Three Delhi blast suspects. (Fotocorp)

New Delhi, Oct. 16: The Students’ Islamic Movement of India has dared the Centre to ban the Indian Mujahideen, if it exists.

The students’ outfit, smarting under an extension of a ban on it, alleged that the Indian Mujahideen, suspected to be behind a spate of recent serial blasts, was a figment of the Intelligence Bureau’s imagination.

“Has this Indian Mujahideen come up on any list (drawn up) by the western powers or by the home ministry here? If yes, then it should be banned immediately,” former Simi president Shahid Badr Falahi said over the phone. “But I think it is actually a fictitious entity created by the Intelligence Bureau to give a bad name to Muslims.”

Intelligence agencies have been coming up with different versions of how the Indian Mujahideen came into being. One of them is that Simi had formed it.

Police had blamed the Indian Mujahideen on the basis of terror emails they had received in the outfit’s name before the May 13 Jaipur serial blasts, the Ahmedabad blasts on July 26 and the Delhi bombings on September 13.

But nothing is known about the structure of the outfit and the police have been struggling to agree on an explanation of its genesis. There have also been conflicting reports about the brain behind the blasts with the police throwing up several “masterminds”.

Under this cloud of confusion, the government is not likely to ban the Indian Mujahideen in a hurry.

The Delhi and Mumbai police, whose actions are based on Intelligence Bureau inputs, believe the outfit was formed sometime in May 2008. It is made up by members of the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Toiba and was engineered by Pakistan’s ISI, they allege.

The Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external spy agency, differs. According to RAW, on April 13, 2005, about a dozen men met at the Himalayan Club Resort near Kathmandu to discuss the formation of a new organisation to divert accusations almost always directed at Pakistan after every blast in India.

Falahi, the Simi leader, was present at the meeting, sources said, along with the first secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Kathmandu and some members of the Jaish and Lashkar. The meeting concluded with the formation of the outfit to give credence to the theory of home-grown terror in India, they added.

But a senior IB source said “that story is wrong”.

The other story doing the rounds in the security establishment is that the Indian Mujahideen was born in May this year after a meeting convened by ISI leaders in Kotli, Pakistan.

“No single story has been agreed upon till now, and the exact structure of the outfit is not known,” a source said.

The home ministry wants to show it is in the process of banning the Indian Mujahideen but cannot as there is no evidence to prove that any such structured outfit exists.

“We are also banned but there is no evidence against us,” said Falahi.

The Simi leader, tagged “moderate” by the intelligence agencies though he insists he is a hawk, was in Delhi two days ago, when the Supreme Court extended the ban on the outfit and referred the case to a larger bench.