T he death of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the 92-year-old separatist leader in Kashmir, came as a body blow to the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which was already divided and weak, and particularly the pro-Pakistan segment in it. Ailing and living in a house-turned-detention centre for over a decade, Geelani, who co-founded Hurriyat, died on September 1, just five months after his close aide and lieutenant Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai, 78, died in a Jammu jail. The two had stirred the political cauldron of Kashmir as Jamaat-e-Islami members for around six decades. The Jamaat was banned by the Centre on February 28, 2019, two weeks after the Pulwama attack left 40 CRPF jawans dead in south Kashmir.
With Geelani and Sehrai dead and the Jamaat banned, the constituency that sees a solution to the Kashmir dispute in merging with Pakistan is now without a structure or a face. Masrat Alam, another prominent pro-Geelani face in the valley, who heads the Muslim League, has been in jail since 2014.
The fear is that the vacuum left by Geelani — whose mass appeal and stature earned him accolades from both his supporters and opponents — would be filled by many hardline Islamist groups, who are trying to capture some space for themselves.
The rise
The All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), widely known as the Hurriyat, came into being in July 1993. It was an outcome of the armed rebellion that swept through Jammu & Kashmir in 1989. The unprecedented militancy broke out just three years after the Muslim United Front — of which Geelani and Jamaat-e-Islami were also a part — saw a crushing defeat in the polls, which was touted to be widely rigged in favour of the National Conference and its partners.
By 1993, the armed rebellion saw itself split into different ideological compartments, including those that demanded complete independence like the J&K Liberation Front (JKLF) of Yasin Malik; and those which sought a merger with Pakistan such as the Hizbul Mujahideen of Syed Salahuddin.
When the special envoys from New Delhi and abroad started meeting to discuss the future of Kashmir, they demanded to see a joint political front from the Kashmir militants.
So, around 26 political parties, civil society members and traders’ organisations came together to form the Hurriyat. In its constitution, all the parties agreed that Kashmir was a “disputed State”, called for a “peaceful struggle” and a solution “as per the resolutions passed by the United Nations”, which calls for the right to self-determination of people of J&K. Kashmir’s head cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who was 19 years old in 1993 and had mooted the idea of forming a joint forum, became the first chairman of the amalgam that had both pro-Pakistan and pro-independence organisations in it.
The Hurriyat, which wielded influence over the militant outfits and was able to control the streets, became a formidable force in the 1990s. In an address made at Burkina Faso in 1995, then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, in an apparent offer to separatists, said “short of azadi (freedom), sky was the limit as far as the demand in Kashmir for autonomy was concerned”.
Riding high on its growing popularity among the masses, the Hurriyat’s call for boycotting the 1996 Assembly elections and the 1999 Lok Sabha elections saw noticeable impact on the ground, with many polling booths registering zero voter turnout. Most Hurriyat leaders, including Geelani and Yasin Malik, were lodged in different jails for their anti-election campaign in 1999.
Pakistan also started recognising the Hurriyat as “the sole voice” of Kashmiris. The Pakistani Embassy and visiting dignitaries from Islamabad started inviting the Hurriyat-affiliated political outfits for dinners and discussions over the Kashmir issue to the chagrin of New Delhi.
This necessitated more engagement with the Hurriyat leaders by the Centre. However, the government exploited the personality clashes within the Hurriyat to pick and choose the leaders to negotiate separately. The engagement, however, did not lead to anything concrete.
The September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. saw worldwide anger growing against Islamist armed movements. As the West’s attention turned against Islamist militancy and started perceiving it through the prism of terrorism, the Hurriyat also saw its goodwill waning and divisions started cropping up.
The split
The first major fissure emerged when the Hurriyat constituents accused the Peoples Conference, headed by Abdul Ghani Lone, of fielding proxy candidates in the 2002 Assembly elections. Later, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s decision to engage with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) further deepened the divide, with Geelani raising questions about the futility of engaging New Delhi without a concrete road map for Kashmir.
As the growing differences resulted in the Hurriyat’s split in 2003, 12 out of 26 constituents removed Maulana Abbas Ansari, who was pro-Mirwaiz, as its chairman and named Masrat Alam of the Muslim League, who belonged to the Geelani faction, as its head. Later, the Ansari faction met deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani in 2004 to initiate a dialogue on Kashmir. It also supported former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s four-point formula and advocated a triangular dialogue between Delhi-Srinagar, Delhi-Islamabad and Srinagar-Islamabad after 2005. The ouster of Musharraf from power and the end of the term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put the curtain on the four-point formula, which many see as the closest ever Kashmir got to a final settlement in the past three decades.
BJP’s approach
After its emphatic election victory in 2014, the BJP’s approach towards the Hurriyat also steadily changed.
As the BJP saw a phenomenal rise in the electoral politics in the country since 2014 and managed a grip of the narrative on terrorism with Pakistan, the factions of Hurriyat fast became dispensable groups and were ascribed as “a part of the problem and not a solution”.
The first major salvo from the BJP came in 2015 when India put a precondition to Pakistani National Security Adviser (NSA) Sartaj Aziz not to meet Hurriyat leaders in New Delhi ahead of the NSA-level talks. Since then, Hurriyat leaders’ meetings with the Pakistani Embassy were discouraged or barred.
The government started a crackdown on the Hurriyat in 2017 when many leaders, including Mirwaiz’s spokesman Shahid-ul-Islam and Geelani’s son-in-law Altaf Shah, were arrested. Pro-independence JKLF was banned in March 2019, immediately after the Pulwama attack, and its chairman Yasin Malik was arrested.
The frequent raids and questioning of Hurriyat leaders by the National Investigation Agency and the Enforcement Directorate silenced the separatist groups. Both Geelani and Mirwaiz were placed under house detentions. By the time the Centre ended J&K’s special constitutional position on August 5, 2019, the Hurriyat factions were rendered paper tigers with no structure or manpower to mobilise supporters.
The Hurriyat’s inability to respond forcefully to the Centre’s decision has earned it a bad name even among its supporters, who have started questioning the entire leadership. Now, with Geelani’s death, the alliance faces a vacuum.
The Hurriyat appears to be weakened organisationally, but the sentiment it represents still remains strong among a sizeable population of Kashmir. The Centre’s recent statement that it’s not going to ban the Hurriyat immediately suggests that removing the platform completely from the political landscape of J&K is not a favourable idea. The Hurriyat’s absence will remove an interface between the underground militant outfits and the government. In the future, for any talks, the Centre may have to engage with militants directly, if the Hurriyat goes off the scene.
