How many blasts will it take for the govt to act

NEW DELHI: New York was bombed once, London was bombed once, and Madrid, too, was bombed once. But Mumbai, the wannabe financial hub of the new world, has had it many many times over and over since 1993. The first attack was laid at the doorstep of the Don, but investigations into almost all the ensuing terror attacks have stopped at one name: SIMI or the Student’s Islamic Movement of India.

And throughout all these bloody bombings, if the helplessness of the working Mumbaiite continued to be portrayed as “its legendary spirit”, the political establishment, too, has made a farce of the mess religiously.

More than a decade on, the political establishment is yet to rise over their petty concerns to nail or even contain the tentacles of Simi. Even Maharashtra’s own NCP — led by its moral policeman-turned-home minister RR Patil — has had a history of dilly-dallying vis-a-vis SIMI when it comes to taking decisive action on the Islamic fringe outfit out.

Circa 2001, the NCP disowns a decision of its own state government asking the then NDA-led Centre to ban Simi. Its logic: the move was taken at a politically-convenient moment for the BJP, which was going to polls in UP.

And when the Centre ultimately banned the outfit, the then Opposition Congress was guarded in its reaction as two of its own CMs, Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh and Ashok Gehlot of Rajasthan, too had demanded it.

But their then spokesman Jaipal Reddy, who is a Union minister today, was more forthcoming. “Apart from being lop-sided, the action on SIMI is ill-timed. We are sure that this naked attempt to fan communal discord is not going to help the BJP in UP,” he said then.

The Left’s record too is a shade of deep red. Describing the ban on SIMI as “politically motivated”, Comrade Jyoti Basu said at a meeting in Lucknow on October 6, ’01 that the government should come out with all allegations on the basis of which SIMI has been banned.

Prominent among those who attended the meeting were the then CPM general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet, politburo member Sitaram Yechuri, CPI general secretary A B Bardhan, national secretary D Raja, Samajwadi Party leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, former prime ministers VP Singh and Deve Gowda, AIFB general secretary Debabrata Biswas and RSP MP Abani Roy.

So today, even as a national rage builds against the perpetrators of 7/11 — Simi, for sure, in tandem with Lashkar, according to Maharashtra DGP PS Pasricha — it is only natural that the Samajwadi Party chose to defend the banned outfit.