The Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which is a banned organization, almost managed place at a Delhi high table when an international agency organized a meeting between its leaders and UN special reporter on freedom of religion. The international agency retreated when the government got a whiff of the proposed meeting and told the meeting’s hosts that SIMI was a banned outfit and any meeting would invite charges under Unlawful Activities Pre-vention Act.

SIMI has of late has been making attempts to protect its assets by purveying a spurious theory about a hard-liners and moderates split in its ranks. This meeting sought revocation of the ban on the outfit. Intelligence officers familiar with the functioning of the outfit said the attempts to project a section as political Islamists are part of an attempt to regroup. Coming from well-placed and educated professionals, terror in Karnataka has become a point of worry in top echelons.

This could well be the first time that a terrorist camp used by Islamist fundamentalists has been detected in southern India, where a spate of terror attacks in the last few years, such as the Hyderabad’s Mecca mosque and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have been witnessed. These attacks expose a serious chink in the country’s intelligence armor. According to officials, students are the main targets for SIMI activists who brainwash them to take to Islamic cause. Active members of SIMI closely observe Muslim students, especially of engineering and medical streams and evaluate them on various parameters including their religious faith, temperament and other attributes.

Meanwhile, in what could unravel the actual penetration of terror in southern states, especially Karnataka, in major crackdown on the banned SIMI the Madhya Pradesh police raided several places in Indore a fortnight back and arrested 13 top leaders of the organization, including its Karnataka head. Other heads in the net are from Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. In Bangalore, the arrest of Yahya Kammakulty, a B. Tech graduate and a former employee of Tata InfoTech and GE Wipro Healthcare, by the Karnataka police last month had revealed SIMI’s rising clout among educated Muslim youths in Karnataka and Kerala.

Among the half-a-dozen persons arrested in Karnataka for suspected SIMI links, at least four were found to be medical students and some IT professionals. SIMI’s major funding source is suspected to be charities in Saudi Arabia. The intelligence and investigating agencies had indicated that the Muslim IT Professionals Association, a Bangalore based voluntary organization, is propagating fundamentalist values and fostering terror links among IT professionals in the guise of social service. However, there have been strong reactions from Muslim techies.

While some feel that Karnataka may not be the target for terrorist attacks, but a safe zone for scheming attacks in different parts of Southern India, including Hyderabad and Tamil Nadu, others feel that the state is as vulnerable as any other in the region. The vulnerability is largely attributed to the fast stride that the state has made in terms of economic and commercial activities in fields like IT and biotechnology.