VR Jayaraj, The Pioneer
Investigations by the Kerala ATS and intelligence sleuths point towards Abdul Nasser Madani’s links with the Indian Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. The man suspected of plotting the Coimbatore bombings continues to preach and practice hate. Yet, the CPM has struck an alliance with him, forging a terrifying Marxist-Islamist front.
Caught between the mind-boggling evidences, depositions and statements made by accused extremist operatives and witnesses on the horrifying trans-national terror links of PDP chairman Abdul Nasser Madani and a Marxist Government that has obviously sworn not to question him ever, let alone the possibility of arresting him, the police in Kerala are in a real fix. Even as this is being written, Abdul Sattar alias Sainuddeen aka Sattar Bhai, a Keralite arrested from Andhra Pradesh in January for manufacturing bombs for the Indian Mujahideen that went off in various Indian cities last year, is being questioned at a police facility near Thrissur in central Kerala. Last week he told investigators that he had been in close connection with Madani for the past 15 years.
It could mean that the bomb-maker and the ‘metamorphosed’ extremist were colleagues in an impious company or at least were known to each other when explosions aimed at taking BJP leader LK Advani’s life killed 58 people and wounded hundreds in Coimbatore, a crime for which Madani stayed in prison for close to a decade.
The terror-man’s deposition came within five days of Madani’s public denial of knowing or having any knowledge of any Sainuddeen or Sattar Bhai. Unfortunately, the Marxist Government in Kerala, especially its Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, a junior member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau, tends to trust Madani more than his own police officials working overtime out there in the field. “Our duty is to probe. It is up to the Government and the courts to decide what to do with the results of our probe,” was how a State intelligence official commented about this.
Sainuddeen’s statement about his Madani links came on the same day a court in Aluva, off Kochi, ordered a probe against Sufiya, the PDP chairman’s wife who efficiently led the party pack and its ‘operations’ through the 111-month absence of her husband, for her alleged role in the case relating to the burning of a Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation bus at Kalamassery, off Kochi, on September 9, 2005. This order was based on a PIL, which in turn was based on the several reported evidences against Sufiya, including witness depositions, statements of accused in the case and dockets of telephonic conversations with the men behind the bus-burning.
All these were at hand, but the police was incapacitated to move against the woman in a black burqa, thanks to the secret interests and intentions of the political bosses.
Majeed Parampayi, fifth accused in the bus-burning case, told the police that the ‘operation’ was conceived, planned, funded and executed by none other than Sufiya, but Madani claimed that Majeed had not given any such statement, that the police had written it down all by themselves after getting a piece of blank paper signed by him using torture. Strangely, the Home Minister or the police did not deny this allegation of police excess, and Opposition leader and Congress heavyweight Oommen Chandy, who was the Chief Minister with the portfolio of Home Minister when the incident took place and the arrests were made, kept mum.
All these developments had occurred when the revelations about Sufiya’s links with Sainuddeen were fresh, which established that his daughter Fazeela Begum had been attending preparatory school staying at Sufiya’s Kochi residence, when Madani was in prison. Reports are that Sainuddeen himself has now told the police about this.
The CPI(M) is persisting with the argument that there are two Madanis. They say that the Madani who came out of the Coimbatore prison on August 1, 2007 following a court order and several pressure games like the unanimous resolution in the Kerala Assembly on March 16, 2006 (Congress was in power then) seeking his release on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, and the Madani whom the Marxist Government had arrested on April 8, 1998 and handed over to Tamil Nadu Police were two different personalities. The Marxists say that Madani is no more into extremism, that he has become a Sufi saint or something close to it, and that his only concerns now are democracy, upliftment of the downtrodden and dignity of Muslims. But the people of Kerala find no reason to agree with this.
There are unconfirmed reports of his clandestine appearance at religious classes where known terror elements were present. More than that the fire in his speech at the post-release reception on a Thiruvananthapuram beach, in which State Ministers and Marxist leaders shared the dais with him, and his election speech at Muslim-majority Ponnani two weeks back where CPI(M) State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, the architect of the Communist-PDP alliance, shared the platform with him, proved that he had changed little. These speeches resembled his pre-arrest stage shows that whipped up communal passion, asking his ‘Muslim brothers to think about the unthinkable and to do the undoabl’.
Those who remember the public programmes of Madani in his pre-Ayodhya, Islamic Sevak Sangh days would shudder even now. In those days he would come to the venue in a motorcade, escorted by helmeted black-liveried motorcycle outriders and footboard-mounted bodyguards, who called themselves ‘Black Cats’.
Speeches of the supremo would be preceded by thorough stage searches and the Caucasian chalk circle was inevitable wherever the boss went or sat. Affiliated shows included armed martial arts performances by his followers and howls of freedom and shouts of jihad. Madani says he has given up all that and even pardoned the ‘RSS goons’ who had hurled bombs at him, leaving him crippled forever. In those days his speeches were full of carefully conceived calls for ‘resistance’, which political scientists termed as nothing but calls for war against the state, but the judiciary had its sets of written laws.
When the ISS was banned in the post-Ayodhya scenario, Madani transformed his Islamic Sevak Sangh into the People’s Democratic Party, a political outfit (for public consumption), but retaining almost all the hard feelings and agenda he had been advocating and executing all along.
The furious speeches went on under the passive protective umbrellas of then heavyweight leaders K Karunakaran of the Congress and EMS Namboodirippad of the CPI(M), both of whom thought PDP’s existence and strength were key to the destruction of the Indian Union Muslim League. It was then that the blasts aimed at Mr Advani in Coimbatore took place. Soon, he was put into prison.
Later, the CPI(M)-run daily newspaper, Desabhimani, compared Madani to Bhindranwale and called him a terrorist and tried to take credit for his arrest, all for electoral purposes. Those claims have now been convenitently forgotten. Even among these dramas of complicity and feigned objections, several cases were registered against Madani, most of them in the name of inflammatory speeches, but in the course of time almost all of them have been dismissed, thanks to legal definitions and lack of evidences. Some five or six such cases are pending, and at every rally he addresses these days, Madani confidently claims that he is sure he will be acquitted in all of the cases.
All that while, during the 2001 Assembly poll, leaders of the Congress-led UDF “queued up” (in Madani’s words) in front of the Coimbatore prison, seeking the blessings of the ‘ustad’ so that his followers and sympathisers would vote in their favour. Unable to deny this fact (though Madani said it), Congress leader Oommen Chandy and State president Ramesh Chennithala admitted that UDF men had indeed gone to Coimbatore but only out of compassion for a man who was lodged for long in a prison without trial.
But there was more. Madani said he had proof that the UDF leaders had written to him seeking his electoral support. Muslim League leader PK Kunhalikkutty denied this, but the other day Madani produced letters written by Kunahalikkutty in the official letter pad of the State Industries Minister — he held this portfolio then — begging for his support.
Madani, now 44, claims that he is the second ‘Mahatma’. “I am no Mahatma Gandhi, but as a worshipper of that great soul, I have pardoned the people who made me a cripple,” he said recently. “If I am the hindrance to communal harmony and peace in Kerala, send me back into the prison. I am only happy to do that sacrifice for the peace of this State and country.”
Still people are not convinced because investigators with the Anti-Terror Squad and the Intelligence Bureau are finding some new evidence that connects Madani with people acting as agents and operatives of the Indian Mujahiddeen and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba every passing day. Oman-based terror-fundraiser Sarfaras Nawaz, a native of Perumbavoor near Kochi who had reportedly arranged the funds for the Indian Mujahiddeen’s blasts in Bangalore, told the police the other day that he had had a long discussion with Madani in person after his release from the prison.
Nawaz, held by RAW men in Muscat, told the Karnataka Police that his meeting with Madani at his orphanage at his native place in Kollam was arranged by absconding terror-man Nazeer of Neerchal, Kannur, who was said to be chief recruiter for the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba in South India. But Madani denied any such meeting.
Nazeer was the person, who, according to the police, had recruited the four Malayalee militants — Fayaz, Faiz, Raheem and Yasin — who were killed in an encounter by the security forces in Kupwara, Kashmir in the first half of October last year. Investigations have also revealed that the four militants, before leaving for Kashmir in a bid to cross over to Pakistan — they had received basic terror training in LeT facilities in Hyderabad — had celebrated Eid at Sufiya Madani’s place in Kochi.
The entire terror-hunt by the Anti-Terror Squad in Kerala had started with the information about the killing of the four militants in Kashmir, and the revelations so far have established the presence of a massive network of anti-national operatives loyal to LeT and perhaps Al Qaeda in the State, as the BJP’s national and State leaderships have consistently argued all these years. The investigators are sitting startled at the magnitude of the terror presence with tentacles of the Kerala terror structure extending to Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Pakistan, Oman, etc.
The high point of all these probes is that the man figuring at one end of this long tentacle is none other than Madani, the man whose PDP is presently the most valued political ally of the CPI(M), which is seeking votes in the name of ‘national security’ in the Lok Sabha polls.
Timeline
January 18, 1966: Born at Sasthamkotta, Kollam, Kerala.
August 6, 1992: Crippled in a bomb attack
December 11, 1992: Dissolves his militant Islamic Sevak Sangh (ISS) in the post-Ayodhya scenario to launch the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
February 14, 1998: Serial bombings aimed at LK Advani in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. 58 killed, close to 200 wounded. Advani escapes attack as he arrived late. Madani is believed to have masterminded the bombings.
April 8, 1998: The LDF Government in Kerala, led by CPI(M)’s (late) EK Nayanar, arrests and hands Madani over to the Tamil Nadu Police.
September 9, 2005: A Tamil Nadu State bus is burnt at Kalamassery, off Kochi, reportedly to take revenge for the torture on Madani at the Coimbatore prison. Role of Sufiya, his wife, suspected in the arson.
March 16, 2006: The Kerala Assembly, with the Congress-led UDF in power, passes a unanimous resolution seeking Madani’s release on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.
August 1, 2007: Release from prison after the court acquits him in the blasts case for lack of evidences.
October 7-11, 2008: Four Malayalee LeT operatives killed in Kashmir; Investigations into the incident raises suspicions of links of Madani and his wife with terror network.
March 21, 2009: Kerala CPI(M) secretary Pinarayi Vijayan shares dais with Madani in Ponnani following the establishment of a poll alliance, raising a hornet’s nest in Kerala politics.
March 25, 2009: Kerala Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan announces decision to continue probe against Madani and his wife, but his Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan rules out any investigation.
April 1, 2009: A court in Aluva, Kochi, orders the police to probe the role of Sufiya Madani in the bus-burning incident.
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