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Challenging SIMI’s hate politics

In a deluge of words and images provoked by the arrest of the Students Islamic Movement of India’s leadership at Indore, the proscribed organisation’s top jihadist ideologue, Safdar Nagori, has been represented as an archetypical Bollywood movie villain, a key figure in terror groups ranging from SIMI through al-Qaeda to the mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar. While Mr. Nagori’s linkages and networks are important matters for criminal investigators, his real significance lies elsewhere. He gained power in India’s largest Islamist political grouping by speaking for a particular constituency — a critical mass of disillusioned young Muslims who had tired of their community’s traditional leadership, and the state’s promises of secularism, equality of opportunity, and democracy. When, in 2001, Mr. Nagori proclaimed in an interview that he was “very bitter about being Indian,” he was voicing and exploiting the rage of a generation. SIMI at the time had an estimated 40,000 ikhwan, or volunteer ‘brothers,’ and upwards of 20,000 people routinely attended its conferences. Embittered at being denied social and economic equity and justice by a rising tide of communal prejudice, and angered by a brutal succession of riots, massacres, and pogroms that scarred the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of young people saw in Mr. Nagori’s calls for jihad the promise of justice — or at least a kind of retribution.

Back in the summer of 1976 — less than a year before SIMI was founded, at a time when the rising influence of communalism in the public arena was becoming evident — the eminent historian Irfan Habib, along with his colleagues Iqitidar Alam Khan and K.P. Singh, called for “a conscious ideological struggle against the forces of Muslim communalism.” Muslim communalists, Dr. Habib and his co-authors noted, had the “preservation of Muslim separatism, not the end of Muslim backwardness, as their basic aim.” As a democratic and progressive counter-agenda, they proposed an eight-point programme focussed on ending discrimination in jobs and business, broadening access to education, proscribing hate propaganda, and suppressing communal riots. The political system failed to act on such far-sighted advice. The National Common Minimum Programme, adopted in May 2004 by the United Progressive Alliance government, made big promises in the section on ‘Social Harmony, Welfare of Minorities.’ The Sachar Committee report offers a quite radical blueprint for the “inclusion and mainstreaming” of India’s 150 million Muslims after addressing the specific “deficits and deprivation” with remarkable honesty. The great pity is that there has been poor, mostly insincere follow-up on the ground.

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