The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is likely to submit a comprehensive report to the Union Home Minister soon on the activities of the Islamist outfit, Popular Front of India (PFI), in Kerala.
The IB is preparing the report on the basis of directions from the Home Ministry in the context of alleged links between the PFI and activities like recruitment of youths to the Islamic State (ISIS) and controversial conversion of girls from other religions to Islam, which many are terming as love Jehad, an Islamist programme.
The Union Home Department has asked the IB for a report on the PFI’s alleged extremism-linked activities in Kerala just when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has put the organization under its scanner over the controversies surrounding the conversion of Akhila (25) from Vaikom in Kottayam district to Islam and her marriage with a Muslim youth.
According to sources, strong suspicions had come up about possible extremist connections of the PFI way back in 2008 when the organisation used to be known as the National Development Front (NDF) but the then Governments in Kerala and the Centre might have failed to attach the required importance to reports in this regard.
One report alleged that the Islamist organisation could have been involved in the SIMI training camp held at Vagamon in Idukki district in December, 2007 and the secret SIMI meeting held at Panayikkulam, Aluva near Kochi on August 15, 2006. It is alleged that the NDF had at one point of time become a haven for activists of SIMI could migrate after its ban.
The first indications of the Islamist outfit’s alleged extremist links had come out after the arrest in October, 2008 of a former NDF activist, Abdul Jaleel of Kadachira, Edakkad in Kannur district. He was arrested in connection with the probe into the recruitment of four Keralite youths who were killed by security forces in Kupwara, Kashmir.
Almost all those arrested in the case pertaining to the brutal attack on TJ Joseph, a lecturer of Catholic Church-run Newman College at Thodupuzha in Idukki district on July 4, 2010 in Muvattupuzha, Ernakulam district, were activists of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), the Popular Front’s political arm.
The assailants had attacked Joseph as he was returning home with his mother and sister after attending Mass at a local church. They chopped off his right hand and threw it into a plot of land nearby. He was attacked for preparing a question paper for a class test in his college in which he allegedly blasphemed Prophet Muhammad.
The IB and NIA have reportedly concluded that many of the Kerala youths who have joined the ISIS have been present or former SDPI activists. It is said that those who had joined the ISIS had tried to lure more youths from Kerala into it. The agencies are currently looking into the reports that huge amounts of money had flowed into Kerala from the Gulf in connection with this.
Meanwhile, a special investigation team of the Kerala Police probing the murder of Vipin, Sharirik Shiksha Pramukh of the RSS at Thriprangode in Malappuram district has found that the SDPI could have played a major role in the murder. The police have arrested two persons, said to be SDPI activists, for the conspiracy behind the murder.
Vipin (27), second accused in the case relating to the murder of P Faizal alias Anil Kumar, originally a Hindu who had embraced Islam in 2015, was hacked to death by a six-member gang at Pulinchode, BP Bazaar in Tirur on the morning of August 24. Faizal was killed in November last, and Vipin, arrested in January, was released on bail in April.
The police arrested SDPI workers Tufail (32) of Paravanna and Muhammad Anwar (39) from Perinthallur the other day allegedly for conspiring to kill Vipin as an act of revenge for Faizal’s murder. They said the probe team had got decisive information about the killers from those arrested.