Late one February evening in 2001, Sadiq Israr Sheikh received an invitation to tea at the Medina Hotel, cradled inside the lanes of Mumbai’s Cheeta Camp. Like many young Muslims of his generation, enraged by the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Sheikh had joined the Students’ Islamic Movement of India. Within months, though, the air-conditioning mechanic had become bored with listening to impassioned speeches on Islam. Then, a year after he drifted away from SIMI, came the meeting at the Medina—one which would leave deep scars across India.

Two weeks after the carnage of 9/11, India moved to ban SIMI, charging the organisation with sedition. Even though hundreds of key SIMI operatives were arrested and interrogated, police forces and the intelligence services missed the real story.

Following his meeting at the Medina Hotel, Sheikh crossed the border into Bangladesh, boarded an Emirates flight headed from Dhaka to Karachi through Dubai. From Karachi, Sheikh told police—in testimony which under Indian law cannot be used against him during trial—he drove on to a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp near Bahawalpur. There, he began training with the core of former SIMI members who were forming the Indian Mujahideen.

Lessons learned from the SIMI story help understand the prospects—and perils—of this week’s decision to proscribe the Popular Front of India (PFI). The SIMI ban choked visible Islamist political mobilisation, but it didn’t cut off air to jihadist groups. Worse, jihadist networks became more walled off, operating with a discipline and secrecy that blinded India’s security services.

For almost six years—from 2005 to 2011—India’s police and intelligence services were to flail, clueless, in the face of the lethal urban terrorism campaign the country had ever faced.

PFI’s terror connection

Ever since 2016, the PFI has regularly faced allegations of its members joining transnational jihadist groups like the Islamic State. Kerala resident Shajeer Mangalassery Abdulla, accused by the NIA of recruiting for the Islamic State in Afghanistan, was a supporter of the PFI’s political wing, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI). Safwan Pookatail, a graphic designer with the PFI house-journal Thejas…..

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