DM Monitoring
NEW DELHI: On the night of December 26, 2001, Mohammad Abdul Hai boarded a train from Jodhpur in northwestern India’s Rajasthan state to Surat city in neighbouring Gujarat to attend a three-day seminar on Muslim education.
The seminar was organised by the All India Minority Education Board, of which Hai – then an associate professor at Jodhpur’s Jai Narain Vyas University – was a member.
The three-day event was expected to be attended by nearly 400 Muslim scholars, activists and community leaders from across India. Hai was excited about the seminar. But little did he know that the event was going to change his life forever and soon he would not only be called a “terrorist” and “anti-national” but will have to spend the next 14 months in jail.
The next day at approximately 11pm, police arrived at Rajeshree Hall, a closed film theatre in Surat, where Hai and 120 others attending the seminar were staying.
Police arrested all of them under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), a stringent anti-terror law, and charged them with being members of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and for organising the meeting to “promote and expand” SIMI’s activities. A total of 127 people, all Muslims, were arrested.
More than 19 years after they were booked, a court in Surat on Sunday acquitted all of the accused in the case. Five of them died during the long trial. Indian authorities accused SIMI of carrying out several bombings and of having links with armed groups based in Pakistan. Hundreds of its alleged members have been arrested, but the group says it merely propagates an “Islamic way of life” for India’s Muslims.
The Indian government banned SIMI in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
An ordeal of nearly 20 years: The Surat court, in its March 6 order, said the prosecution had failed to produce “cogent, reliable and satisfactory” evidence to establish the accused belonged to SIMI or had gathered to promote the group’s activities. The court ruled they cannot be held guilty under UAPA.
“This case caused so many problems for us and our families. Some of the victims lost their government jobs, some couldn’t get work for years,” Hai told Al Jazeera over the telephone. After spending 14 months in jail, Hai was granted bail by India’s Supreme Court in 2002. But that was not the end of his ordeal. Every week for several years, Hai, now 66, would travel more than 700km (430 miles) from his home in Jodhpur to present himself before the police in Surat. Twice a month, he made the same journey to appear before a judicial magistrate in the Gujarat city.
Meanwhile, three months after getting bail, he was reinstated at his university but was denied any promotion due to the case. “I was working as an associate professor on December 27, 2001, and I retired at the same position in June 2015. I couldn’t get a single promotion all these years and lost so many monetary benefits a government employee gets, including gratuity at the time of retirement,” he said.
Asif Iqbal, 53, was working as a primary healthcare worker with the Surat Municipal Corporation when he was arrested in the same case. “I kept telling the officials the case is still pending in the court and I have not been declared guilty, so let me keep my job but they didn’t listen and terminated me,” he told Al Jazeera over the telephone from Surat.
