Islamist Crime Syndicate Stopped in Its Tracks
India imposed ban on PFI and eight of its affiliates spreading terror.
On September 28, 2022, the Indian government imposed a five-year ban on the Popular Front of India (PFI) and all of its affiliated organisations. PFI, an extreme Islamist organisation that took over from the National Development Front (NDF) in 2006, is infamous for its total disdain for the Indian constitution and its participation in anti-India activities. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) therefore determined that the PFI was an unlawful organisation in violation of India\’s 1967 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and as a result, the PFI is banned. PFI and its associates have customarily engaged in forced conversions, funding of terrorism, illicit hawala transactions, criminal conspiracies, inciting violence through hate speech, and other acts of terror. These atrocious crimes against humanity have included the cruel murder of innocent Hindus, Christians, and even moderate Muslims.
The PFI was established in 2006 as a reformation of the National Democratic Front (NDF) in Kerala, the southernmost and most literate state of India. Originally founded in 1994, NDF was disbanded as a pan-Islamic group that was exposed to multiple instances of hate speech and related crimes. By combining the approaches of NDF, Manitha Neethi Pasarai, Karnataka Forum for Dignity, and other organisations, PFI a developed with a multi-state worldview. PFI advertises itself as a neo-social movement empowering people to achieve justice, freedom, and security, yet its actions point to it being a spiteful crime syndicate. To further its nefarious criminal agenda, PFI has a number of organisations that engage with different socio-economic groups, including but not limited to the Rehab India Foundation (RIF), Campus Front of India (CFI), All India Imams Council (AIIC), National Confederation of Human Rights Organisation (NCHRO), National Women\’s Front (NWF), Junior Front, Empower India Foundation, Rehab foundation Kerala, and others. At the time of its banning, PFI\’s crime syndicate maintained operations in 23 Indian states, with major concentration in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Kerala provided as the organisation\’s primary base. Wherein, PFI assets that it works with human rights activists (rather people who may be viewed as HR activists) to stop human rights violations in the country, however in reality, the organisation works to incite Islamist hate against people of other faiths and cultures while ostensibly defending the rights of minorities.
In a notification dated September 27, 2022, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs highlighted PFI\’s connections to terrorist organisations like ISIS and Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh. Furthermore, PFI cadres have taken part in terrorism in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Besides this, the organization\’s founding founders were the heads of the outlawed jihadist terrorist group Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
In the course of its investigation leading to the ban, India\’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) discovered that PFI opened 27 bank accounts, 9 of which were RIF accounts, and that a total of INR 120 crores was routed by PFI through a rogue network in West Asian nations, particularly Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The funds were covertly moved to India for nefarious and extremist activities. The money was transferred in such a deliberate manner that cash deposits and withdrawals occurred every day, and payments were restricted to a maximum of INR 50,000. so that they are exempt from giving tax number or other forms of identification.
On September 22, 2022, the PFI offices in the Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Puducherry, Assam, and Rajasthan were searched by India\’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED). PFI Chairman O. M. A. Salam, its National General Secretary Anis Ahmed, its Member of the National Executive Council P. Koya, its National Vice Chairman E. M. Abdur Rahiman, its National Secretary Afsar Pasha, its Member of the National Executive Council Abdul Wahid Sait, its National Secretary (Media and Public Relations) Mohammed Shakib, and its President of the West Bengal unit Minarul Sheikh were all detained during the search and seize operations carried out as part of Operation Octopus of the Indian Investigation agencies. So far, 247 PFI members have been detained as further investigations are ongoing.
PFI has a long history of engaging in several anti-humanity and anti-india actions. Rifles, bombs and bomb making manuals, provocative literature outlining how to further the ideology of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were seized by police from the offices of PFI members in July 2010. In 2012, the Kerala government briefed the Kerala High Court at a case hearing that PFI was connected to 27 community-based murder cases, 86 murder attempts, and 106 instances of communal violence, and that its activities were detrimental to national security. PFI centres across the nation were the targeted of many searches in April 2013 that resulted in the seizure of lethal weapons, foreign currency, and human shot targets in addition to explosive raw materials like gunpowder, swords, and other weaponry.
In wake of the Assam clashes of 2012. the criminal syndicate PFI cooperated and worked with Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), a Pakistan based Jihadi terrorist group that calls for Jihad against the people of diverse faiths, in order to spread inflammatory messages,. Roughly 28 to 30% of these messages originated in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Towing the line of proscribed international Anti-Jew terrorist organisations. In July 2014, Anti-Jewish demonstrations and antisemitism were stoked in many Indian regions by Islamist minded PFI.
The PFI office in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi served as an outpost during the Anti-CAA protest in 2019–20, and the criminal group was actively involved in a misinformation campaign with the sinister goal of peddling false information about National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) to Muslims in order to incite violence and Anti-India and Anti-Hindu hatred. The evil scheme of the criminal gang PFI was to provoke a civil war in India over the NRC and CAA. The criminal organisation was also involved in establishing an illegal helpdesk in Goalpara and Kamrup, Assam, to fabricate false documents.
When the world was struggling with the Covid-19 outbreak, PFI was spreading its wings and used the time to move forward its anti-government agenda. On May 10, 2020, PFI organised an online conference ‘National Lockdown Fascism-Unmask the Hidden Agenda’. The event was attended by tens of thousands of people through various social media platforms and zoom. The online conference called for mass protest against Government of India calling them fascist. Prominent members of the PFI and SDPI – the PFI’s political party, along with ex- IAS officer Sasikanth Senthil, Raj Ratan Ambedkar, National President of the Buddhist Society of India, and Islamic Scholar Khalilur Rehman Sajjad Nomani all participated in the conference and gave provocative speeches against government. The conference aimed to blame the government using Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity and instil Islamophobia in the minds of people in India and abroad.
The PFI unveiled the group\’s evil ambition to convert India to Islam by 2047 in a pamphlet titled \”India 2047-Towards rule of Islam in India,\” which was seized and released by Bihar police on July 13, 2022. In the publication, the process of converting India into an Islamic nation was described in detail, and it was intended to radicalise a majority of Indian Muslims accordingly.
There is an unending list, and also evident is that the PFI is connected to various criminal activities ranging from hate speech to the hijab violence, from terror plots to the killing of Christians and innocent Hindu volunteers. Nothing is hidden from the public view and therefore, many Indian Muslim and Christian organisations, such as the All India Sufi Sajjadanashin Council, Tanzeem Ulama-e-Islam, Kul Hind Markazi Imam Council, Sufi Islamic Board, All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, Sufi Khanqah Association, and Christian Alliance for Social Action (CASA), an umbrella organisation of all Christian factions in India, were the first to endorse the Indian government\’s ban on the criminal syndicate PFI.