The special tribunal under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 2006, headed by Justice Geeta Mittal, recently lifted the ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The joy with which several mainstream Muslim organisations and much of the Urdu press greeted SIMI’s return to lawful existence proved to be short-lived since the very next day the Supreme Court stayed the tribunal’s verdict. Nonetheless, the misguided show of solidarity with SIMI raises some very disturbing questions. Are Muslim leaders and the Urdu media wilfully blind to the malevolence sheltering in their own backyard? Or, is it that in the interests of “communal balance”, anything goes?

The nefarious nature of SIMI has been evident from the moment it emerged from the womb of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) in 1977. “Character building” to fight against the perceived twin evils of communism and capitalist consumerism with its “degenerate morality” was the declared objective. But in less than a decade this self-styled moral brigade metamorphosed into “the real inheritor” of the legacy of the founder of JeI, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, who argued that all Muslims must strive for an Islamic state.

True to its ideological mooring, in the ’80s, SIMI produced eye-catching stickers proclaiming “Secularism, NO; Democracy, NO; Nationalism, NO; Polytheism, NO; Only Islam”. These stickers adorned many Muslim homes and shops throughout India. But no one seemed to be unduly perturbed by this dangerous drift of a section of Indian Muslim youth, spreading wings under the loving care of its patron, the JeI. (It was only in the late ’90s that the JeI officially snipped the umbilical cord that organically linked it to SIMI.)

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