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Tribunal upholds ban on Al-Umma in Tamil Nadu

A special tribunal in Madras upheld on Wednesday a 1998 order of the Tamil Nadu government banning Al-Umma, a fundamentalist organisation.

The tribunal held that there was sufficient material on record to show that Al-Umma was encouraging and promoting hatred between Hindus and Muslims.

Dismissing an appeal by Al-Umma founder S A Basha, the tribunal presided over by Madras High Court Chief Justice N K Jain and constituted under the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act held that the notification declaring it an 'unlawful association' could not be interfered with.

The organisation was banned on the night of February 14, 1998, within hours of the serial bomb blasts in the textile city of Coimbatore, which killed 60 persons.

The tribunal held that the material before it could not be ignored merely because of Basha's contention that there was no evidence linking Al-Umma with the explosions.

From the first information report, it could be seen that Al-Umma cadres had "maliciously and unlawfully" caused the blasts in different places in Coimbatore, including one near a place where then Bharatiya Janata Party president Lal Kishenchand Advani was to address an election campaign meeting.

In his appeal filed in January 1999, Basha had argued that the Supreme Court had declared the act itself unconstitutional in 1951.

The tribunal observed that the material on record and FIRs revealed that there had been 19 bomb blasts between February 14 and 17, 1998, which also left 250 persons injured and damaged property worth Rs 43.7 million.

The killing of Constable Selvaraj on November 29, 1997, allegedly by Muslim fanatics, had led to the killing of 18 Muslims, the tribunal held, and said hard-core Al-Umma members had turned intense feelings of hurt and rage into a cause for retaliation by exploiting photographs of the dead.

Nine state government witnesses and Basha were examined in the hearing, which began in March 1999 and ended on December 13, 2000, on which day the tribunal reserved its orders on the appeal.

Justice Jain had earlier been asked to head a board to adjudicate the issue, but Basha, now in jail, successfully appealed against it on the grounds that such a body had no power to review the ban.

Subsequently, the government constituted the special tribunal after amending the relevant Act, as earlier there was no provision for such judicial review built into the law.

The state police later arrested more than 150 suspected activists of the outfit, including Basha, in connection with the blasts.

PTI

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