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IN March 2007, the last time 32-year-old Iyash Yahya Kammukutty, an electrical and communication engineering graduate from the Regional Engineering College in Kozhikode, was employed full-time, he drew a salary of Rs 1.14 lakh per month. In online profiles, the former senior systems specialist at GE Healthcare lists ‘driving social change’ as one of his hobbies, apart from reading.

As a young Muslim leader in the IT sector in Bangalore, Yahya was in an organisation called the Muslim Information Technology Professionals Association (MITA), created on the lines of informal right wing and other socio-religious groups in companies around the world.

Around May 2007, Yahya, a father of three children, was forced to leave his company after he was allegedly found stealing software to create products for a company he was secretly running on his own from Dubai.

There is now another, darker side emerging to Yahya Kammukutty as he stands in the centre of an investigation in Karnataka into an alleged attempt to rebuild a network of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.

Officials of the Corps of Detectives of the Karnataka Police investigating the case suspect say Yahya could be at the top of the banned group’s discreet, controlling hierarchy in southern India.

Yahya’s contact details feature in the list of a total of 32 men in the age group of 20 to 30, who attended three secret meetings in northern Karnataka in the second half of 2007, allegedly to plot terror attacks.

So far eight people, including Yahya and his friend Syed Sameer, an electrical contractor and another Bangalore resident, have been arrested from the groups that met at Castle Rock on the Karnataka-Goa border, a farmhouse and a dargah in north Karnataka. The Karnataka Police have identified all eight as active members of SIMI.

While SIMI’s footprints, often in collusion with that of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, have been seen in several major terror attacks in India since the outfit came into existence in 1977 in Uttar Pradesh, even after the 2001 proscription, the outfit has never until now been identified as being a dangerous presence in Karnataka.

Since being banned, the outfit has been organising students under various alter egos in order to work around the ban, especially in the coastal and northern parts of Karnataka. Organisations like the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, and various forums for young professionals, are frequently on intelligence scanners as possible screening grounds for the recruitment of dedicated cadre for SIMI.

So, what has brought SIMI back into action? According to experts a fraction of young, educated Muslims in Karnataka want to build their own defence force because they felt insecure after establishments such as the Sangh Parivar became important political forces in Karnataka over the past two years.

The emergence of the Karnataka Forum for Dignity in coastal Karnataka, comprising largely youths and closely connected to alleged new avatars of SIMI in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, like the NDF and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai, is often cited as an example.

The new lot in SIMI is tech savvy. Medical students Mohammed Asif, 22, Mirza Ahmed Baig, 23, Allah Baksh Yadavada, 23, ayurvedic medicine student Asadullah Abubaker, 22, are all children of the Internet age. Jihadi literature sits side by side with pornography on their computer hard drives. They hold deep religious discussions on social networking sites, Islamic forums and know the intricacies of cell phone and email usage—even how to avoid being caught on account of digital evidence.

‘‘Recruits seem to be carefully picked. Apart from religious commitment recruits are usually from modest backgrounds needing assistance with education or from families that have borne the brunt of communal violence,’’ says a CoD investigator.

DEGREE OF DIFFERENCE

Unlike in the past, the SIMI cause is drawing the educated in Kerala By -Rajeev pi

Posturing apart, we were into nothing more than polemics in our time. SIMI was never really militant,’’ claimed the man, a former leader of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who now edits a newspaper run by one of Kerala’s barely concealed Islamic fundamentalist outfits, in Kozhikode. SIMI, he maintained, can’t be held responsible for what some of its men may do once they leave.

Kozhikode was once Kerala’s biggest SIMI base from the days of its controversial mid-1980s campaign for ‘‘Liberation of India through Islam’’ until the outfit’s proscription immediately after 9/11.

Increasingly under the intelligence scanner now, many former SIMI men ensconced in other Islamic outfits and political parties in Kerala still take pains to insist that even that slogan was just an ideological pivot, not a goal really.

But what many former SIMI men in Kerala are accused of by far exceeds the realm of mere polemics. Take the case of C.A.M. Basheer, an aeronautical engineer from Ernakulam, said to be based in the Gulf and one of SIMI’s high-profile leaders in Kerala. Intelligence sources say Basheer, who is a suspect in the Mumbai bomb blasts, has been one of the key remote SIMI handlers in Kerala after the ban.

They add that even Yahya Kammukutty, who the Bangalore police caught last week, was being tracked for his connections with Basheer. The police was on his vigil after a Lashkar-e-Toiba ‘commander’, Muhammad Fasial Khan alias Abu Sultan—whom the Mumbai cops killed in an encounter later—reportedly sojourned in Kerala with Yahya, allegedly at Basheer’s behest.

There are also the likes of Sahduli, a graduate electronic engineer, and Rafeeq, a trained postgraduate teacher, who were among a bunch of men that the cops caught in Aluva last year with SIMI pamphlets and ‘‘seditious’’ books.

Unlike in the past, the SIMI cause obviously has been drawing a good crop of the educated in Kerala. The state intelligence is now also tracking a well-developed girls wing that the SIMI has supposedly put in place in the state.

Time was when SIMI, before and even after the parent Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) disowned it in a huff, pitched eagerly into everything that could strike a popular, albeit decidedly Islamic, chord in Kerala. Initially, these ranged from campaigns to spread Islamic morality, including by blackening movie posters showing a woman’s cleavage here or a leg there, and stopping cabaret dances in local bars to taking out anti-US processions. Its membership in Kerala kept swelling even after the break with JeI, which eventually came after SIMI men waved black flags at visiting Yasser Arafat in New Delhi, calling him a US stooge for the Camp David talks.

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