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Indian Mujahideen born over tea and biscuits

HYDERABAD: Every Sunday evening, Sadiq Israr Sheikh would meet with friends over tea and biscuits and chat about the global jihadist movement.

Sheikh joined the Students Islamic Movement of India, then a legal organisation, in 1996. Many of those who attended the weekend study meetings at Dr. Tayyeb Ali’s first-floor apartment were his neighbours. Some senior Mumbai SIMI members were also in attendance, among them Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri and Abdul Subhan Qureshi.

By the summer of 2001, though, Sheikh was done with the study group. SIMI’s public polemic had turned increasingly vituperative over the years; the organisation had voiced support for Osama bin Laden, and hailed the Taliban’s Mullah Omar as a liberator of Muslims. But it was not enough for Sheikh.

“All we do is talk,” he angrily shouted at one of his last SIMI meetings. He didn’t yet know it, but that remark would lead him into the ranks of the Indian Mujahideen.

Back in 2000, Sheikh’s life didn’t look like it was headed anywhere. He had just thrown up his job as a freelance repairman for Godrej, but failed to find new work. Having dropped out of school during his last year at the Saboo Siddiqi College in Byculla, Sheikh obtained certification as an air-conditioning mechanic from the Indian Technical Institute. But there was little money to be made. SIMI, it is likely, gave Sheikh the sense of purpose and agency he lacked in real life.

Then, in April 2001, Sheikh ran into a relative who offered to turn his jihadist dream into reality.

Salim Islahi was in Cheeta Camp to visit his cousin, and Sheikh’s sister-in-law, Mehzabeen Asad.

The son of Maulana Abdul Aleem Islahi, a Hyderabad-based cleric who had been expelled from the Jamaat-e-Islami for his extremist views, Salim Islahi acquired the somewhat vainglorious honorific Mujahid [holy warrior] after a run-in with the police in Hyderabad.

While the elder Islahi’s writings, as reported in The Hindu on Wednesday, fired the imagination of many young Islamists, the cleric refused to endorse calls for violence.

His son, investigators who have been piecing together the Indian Mujahideen story believe, saw things differently.

Sheikh had no intention of meeting with Islahi, as his relationship with Ms. Asad was poor. But Islahi sought him out, possibly at the suggestion of Shahbandri or Qureshi, and the two men ended up having a long discussion. When Sheikh complained that India’s Islamist leaders were unwilling to act on their own jihadist polemic, Islahi offered to put him in touch with someone who was willing.

In July, Sheikh received an e-mail summoning him to a meeting at the Tipu Sultan mosque in Kolkata’s Dharmatala area. There, Sheikh has told investigators, he met with ganglord Aftab Ansari, a Mafioso who is reputed to have discovered religion while sharing a prison cell with top jihadist operative Syed Omar Sheikh in New Delhi.

He also met with Ansari’s key lieutenant for jihadist operations, Asif Reza Khan, who, it turned out, had been the author of the e-mail summoning him to the Kolkata meeting. Ansari offered to underwrite his journey into the jihad, just as he was doing for dozens of other angry young men.

In September, 2001, Sheikh is alleged to have left for training at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. His instructor, the police say, was Mohammad Azam Cheema, the organisation’s key commander for operations directed at India.

Sheikh, the authorities allege, returned to India through Kathmandu after completing an advanced weapons and explosives course.

Many of those Sheikh trained, the police say, were Indian nationals, among them, his neighbour and fellow-regular at SIMI’s Cheeta Camp meetings, Mohammad Ansar. Sheikh learned, in time, that two regular visitors at that study group, Qureshi and Riyaz Shahbandri, had recruited several new volunteers.

Volunteers had also arrived from Hyderabad for training in the wake of the Gujarat pogrom, among them Abdul Khwaja, who, using the alias Amjad, now heads a Lashkar-linked, Lahore-based cell operating against India.

By 2003, Sheikh himself was regularly despatching volunteers from the Azamgarh area for training. And by 2005, the networks that later took to calling themselves the Indian Mujahideen were ready to carry out their first bombings.

In important ways, the birth of the Indian Mujahideen marked the rebellion of young Islamists against their leaders: of sons, as the story of Salim Islahi illustrates, against sons.

SIMI’s Safdar Nagori-led faction formally committed itself to a full-scale jihad against the Indian state at a secret meeting held in Ujjain from July 4 to 7, 2006, after which it began looking out for volunteers.

But by that time, figures like Sheikh, Qureshi and Shahbandri had already carried out several major attacks. Even key SIMI insiders like Nagori were largely unaware of what was going on.

Quietly, the rebels had succeeded in setting up networks whose power and reach far exceeded anything India’s Islamists had ever believed was possible.

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