The Cry Of The Beloved Country

Chilling stories of fathers and brothers swallowed by midnight arrests, as family members lack the resources for legal redress, Reports AJIT SAHI

Face of terror? An alleged SIMI member in Bhopal for interrogation Photo:AP

ALTHOUGH THE police in the various states made a huge ruckus with their presence on the two or three days the SIMI tribunal held its hearing in their cities during June-July, 2008, the overwhelming dominance of the police was nowhere more evident than in Bhopal during July 1-3, where the Centre presented SIMI-related cases from Madhya Pradesh. As uniformed officers and their subordinates with guns holstered had the premises in their control, many plainclothesmen also moved around the government building where the makeshift courtroom had been prepared for the tribunal, perhaps keeping an eye out for troublemakers.

It was, then, no small act of courage when a fear-stricken group of Muslims, numbering about a dozen and clearly of little means, landed at the tribunal hearings most tentatively and, speaking meekly, urged their plea be taken up. All travelling to Bhopal from small towns near and far, they had only heard from newspaper inserts that a tribunal somehow connected with SIMI had arrived in the state capital. Though they had no idea about its framework of inquiry, they still decided to take their chance. They were led by a local lawyer, a Muslim, most sincere and earnest but, certainly, not much tuned into the possibilities that this tribunal could offer this group. Each one of them has a tragic tale to tell with brothers and sons arrested by police over patently fabricated charges of being SIMI members. The tribunal did accept their affidavits, but that was more for the record. Justice, or rather help, of the sort they sought was not to be found here.

Outside the tribunal, this reporter spoke to a few of this group and found a disturbing pattern to their stories. It was clear that these scared people had little idea that they could actually be looking at a much longer haul than they realise now. Here are some of those chilling stories:

Tabrez Husain, 28, runs a photo studio some 150 km from Bhopal, in a tehsil called Narsinghgarh where his family has lived for 40 years. On April 2 this year, a dozen policemen landed at his house in the middle of the night and dragged his younger brother, Faisal Husain, away with them. “For three days we didn’t know where he was,” Tabrez told TEHELKA. On the third day, he read in the newspapers that a SIMI activist had been arrested and wondered if it was his brother. On the night of April 5, the police returned with Faisal and searched the house. “They found nothing,” Husain says. When the family asked for a panchnama — the official record — of the search, the police ignored their requests. Shortly, the police left with Faisal.

On April 8, Tabrez and his two other brothers, Aftab and Intekhab, had gone to the local court to appear before a judge in an eight-year-old case of rioting in which all the four brothers were implicated by the police. All of a sudden, someone called from the nearby village, where Aftab runs a shop as an optician, to say that the police wanted to search his shop. Aftab and Intekhab went across to be present during the police raid. After the search, the police took them along. Within hours, the two brothers were arrested on charges of sedition and unlawful activity, and for being a member of a terrorist organisation, which is punishable with life imprisonment.

Tabrez says neither his two brothers nor he were ever associated with SIMI. Faisal had, indeed, been a SIMI member but had submitted an affidavit in 2001 after the ban that he had quit the organisation. On June 6, the police filed a chargesheet against the three brothers. Sure enough, all have confessed to being SIMI members. The police claim they found pamphlets at their house announcing that Muslims will build Babri Masjid once again at the same spot in Ayodhya where it was demolished in 1992. Tabrez fears for his brothers, as they have been implicated in the confessions of Safdar Nagori, the SIMI leader arrested in March at Indore. Tabrez fears he may be next in the line of fire.

Abdul Saleem, 74, is grieving for his youngest son, Abdul Mubeen, who was arrested on April 6 this year. Saleem lives in a tehsil in the Guna district, 175 km north of Bhopal, where he worked and retired as a reader in the magistrate’s court. Mubeen, 28, ran a photocopy-cum-STD booth from a rented room 3 km from their home. “They came at 4 am and showed no warrant to arrest him,” Saleem told TEHELKA.

The police also dragged away Saleem’s two other sons, an 18- year-old grandson, Abdul Qadir, and a nephew. The next day, police released all but Mubeen and Qadir. On July 2, when the interview with Saleem was conducted, his youngest son and grandson were in judicial custody. Mubeen had once been a SIMI member. When the organisation was banned, he and some others were called in by the police and made to submit affidavits that they would stay away from SIMI. The police claim they seized pamphlets from Mubeen suggesting that the Amarnath Yatra be attacked. It is pointless to ask if the police found independent witnesses to these seizures.

RIZWAN KHAN, 24, sells cycle seat covers in his small shop in the Sehore district 50 km west of Bhopal. It is his father, Mohammad Rafeeq, who was arrested by the police as a SIMI member, even though he is 45 years old and way beyond SIMI’s upper age limit of 30 years. The chargesheet filed claims that the police found “11 SIMI pamphlets and a book published by SIMI” from Rafeeq. The police claim that the book in Hindi is titled SIMI: 25 years of the journey of a struggle, 1977-2002. “I swear to God that my father has never been a member of SIMI or any such organisation,” Khan told TEHELKA, more scared than agitated. “He is a simple man who has never even remotely had any political ideas.” As is the standard with lower courts across India in such matters, his father has been denied bail. Khan was aquiver with both rage and fear as he talked haltingly about his options.

If some ex-SIMI members were forced by the police to submit affidavits in 2001 that they won’t have anything to do anymore with SIMI, there is a scandalous story of police arresting someone this year who had, in 2001, submitted an affidavit that he had never been a member of SIMI. This is Shakir Ali, 29, and a resident of Narsinghgarh. Shakir and his older brother Zakir Ali together ran a grocery store. “My brother has never been a SIMI member,” Zakir told TEHELKA. On April 2, at 1.15 am, about 15 policemen came to their house and took Shakir away. Zakir went to enquire at the local police station in the morning but was cold shouldered. Four days later, the police presented him before the court as being a member of a terrorist organisation. The evidence: The police say they seized the same pamphlet from him that claims Babri Masjid would be rebuilt.

Identical is the story of Irfan Ali, 34, who lived in a joint family with his older brother Majid Ali. The two brothers ran a readymade garments shop in Narsinghgarh. On the night of April 2, the police picked up Irfan from their home and booked him for sedition. When the police filed a chargesheet against him, they applied another charge: being a member of a terrorist organisation. “We filed for a bail application before the High Court but our lawyer was very pessimistic so we withdrew it,” says Irfan’s distraught brother, Majid.

Not one person in this group seems to possess the resources to mount any defence beyond the local courts. It seemed beyond both their intellectual and financial capacity to take the battle to the High Court, leave alone the Supreme Court. For most, while one earning family member has fallen off, there is now the additional burden of sustaining his family and paying his legal fees. Tabrez, whose three brothers are in jail, has been driven mad. He loses the strands of his thought in the middle of his speech, like an old man given to hopelessness after a long run of misery.

Meanwhile, the proceedings before the SIMI tribunal in Bhopal turned out to be in a class of their own. In the earlier hearings at Thiruvanathapuram, Bangalore, Udaipur and Hyderabad, the Centre brought as witnesses police officers who had had led investigations in the various cases. Jawahar Raja, the counsel for ex- SIMI president Shahid Badr Falahi, had fully used such opportunities to launch a scathing cross-examination of those officers, often catching them on the wrong foot, and making them admit their procedural failures such as in effecting seizures. But in Madhya Pradesh, only one investigating officer was brought by the government to depose before the tribunal. All others were senior officers who said they were deposing from their knowledge of the documents. A typical conversation went like this:

Jawahar Raja: Did the police apply for a search warrant before a magistrate?

Deponent: I cannot say. I am not the investigating officer.

Jawahar Raja: Is it true that the police carried its own stock witnesses?

Deponent: I cannot say. I am deposing from records.

Raja: I suggest to you that the police claim is false.

Deponent: The suggestion is denied.

And so forth. •