‘Islamic Nation by 2047’: What Prompted Ban on India's Most Potent Muslim Organization?

While some political parties and social organizations have criticized the decision, PFI activities detail the alleged threats the 16-year-old group posed to India's national security.

The Indian government made its intentions against the group quite clear last year when it submitted a Supreme Court request that the organization be banned over its nefarious activities.

According to Indian officials, the PFI, which came into being in December 2006, has been under close watch of national security agencies over its alleged role in the 2019 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, forced conversions, the radicalization of Muslim youth, and money laundering.

“Criminal violent acts carried out by PFI include chopping off a limb of a college professor, cold-blooded killings of persons associated with organizations espousing other faiths, obtaining explosives to target prominent people and places, and destruction of public property,” the Indian Home Ministry has claimed.

The PFI has over 50,000 members and many other sympathizers in Kerala, the southern Indian state which submitted that the group was a "resurrected avatar" of the banned SIMI group before the Kerala High Court in 2012. Security agencies have found their presence in at least 17 Indian states.

Law enforcement agencies suspect that some members of the group joined the ranks of Daesh* terrorists operating in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What's more, the PFI is said to have links to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a terrorist group operating in Bangladesh and India, among others.

In one of the raids against top functionaries of Maharashtra PFI, law enforcement agencies reportedly seized a “brochure and CD related to Mission 2047”, the documents revealing details of a plan to convert India into an “Islamic Nation”.

During raids in Uttar Pradesh, federal agencies allegedly discovered training “guides” for cadres on how to make bombs and videos related to Jihad prophecy.

The group exhibited its scale of influence in southern India last week, staging violent protests against the raids conducted by the National Investigative Agency and state police earlier this month. Authorities detained and arrested around 900 people for hurling petrol bombs and damaging public property in Kerala.

Plan to Wage 'Civil War-Like Situation'

In one of the raids, India's Enforcement Directorate reportedly recovered a diary from PFI Chairman OMA Salam’s close associate M. Mohammed Ismail, possessing a “dark sinister plot” to create a civil war-like situation in India.

In particular, investigators found that the PFI had made a “hit-list" of over 200 Indian politicians and even established military training sites in the forests of the southern states of Telangana and Kerala.

In July, police filed a case against a PFI physical education instructor, Abdul Khader, who allegedly trained more than 200 cadres at his martial art training center in Telangana’s Nizamabad city.

In 2016, a total of 41 PFI cadres were convicted in an arms training site case in Kerala, in which officials found evidence of the group covertly organizing training exercises and military-like drills for its members.

More than 1,300 criminal cases against PFI cadres and its front organizations have been filed in different states. Aware that the ban is likely to be challenged before a tribunal, law enforcement agencies have reportedly ensured enough substantive evidence against the PFI in raids and during the interrogation of the arrested members.

* Daesh (also known as IS/ISIS) a terrorist organization banned in Russia