Chennai police arrest 3 HuT members of a family for campaigning against elections

CHENNAI: Tracking the activities of a well-educated man who has been waging a struggle to establish a global Caliphate, the Cyber Wing sleuths of the Greater Chennai City Police arrested the man and two others from his family on Thursday after booking them under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for their alleged anti-national activities.

The three are allegedly members of the international organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HuT), which was formed about seven decades ago with the primary aim of establishing a global Caliphate that is guided by Sharia law.

The arrested persons were identified as Amir Hussain, an engineering graduate who also has a doctorate, his father Mansoor, and his brother Abdul Rahman.

Sources told DT Next that this was the first time that the city police were arresting HuT sympathisers, though the sleuths had confirmed the presence of people who were sympathetic and supportive of the outfit’s hardline ideology at least two decades ago.

Propagating the organisation’s ideology, Amir Hussain has been uploading videos on YouTube, in which he had been speaking against the conduct of elections and democracy, as he believed in Caliphate rule and not democratic elections.

In a recent YouTube video, he even asked the members of the Muslim community not to vote in the general election, claiming that it was totally against the idea of Caliphate. While he is more involved in virtual discourses, his father, Mansoor, is known for in-person, close-door events that attracted the attention of both hardliners and law enforcement agencies.

“His father has been conducting hall meetings every week in Royapettah to spread the ideology of the outfit. The admission to these meetings was only through ‘invite only’. The number of participants has been increasing every meeting,” sources added.

In the past, HuT has been trying to establish a Caliphate rule globally by trying to attract more people to the ideology. However, in recent times, it has allegedly changed tact and have started talking more about militant means to achieve the goal, sources alleged.

HuT is an international Islamic fundamentalist political organisation, which is aiming for the re-establishment of a Caliphate ruled by the Sharia system.

It was founded seven decades ago, around 30 years after the last Caliphate was liquidated along with the Ottoman Empire in 1924 following World War I and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk came to power.