What is the Popular Front of India or PFI and what is their ideology?

On Friday, when the Popular Front of India observed a violence-ridden flash hartal in Kerala to protest the nationwide clampdown on over 100 of its top leaders by the National Investigation Agency, along with the Enforcement Directorate and the local police the previous day, the message it wanted to send across was loud and clear. The PFI was born in 2006 when the National Development Front, set up in Kerala’s Kozhikode a year after the demolition of the Babri Masjid with some helmsmen of the now-banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India on its top council, merged with the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, which was gaining ground among the Muslim youth of coastal Karnataka, and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai in Tamil Nadu. Built behind the façade of a ‘neo-social movement’ seeking social and economic justice and political representation for Muslims, Dalits and tribals, the PFI comprises ultra-religious, radical Muslim men fiercely protective of what they see as tenets of their faith. Relegious identity “For the PFI, in contrast to the conventional Muslim parties, religion and religious identity constitute a blueprint for sociopolitical action — and need constant protection from external threats,” R. Santhosh and Dayal Paleri of IIT-Madras observed in a paper on ‘Crisis of Secularism and Changing Contours of Minority Politics in India: Lessons from the Analysis of a Muslim Political Organisation’, published in Asian Survey last year. This model, while it drew flak from conventional Muslim political parties such as the Indian Union Muslim League, found traction among many Muslim youth for its assertiveness; thrust on educating the minorities on their legal and constitutional rights, even supporting them as in the Hadiya case in which a Hindu girl converted to Islam and married a Muslim youth; and its sustained campaigns for civil rights by brandishing a narrative of victimhood and aligning it with episodes of Islamophobia from around the world.