NDF’s TN links worry Kerala Police

The Kerala Police are worried about the vast network the Islamist outfit, Popular Front of India (formerly NDF), has in the neighboring states in the context of the “secret meeting” it held in Thakkala in Tamil Nadu the other day. Sources in the State Home Department say that this has emphasized the need of a joint vigil of the Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka police forces.

The Popular Front has claimed that the meeting at Thakkala did not have any secret nature but it was an open and pre-decided function to release a book but officials in the State police’s Intelligence wing reject this. They say the meeting was held in Thakkala as it was not safe for the outfit to hold it in Kerala due to the ongoing raids on its offices following the July 4 attack on a college professor in Muvattupuzha.

Intelligence inputs have clearly established that the Popular Front has considerable influence in several areas of Tamil Nadu, especially in the villages along the inter-state border. The police admit that Tamil Nadu’s Manitha Neethi Pasarai, which along with the Karnataka Forum for Dignity had merged with the NDF to form the Popular Front, is popular among the backward Muslims there.

Apart from this, the Popular Front is also getting the support of several fringe groups in rural Tamil Nadu, where people still live in miserable social and economic conditions. “It is quite easy for the Islamist outfit with its pro-Muslim and pro-Dalit approach to win supporters among such people,” said a senior Kerala Police official.

Sources in the State Intelligence wing said that Popular Front meetings in areas like Thakkala had been taking place regularly for quite sometime now – though not of the dimensions of the one on Sunday – as there was no situation in Tamil Nadu which necessitated a close watch on the outfit. For the same reason, suspects from Kerala were finding it easy to live and work comfortably in these areas, they said.

Police officials say that a situation comparable to this exists in Karnataka also. They say this is one of the reasons why the police teams from Kerala could not lay their hands on the culprits behind the attack on college professor TJ Joseph. However, steps had already been taken to get full cooperation from the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka police forces in the hunt for the accused, they said.

The NDF (National Development Front), which had begun widespread activities in Kerala as an Islamic resistance organization in 1993, had transformed itself into the Popular Front of India with its merger in 2007 with the Karnataka Forum for Dignity and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai.

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