Thangalpara is a place for picnics. But for some, the idyllic holiday spot in Kerala — with its lush green hills, deep ravines and rivulets — was the ground for terror.

Last week, when the Gujarat police cracked the Ahmedabad blasts case, they found that members of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi) who were allegedly involved in the explosions had been trained at, among other places, Thangalpara in Wagamon, a tiny plantation town in Kerala. Police sources say that in the autumn of 2007, 40 Simi activists descended on Wagamon for training. One of them even fondly inscribed the name of the organisation on a rock.

Thangalpara, the Kerala and Gujarat police say, was put on the terrorist map by two Simi activists from Eerattupetta, near Wagamon. Abdul Shibly, a computer engineer, and his brother, Shaduli, were arrested in Indore in March this year.

Clearly, despite a ban, Simi has been thriving. The arrests have once again focused attention on the organisation — and on the four top leaders who set the road-map for the present day terrorists. One is dead, the second is in jail, and two are absconding.

C.A.M. Basheer, the police acknowledge, is the brain behind Simi activities. And though he has been holed up in a West Asian country for some years now, the group at Wagamon would have had his blessings.

Basheer, an aeronautical engineer, fled the country in 1994. But even now, he is believed to be masterminding Simi’s underground activities. Originally from Aluva near Kochi, he studied in the Aeronautical Engineering College in Chalakudy and the Union Christian College, Aluva. After graduating, he joined a flight training institute in Bangalore and worked at the Mumbai International airport.

Basheer joined Simi in 1985 and rose to become its state president in 1987. Those days, a southerner with a pronounced accent was rare in Simi. “Most Simi youths were from the north and they spoke Urdu. Basheer opted for English, though few Simi cadres understood it well. But I remember listening to his tape on the Babri Masjid demolition for hours and thinking that the man made so much sense,” says a former member of Simi, now an academic.

Basheer’s name cropped up in investigations when terror strikes marked the first anniversary of the 1992 demolition in railway stations in India. Basheer, sources say, trained in the use of arms and explosives in a camp organised by the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan in its North West Frontier Province in the early Nineties.

Now 45, he is still active and funding Simi activities. An intelligence report says he sent money to Simi leader Saquib Nachan for the 2003 Mumbai blasts, which killed 48 people and injured 150.

Apart from Basheer there was another man who influenced Simi in the early Seventies and Eighties. Abdul Karim Tunda is often described in intelligence circles as the father of the Indian jihadis.

Karim, originally from a lower-middle class Delhi family, ran a homoeopathic shop in Ghaziabad. He later moved to Mumbai where he set up a dyeing fabrics business.

After the Bhiwandi riots of 1984, the Sunni sect of Ah-le-hadis that was gaining ground in Mumbai held several meetings to counter what they thought was a threat from Hindu right wing groups. After attending one such meeting, Karim joined the Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen, another radical organisation.

Karim trained Muslim youths drawn from the poor quarters of south Mumbai’s ghettos. With his flowing henna-dyed beard, the 75-year-old was seen as a spiritual leader by the young men he recruited for Simi. While it is not known how many actually turned to terrorism, two recruits who did so were Jalees Ansari and Azam Ghauri. The sources believe that Karim, Ansari and Ghauri set off over 43 bombs in trains and in Mumbai and Hyderabad in 1993. Incidentally, a bomb-making accident ripped his left hand apart and earned him the nickname of Tunda, or the crippled.

Ansari was arrested, while Karim fled to Calcutta and crossed to Bangladesh where he joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba. By 1996, he had mobilised support from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim youths. Information about Karim’s activities came from men who detonated bombs using pencil batteries. Nabbed in Delhi, they told the police that they had been trained by Karim.

Some say he is dead, some believe he flits between Pakistan and Bangladesh, and others have it that he lives in Lahore with his family. Rumour also has it that he was arrested in Kenya and handed over to the CIA which has lodged him in a third country.

Simi has had other leaders as well. One of them was Asif Raza Khan, who met top militants such as Maulana Masood Azhar and Omar Sheikh Saeed when he was in prison in Delhi in the mid-1990s. Khan first drifted towards the Hijbul Mujahideen, and then zeroed in on kidnapping as a method of terror. Later, one of his mentors, British national Omar Sheikh Saeed, went on to kidnap and kill American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Khan, born in Calcutta in 1974, did his postgraduation in Urdu literature and Islamic studies from Delhi. Khan, says a friend, was worried about the inflow of funds for jihadis. “Nobody is funding the jihadis, he used to say,” recalls the ex-Simi activist. “Each jihadi organisation requires something like Rs 1.5 crore per year and so he organised Rs 120 crore solely through kidnapping. And he never lived a lavish life. He just gave Rs 1,000 to his wife for her monthly expenses and lived frugally.”

There is a story about him that the police like to relate. Khan and his aide Aftab Ansari kidnapped shoe manufacturer Partho Roy Burman from Calcutta in 2001.

They allegedly got a huge ransom for his release — a portion of which was sent to Omar Sheikh who then wired the money to Mohammad Atta, the Egyptian pilot who crashed one of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre in 2001.

Khan’s friend says it was a story he made up to give the Indian police the impression that he was a big fish among Indian jihadis, which, he thought, would stop them from bumping him off. As it turned out, Khan was killed.

He was caught by the Delhi police in October 2001 and handed over to the Rajkot police for a kidnapping case in Gujarat. Two months later, the Rajkot police shot him dead. Khan was 26 when he was killed.

For the jihadis in India, Jalees Ansari is, however, “the true mujahideen”. Long before terrorists discovered that deadly putty called RDX, Mohammed Jalees Shakil Ansari was assembling crude bombs.

The mill worker’s son acquired an MBBS degree and used to work at Sion Hospital and lectured at Grant Medical College in Mumbai. The sources say he took to violence because he believed the Bhiwandi riots and the Babri Masjid demolition undermined the position of Muslims.

Several Muslim weavers or Ansaris were killed in the textile town of Bhiwandi. Ansari saw how hard-pressed the community was after the communal riots. And he metamorphosed from a soft-spoken healer to a terrorist. The Central Bureau of Investigations eventually caught up with Ansari, just before he was to set off a round of blasts in 1994.

Ironically, people who know him speak of him admiringly. His neighbours point out that he started a clinic for the poor and taught English to local children. “There is something still in his eyes. His body is wasted, after years of torture and jails, but you look at his eyes and you see the fire,” says the former Simi activist. Ansari is now serving a life sentence in Ajmer.

This is the Indian face of terror. The Indian Mujahideen is no longer a contradiction in terms.