With the Gujarat Police pinning last month’s serial blasts in the state on the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, THE SUNDAY EXPRESS profiles key SIMI members arrested over recent years and finds out what they have revealed in interrogations so far
Last year in Bhopal, the former general secretary of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, the man often identified as one of the chief opponents of a softer political identity for SIMI, Safdar Hussain Nagori, now 40, met Raziuddin Nasir, a 21-year-old Hyderabad youth fed on hardline Islamist ideology.
One of the first questions Nagori, arrested in Indore in March this year, asked Nasir was how he could contribute to his efforts in reviving SIMI.

According to interrogation reports and statements given by Nasir, Nagori and the other alleged SIMI activists—all arrested between January 11 and March 27 this year—he told Nagori he could make bombs using hydrogen peroxide as an explosive.
The SIMI leader responded by saying he wanted guns. Nasir, according to his statement to the police, said he would have to go to Pakistan for that. Nagori, however, told Nasir he was not in favour of sourcing weapons from Pakistan.
There is still little hard evidence that Nagori or others in his core group of nearly 32 men from Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, ever did anything sinister other than conspire since they began meeting around the country through 2007.
For instance, on April 25, 2007, the thirtieth anniversary of the formation of SIMI, the group met at a carefully chosen location on the Karnataka-Goa border. The meeting—which was in line with the hardline SIMI ideology of creating a greater Islamic Caliphate, rejecting democracy, secularism and nationalism—decided to put into operation ‘Khilafat and jihad’. Resolutions were made to continue the struggle for changing India from Dar-ul-Harab (Abode of War) to Dar-ul-Islam (Land of Islam).

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