With the cyber security agencies reporting to the Union Home Department that Kerala-based Popular Front of India (PFI) was behind the Assam-related rogue SMS-MMS campaign along with HuJI, the Kerala Police have put the Islamist outfit under their scanner. Probe is already on into the departure of several Assamese workers from Kerala under alleged PFI threat.
PFI general secretary Abdul Hameed rejected the charge as State propaganda but the police have already started probing the departure of several Assamese migrant workers from Muslim-majority Malappuram district following threats and the origin of an MMS featuring visuals of strife in Assam, received by an employer of Assamese worker.
The police have registered a case over the complaint that 12 alleged Popular Front activists had on August 17 threatened some Assamese employed in the construction industry in Manjeri, Malappuram of grave consequences if they did not leave the State within three days. Several Assamese workers had reportedly left Kerala following this.
Sleuths are also trying to identify the origin of an MMS with Assamese visuals, received by a hollow bricks manufacturer, who had employed Assamese workers, in Manjeri on Monday evening. However, the PFI general secretary said, “This is not the first time we are being targeted. The PFI has proved the allegations wrong and had come out clean in all earlier cases.”
The Kerala Home Ministry directed the State police to launch a campaign to instill confidence in migrant workers from the North-East, especially Assam, living in the labour camps. The police would visit such camps to assure the workers of their safety in the State. Apart from the Malappuram development, there has been no exodus of North-Easterners from Kerala so far.
Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan on Tuesday asked Additional DGP (Intelligence) to cross-check reports on the role of the PFI in the SMS-MMS campaign with Central authorities. “We have taken note of the reports,” he said, adding that there had not been any reports of panic fleeing by migrant North-Easterners from Kerala.
The Popular Front had come into existence in its present full-fledged form after its former Avatar National Development Front (NDF), constituted in 1993, formed a human rights and backward people’s rights consortium with the Karnataka Forum for Dignity of Karnataka and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai of Tamil Nadu in 2006.
Though the PFI had been facing allegations of militancy all along, the first concrete suspicions on its involvement in such activities came out following the killing by security forces of four Malayalee militants in Kashmir in October, 2008. Some of those arrested in Kerala in connection with this LeT programme were allegedly former NDF men.
However, the first real picture of PFI ruthlessness was unveiled when its activists chopped off the right hand of TJ Joseph, a college professor in Muvattupuzha, some 50 km away from Kochi, on July 4, 2010 for the alleged blasphemy of Prophet Muhammad contained in a question in a test paper he had set for his students.
On July 17, Vishal Kumar, a local ABVP leader of Chengannur, Alappuzha was murdered by activists of the Campus Front, students’ wing of the PFI. On August 7, PFI operatives carried out another Taliban-model attack on Nasser Vaniyakkad, an hotelier, at Paravur near Kochi by hacking him in the right leg several times.