Different rules?

By NEENA VYAS

THREE DAYS ago when the hijack drama of an Alliance Air plane took place - which turned out to be a false alarm due to a miscommunication - the first instinct of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Vajpayee Government was that it could be the handiwork of the SIMI, Students Islamic Movement of India, which has recently been banned. Senior Government officials suggested as much.

Perhaps, the Home Ministry is regretting that there was no hijacking and the SIMI cannot be blamed. That would, indeed, have been useful in justifying the proscribing of the organisation. Some 500 SIMI activists have been arrested throughout the country and the Home Secretary, Mr. Kamal Pandey, admitted last week that no firearms, ammunition or RDX was found in any of the SIMI premises which were raided. But, the BJP's secular credentials were intact because non-BJP State Governments had also demanded a ban on the SIMI and participated in the raids and arrests that followed.

The Home Ministry has alleged that the SIMI had close links with the ISI and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. Mr. Pandey said the Government had known about this for months. The question then is why did the Government not arrest the SIMI activists linked to the ISI and charge them with spying? Was it necessary to ban the organisation on that basis?

If organisations are to be banned because of their penetration by various intelligence agencies, then no agency, no political party, not even the Government may be safe.

The other charge against the SIMI made by the Government is that its agenda is communal - the SIMI's objective, stated years ago, was the establishment of Islamic rule. This, the Government said, was against the secular order of the Constitution.

There can hardly be any doubt that the SIMI is communal. No sane person can applaud an organisation which since its birth in Aligarh in 1977 used the Quran to justify jehad. It even denounced women students participating in theatre and dance. In fact, the Jamiat-e-Islam-i-Hind, whose student wing the SIMI was, itself broke away to form a separate organisation.

But it must be pointed out that the RSS literature too speaks of a Hindu Rashtra, it talks about Muslims and Christians as second class citizens. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has on its agenda the bringing down of several mosques in the country, an act which can only be unlawful as there is a specific legislation forbidding the changing of the status of any place of worship. The Bajrang Dal has an ongoing plan to teach martial arts to its young members to ``protect'' Hindu culture (by this they normally mean attacking women wearing jeans, for, men wearing pants do no harm to Hindu culture). The Dal has distributed `trishuls' to be used as weapons and its vocabulary is always aggressively communal. Has that made the Home Ministry sit up and ban these organisations? No, instead the Union Home Minister was reported to have said a demand to ban the Bajrang Dal was a ``joke''.

With the BJP steadily losing its popularity, the leadership is obsessed with the coming Uttar Pradesh polls. The Prime Minister knows only too well that if his party is unable to form the next Government in that State, his own political authority would be damaged. Loss of Uttar Pradesh would inevitably make a big hole in its mandate to govern.

It is, therefore, not surprising that the Vajpayee Government will do almost anything to try and turn around the situation in the State to the BJP's advantage. It is in this context that more than a doubt has crept in about the timing of the ban on the SIMI, coming as it did the day after the Prime Minister himself told Opposition leaders (and sought their cooperation in this) that nothing should be done to give the impression that the global fight against terrorism supported by India was becoming a campaign against Islam or those who followed it.

The Opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh, especially the Samajwadi Party, had lost no time in saying the ban on the SIMI was nothing more than the reflection of the BJP's communal ideology. Even in the BJP, some leaders privately admit that the party has no option but to play the Hindutva card in Uttar Pradesh and then hope for the best. Even in Gujarat it will come as no surprise if the party in power once again tries to get back its political supremacy through a policy of dividing the polity along communal lines.

The BJP first played the `mandal' card in Uttar Pradesh by trying to wean away the most backward groups from the Samajwadi Party through a policy change creating a separate reservation quota for them. Now the SIMI ban is being seen as an attempt to create a solid Hindutva votebank as was done with the help of the Ayodhya issue earlier.

The BJP's thinking may well be: ban the SIMI, push the Muslims away into the arms of the Samajwadi Party and others (in any case the BJP was not getting the Muslim votes), and create a backlash Hindu surge into the safe arms of the BJP.

If politics was not the reason for the ban on the SIMI, it is almost inexplicable now when countries the world over are trying to convince Muslim opinion that the fight against terrorism is not going to be a battle against Islam or its followers.

The Government has not come out with information about any terrorist attack planned by the SIMI which would justify a nationwide swoop on it. Of course the SIMI is communal, but so is the Bajrang Dal and even the Shiv Sena. This has given rise to the view that the ban has more to do with Uttar Pradesh politics than anything else.

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Section  : Opinion
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