mittal’s order, it hasn’t taken up any of Falahi’s three appeals in all these years. Fundamentally, there should be no difference in the legal status of Falahi’s appeals and that of the Centre’s appeal before the Supreme Court. After all, both were equal parties before the four tribunals. Every time, the party that got an adverse order approached the apex court, but were not granted a hearing.
In any case, the government’s move to seek a stay from the Supreme Court also compromised Falahi’s legal rights in another way.
As per practice, as soon as a party gets an order in its favour from one court, it has the option to file a caveat in the court, to which an appeal would lie, asking that no orders should be passed in the matter on appeal without intimation to it. However, if Falahi wanted to file such a caveat he would be required to clearly set down the date of the order that was given in his favour. But because Falahi hadn’t received any official intimation on Judge Mittal’s order, he was in no position to even comply with the formalities that the Supreme Court registry would have insisted upon if his caveat was to be entertained.

A SCRAP DEALER in the west Uttar Pradesh town of Saharanpur, 70-year-old Atta-urrehman Kureshi hardly seems a candidate to be tempted by terrorist ambitions. Kureshi set up Wahadat-e-Islami (Unity of Islam) in 1994 to propagate Islam.
In July-end this year, an outraged Kureshi appeared before the SIMI tribunal in New Delhi with a plea with which the judge was by now quite familiar: to strike off his organisation’s name from the background note, which had claimed: “SIMI is reported to be having many cover/front organisations. At the All-India level these [include] …Wahadat-e-Islami.”
Kureshi told the judge he had long passed the upper age limit of 30 years for SIMI membership when it was launched in 1977. He demanded to be told the basis on which his outfit was linked with it. (The paragraph names 60 organisations across India, including one Association for Rural Development and Research and Minority Rights Watch in Kerala.) As ever, the Central Government’s lawyers hadn’t a clue who Kureshi was and why their backgrounder named his organisation. But surprisingly, in his cross-examination, the first question the Centre’s lawyer asked him was, “Are you Yasin Patel’s father-inlaw?” Perplexed, Kureshi said he wasn’t, but volunteered that Patel was his friend’s son-in-law.
Patel, a former SIMI officebearer, is the legal representative of ex-SIMI president, Shahid Badr Falahi, who contested the ban at the tribunal. Sentenced to seven years in jail and out on bail, Patel was attending the tribunal hearings in Delhi. Moments before they stepped inside the courtroom, Patel introduced Kureshi to the SIMI lawyers as “my fatherin- law’s friend”. Standing nearby, the government lawyer perhaps misheard and, in the absence of any other evidence, decided to use it to connect him with SIMI.
A year ago, the Wahadat-e-Islami held a meet on the ‘Role of Muslims in Indian Politics’ at Lucknow. Two years ago, it had organised ‘Islam and World Peace — Programme against International Terrorism’. Yet he is the main accused in the infamous Surat Case, a case that reflects the never-ending persecution of these Muslims and that is profiled in another column. •

ONE MORNING in July, a nattily dressed man named M. Elliyas arrived at the SIMI tribunal’s sitting at Mumbai and, speaking confidently in English, demanded that his name be struck off the background note that the Centre had issued with its February 7 notification banning SIMI. The note alleged that Elliyas “incited” local Muslims in Pune, who “staged a demonstration” to protest the municipality razing some illegal construction. “When exactly did this happen?” he asked the battery of Central Government lawyers, who shuffled papers and hummed and hawed but couldn’t find more details of their own allegations against him. He volunteered: on the day of the event he was visiting the municipal office to find how to make a birth certificate for his newly-born daughter. Even the local police have never questioned him in that case. Then why name him in the background note?
But Elliyas, a successful, 40-year-old IT consultant who topped his Microsoft exam with 99 percent marks, is hardly surprised. Elliyas was a SIMI member during the 1990s and retired when he turned 30, three years before the ban. In the seven years since the ban on SIMI, the Maharashtra police have harassed him no end. He told TEHELKA that when the police couldn’t find anything against him, they booked him under a humiliating law called the ‘Maharashtra Bad Persons, Slumlords and Bootleggers Act’. It is ridiculous that Elliyas spent a year in jail in 2001 under this law.
In his affidavit, Elliyas wrote that the statement against him in the background note “seems to reflect the Central Government’s intolerance of any democratic expression by Muslim members of the public and an attempt is being made to link every such expression with the activities of SIMI to stifle the same”. When Tribunal Judge Geeta Mittal sought to soothe him, Elliyas, in a voice choked with controlled emotion, asked: “What does this government want? Should we actually become terrorists?” •

WE BELIEVE in God and God is great,” a beaming Yasin Patel told TEHELKA on August 5, 2008 after the SIMI tribunal rejected the Centre’s ban on SIMI. Yasin Patel has the dubious distinction of being the only SIMI activist to have been convicted under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). His crime: allegedly sticking an “anti-India” poster inside Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University. His witnesses: only policemen. The evidence: the alleged poster.
A native of Ahmedabad, Patel left Gujarat following the anti- Muslim violence of February- March 2002. He was arrested in New Delhi on May 26 that year. In 2003, the court accepted the prosecution’s argument that the alleged poster denigrated an image of India’s flag and sentenced him to five years in jail under POTA and, concurrently, seven years for spreading disaffection against the Indian government.
Patel had told the court that he was arrested from home at midnight and the poster story was a plant. In any case, the poster in question, printed by SIMI in 1996, did not contain India’s flag. Rather, it showed an image of a clenched fist and the maps of the five members of the UN Security Council: the US, Britain, Russia, China and France. Its text slammed the UN for becoming a handmaiden of these nations instead of staying neutral as per its mandate. On this ground, Patel appealed against his conviction before the High Court, which granted him bail in August 2004. By then, Patel had spent 27 months in jail.
During his trial, Patel recalls the public prosecutor hardly spoke; it was the judge SN Dhingra (who also tried the Parliament attack case) who countered the defence all the time. Police records showed Patel was arrested from the spot at 1.30 pm. and both the police and the accused were there until 7.30 pm. Why then, the defence lawyer asked, were no public witness found in this long period? Because, said the judge, people are afraid of SIMI. The judge saw the poster and said: “It looks more dangerous to me than an AK47.” As the judge dictated Patel’s oral submissions from the cross-examination to his typist, he misquoted one line. Patel spoke out to correct him. “Tell your client to watch his tongue,” the judge bluntly told the defence lawyer. “He will regret it if he doesn’t.”
AMADARSA alumnus from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, where he and SIMI’s ex-president Shahid Badr Falahi were classmates, Patel joined SIMI in 1985 and stayed on till his mandatory retirement in 1997 at the age of 30. He rose to become secretary of SIMI’s Uttar Pradesh unit. For a living, Patel set up a printing unit in Ahmedabad and published books on politics, socialism, psychology and languages. As an outspoken Muslim youth, he often called public meetings to ask Muslims to defend themselves against attacks on the community. This brought him under the police scanner which began harassing him in the 1990s.
Patel’s parents and siblings are settled in Chicago and are US citizens. He, too, moved in 1992 and lived there for two years. At school, he topped his class on social science. “But I wore a beard and both the teachers and the students kept their distance from me,” Patel recalls. “I realised I have no future in the US so I came back.” Today, Patel says he will live and die in India. “The bones of the Muslims are buried in this land,” he says. “Now India has to decide whether it wants us or not.” •

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WHAT DO you say of a campaign in which pain became the only impetus? What do you say of the middle-class fight in which memories became the mainstay, the moving force? Really, what do you say of a tragedy in which the dead kept the living going? What do you tell ML Sehgal, a father who lost his 21-year-old son Vikas, on a day that he waited for him at home so he could cut his own birthday cake? What can the Sehgal family possibly do on June 13? Mourn the fact that they found Vikas’s body in the burns ward of a Delhi hospital or keep life going? What do you tell Harish Dang, a South Delhi businessman who lost five members in the Uphaar tragedy, including his wife and son? What can you say to the Sidhus and the Manns who cremated their wives and children at one go? What words would you choose to calm Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy who enter a dark, empty house every single day? How do you console Rita Sawhney, who lost her daughter at age 20? The Sehgals, Sidhus, Sawhneys and Krishnamoorthys decided to help themselves.

None of the 28 families who had lost 59 members in all — 23 below the age of 15 — in the Uphaar fire on June 13, 1997 were willing to accept the tragedy as something that was “destined”. Vikas’s body was found in the burns ward but there was not a mark on it. Neelam had found her daughter Unnati lying on a stretcher at Delhi’s premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences. She looked like she was asleep, but for a torn earlobe. Someone had moved stretcher to stretcher, yanking jewellery off the dead.
Fifty-nine young lives were snuffed out on June 13, 1997, while they watched a Hindi film in Uphaar, a theatre owned by the Ansals, real estate magnates, who never once uttered the word remorse. The callousness, the heartlessness displayed by the theatre management, in fact, spurred the victims to galvanise themselves into battle. How could the manager have walked away with the cash box after the transformer had caught fire? What about the public address system that should have warned hapless cinemagoers that afternoon? It never came on. It could not have. It was not working. What about the usher who had bolted the only exit from the outside and left duty even before his replacement could come in that day? What about the fire extinguisher? Well, in its place lay a broom. What about all those extra seats that brought in extra bucks but at the cost of human lives? Fate had not dealt the Sidhus and the Sawhneys a bad card. This was a man-made tragedy. This was criminal negligence. Distraught families kept scanning the papers and their suspicions kept getting confirmed, even as they went about the difficult task of cremating the dead. The transformer which caught fire — to deliver a fatal blow this time — had also sparked and resulted in a minor fire at 7am the same day. Linemen from the Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) had used sand to douse the fire and the cables had been repaired, or so they said. What the engineers from the DVB’s breakdown unit actually did only emerged later.
If 10 years later, powerful real-estate tycoons Sushil and Gopal Ansal find themselves singled out as the only two amongst the mighty to have been sentenced by a court of law, it is because the ordinary got together to push their own destiny. If the three DVB engineers find themselves convicted for culpable homicide, it is because the victims got together and swore justice. Grief and anger can propel in many ways. In this case, it brought together simple, middle and lower income group families to wage a unified battle. A battle that sought to avenge the deaths of the 59 whose future lay ahead of them. Justice has always eluded the common Indian and many a case has fallen by the wayside, but the Uphaar fight has shown how dogged determination can yield results. THE BATTLE, which has today become an inspirational example, started as any ordinary story usually does. The spark came from Neelam Krishnamoorthy, who found herself surrounded by eager, inquisitive members of her and Shekhar’s extended family advising her to have another child. This was on the thirteenth day after she had immersed the ashes of 13-year-old Ujjwal and 17-yearold Unnati.
She had already charted her course. The mother made a promise to her children to punish those responsible for their untimely death. Shekhar by her side, the happy housewife who sometimes lent a helping hand to her husband’s flourishing garment export business, Neelam asked her new family of friends in the media for a lawyers name and number. On June 27, to be precise, she called wellknown lawyer KTS Tulsi who offered to come to her house to meet her. But for someone who had already decided to make resolve a companion, she replied, “No sir, if I have to fight this battle, I have to get out of the house.” So, the two went to meet Tulsi, who agreed but with two pre-conditions: one, that he would not take a penny and two, he would lead their battle only if they could form an association. His advice — you cannot take on a rich and powerful lobby like the Ansals as individuals. For the next three days, the grieving couple scoured the newspapers for obituary columns; called up each family, who readily agreed, and on June 30, 1997 — 17 days after death had visited each of those 28 homes — the families had an umbrella. It was called AVUT — Association for the Victims of the Uphaar Tragedy.
Tulsi gave them another important advice — the Ansals would flex their financial muscle, so no one other than the next of kin would be allowed in as members. Bound by deep sorrow and the determination to see the guilty punished, the one thing that marked AVUT’s 10-yea long battle (it has taken this long to win the case in the lower court) was the fact they stuck together as one big family.
NOT THAT the “enemy” did not try. There were crude attempts to lure victims but they didn’t work. And when the colour of money failed to break the resolve that had been born of grief, they tried intimidation. That did not work either, and as Tulsi put it, “This frustrated the Ansals because they succeeded neither with the subtle nor the blatant.”

THE RITUAL started 10 years ago. That June night, the anxious parents rushed home and, on finding it bathed in darkness, quickly lit an oil lamp. The mother prayed and the father stood at the window, waiting for one of Delhi’s ubiquitous yellow-and-black threewheelers to rattle its way up their lane.
The moments ticked away. The first message —“Where are you, please call?” — had been sent to the children’s pager two hours earlier, and, unlike always, the kids had not called back. Send another message, Neelam told her husband Shekhar, as they paced up and down, waiting for the phone to ring. “Where are you?’’ reached the pager for the umpteenth time, and mechanically, as gadgets are programmed to do, the reminder tone kept beeping on a stretcher lying in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
The parents never heard from their children again. Seventeen-year-old Unnati and 13-yearold Ujjwal had succumbed to the billowing smoke that had slowly filled their lungs and asphyxiated them. They were two of the 59 who died in the Uphaar Cinema fire on June 13, 1997.
A decade later, Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy continue to light the lamp. Ask Neelam about it and the tears still come. “Does a mother stop being a mother just because her children are dead?” Look at Shekhar, and he lowers his eyes and says, “We have nothing to live for, but we have a promise to keep.’’
A promise to avenge 59 snuffed-out lives, 23 of whom were below age 15. None of the victims’ families were willing to accept the fire as something predestined. Their decade-long fight points over and over to the greed and negligence responsible for the tragedy. Uphaar’s owners — real estate magnates Gopal and Sushil Ansal — had added extra seats to the hall, which blocked the aisles and exits. The one balcony exit that could have been a lifeline that afternoon had been bolted from the outside. The manager had walked away with the cash box soon after the fire broke out. Ambulances arrived without oxygen cylinders and fire tenders turned up with empty water tanks.
The thought still haunts. None of the victims died of burns. There was not a scratch on Unnati’s body but for a lacerated ear lobe — someone at AIIMS had moved from stretcher to stretcher, yanking valuables off the dead.
Enter the Krishnamoorthy’s South Delhi flat, and facing you straight across from the front door are smiling photographs of Ujju and Niti, photographs that Neelam refuses to garland. Look left or right or into any other room and the house bears all the signs of the children as if they were still living there. Their clothes hang in the cupboard, their books and music lie where they left them, the sheet they last slept on remains untouched.
Don’t the parents want closure? How longcan they nurture the pain? “I sit in the children’s room for half an hour every single day. They guide me and give me strength,’’ is Neelam’s belief. She adds, “I don’t care what people think anymore. I am alive because of my children.”
It is probably the most painful impetus to keep the struggle going but that’s probably the only reason why the Uphaar case has not fallen by the way like, say, the 1995 Dabwali fire or the Kumbakonam inferno which killed 90 children in 2004. If, a decade down, the Ansals are still feeling the heat, there is a reason why.
For weeks after she cremated her children, the first thing Neelam would do each morning was scan the newspapers for the obituaries. “I had two choices,” she says. “I could either sit at home and cry, or go out and fight for justice.” She chose the latter because, as she puts it, “I could not sit back and accept it as fate. All my relatives advised me not to take on a powerful lobby like the Ansals. They advised me to have another child, but how could I bring another child into this world when I hadn’t been able to save the two we had?”
After the Krishnamoorthys refused to have any more children, friends and family turned away from them. Neelam and Shekhar decided to create a new family. They scoured the obituary columns and started calling up the homes of the other Uphaar victims. That’s how the Association for the Victims of the Uphaar Tragedy (AVUT) was born. On the day it came into being, Neelam made a promise to her dead children — that she would avenge them by seeing the guilty punished.
Despair and frustration have been constant companions. By day, Neelam is all grit and determination as she sits through prolonged court hearings, taking copious notes and briefing the press. Untiring when it comes to the court cases, she’s a different person back home. Tired, distraught, hurting like hell…
Strength has come through the test by fire. “I sometimes feel like I’ve been served a living death sentence,” she says. But Shekhar is there to hold her. His garment export business has more or less wound up — he needed to travel to Italy and Germany almost every month but doesn’t want to leave either Neelam or the court cases behind. He has one outlet, though: his music. And he sings those soulful melodies that pierce: Ganga aaye kahan se, Ganga jaaye kahan se— because the four Krishnamoorthys were last together on the banks of the Ganga; Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho, kya gam hai jis ko chhupa rahe ho — because Ujju used to sing it….
The mother sheds a tear again and she’s thinking the same thoughts. Did Ujju go first or Unnati? Were they together when the smoke overwhelmed them? Then the reminder that the fight must go on. Step by step, bit by bit. Defeat and despair intervene for a few moments, but the mother has a promise to keep. Not just to her children, but to the entire Uphaar family. And she waits, one court date to the next, to the next. After 10 years, the criminal case is still in the lower court and four of the 16 accused are dead.
But, as Shekhar reminds himself when he does his morning riyaz: Rahi tu mat ruk jana, toofaan se mat ghabrana, kabhi to milegi teri manzil, kahin door gagan ki chhaon mein.