The Supreme Court Wednesday stayed a Delhi High Court Tribunal order lifting the ban on the Islamic terrorist outfit, Students' Islamic movement of India (SIMI), strongly believed to behind the serial bomb blasts in the metropolitan cities of Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad.
The apex court issued a notice to SIMI asking as to why it should not be banned and has given it three weeks time to reply. The decision would imply that the ban will continue as of now and comes as a reprieve to the Central government, which goofed up the case.
Tribunal head Justice Geeta Mittal in a ruling Tuesday held that no new evidence was submitted by the government to justify the extension of the ban on SIMI -- strongly supporting the widely-held suspicion that the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been going soft on Islamic terrorism to garner Muslim support ahead of the provincial elections in November and the parliamentary elections next year.
The government confined itself to furnishing evidence linked to the Malegaon blasts in the major western state of Maharashtra in 2006 to support its case, but that was not sufficient to come out with the notification to ban it, the tribunal ruled.
Beginning September 2001, SIMI had thrice been banned by the government on suspicion of involvement in terror attacks across the country. The last notification on the ban was issued by the federal home ministry February 7 this year and was supposed to have been in force till 2010. The SIMI had challenged the two-year ban re-imposed.
The main opposition party, the BJP, termed the tribunal ruling "another instance of the UPA government being soft on terror." The party's spokesperson claimed that there was "sufficient evidence" of SIMI's involvement "in terrorist activities across the country, and the government should make amends" by bringing forth the evidence to challenge the lifting of the ban.
The SIMI, which advocates the "liberation of India" and "restoring" Islamic rule, was founded in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1977 by Mohammad Ahmadullah Siddiqi as an offshoot to the Jamaat-e-Islami.
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