Kerala Govt, police divided on banning PFI

Call for banning Islamist organisation Popular Front of India (PFI) has strengthened in Kerala following the brutal murder of a 20-year-old SFI activist at Kochi’s Maharaja’s College allegedly by workers of the PFI and its political and students’ wings a week ago but the CPI(M)-led LDF Government and the State police are yet to reach an agreement with each other in the matter.

While the police have been recommending the imposition of a ban on the Islamist organisation for some time, the Leftist Government is not supportive of the idea as it and the CPI(M) which leads the ruling coalition think that a ban will not serve the purpose of ending its operations as it could reincarnate in some other name and form.

The police want the Popular Front banned on the basis of the horrific attacks it and its political wing Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) have allegedly carried out so far in the State, the latest being the murder of SFI activist M Abhimanyu in Kochi and the observation that it had effectively become a recruitment base for the Islamic State (ISIS), etc.

The recommendation of the State police for a ban on the PFI is also based on the findings of the National Investigating Agency, which had probed the chopping of the right hand of a former college professor in July, 2010 allegedly by SDPI activists and ISIS-related cases in Kerala, and the Intelligence agencies.

State police chief Loknath Behera had put forward the proposal for banning the PFI at a conference of DGPs held in Madhya Pradesh earlier this year. He had supplemented his proposal with a detailed report on the operations of the PFI and SDPI in the State. The Union Home Department had then offered to consider the recommendation seriously.

However, the State Government took a position that it had not put forward such a recommendation. According to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and his party CPI(M), the RSS is an organization as communal and as dangerous as the Popular Front and the first organization to be banned is the RSS if a proposal for banning outfits comes up.

The State police and the NIA had reportedly learned through their investigations last year and early this year, especially in northern districts, that many of the ISIS recruits from Kerala were workers of the PFI and SDPI and that these Islamist outfits had effectively become recruitment bases for the global terror force.

Leftist intellectuals and cultural leaders in Kerala had come out with criticisms against the Jharkhand Government after it banned the PFI in February citing its alleged ISIS connections. They had described the ban as an infringement by the Jharkhand Government on democratic and organisational rights.

The same cultural leaders and intellectuals are now receiving brickbats for not showing the same enthusiasm in attacking the PFI and SDPI over the gruesome killing of the 20-year-old SFI activist, for which six activists of the PFI, SDPI and its students’ outfit, the Campus Front of India, have already been arrested.

Though the LDF Government is not fully supportive of the proposal for banning the PFI, a recent Intelligence report that Islamists have infiltrated political parties like the Congress and outfits like the SFI and DYFI, the students’ and youth outfits respectively of the CPI(M), and the so-called Leftist progressive collectives has caused much worry to it.

The CPI(M) has already started verifying the veracity of the report within its own setup though Finance Minister TM Thomas Isaac, a central committee member of the CPI(M), said the other day, “We are not worried about such reports. If such infiltration has indeed taken place, we know how to throw them out by catching them by the ear.”