All hell broke loose in Srinagar when the National Investigation Agency [NIA] court handed down a life sentence to Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front [JKLF] chief Yasin Malik in May 2022 on terrorism related charges. While shops and business establishments in the city’s main markets shut down as a mark of protest, mobs took to the streets and the police had to use tear gas for dispersing mobs. The situation became so tense that the internet had to be temporarily suspended as a precautionary measure.
Fast forward to the present and with the recent news of NIA approaching the Delhi High Court to enhance the life sentence to capital punishment the JKLF chief is once again in the news. But this development hasn’t caused any outcry in Kashmir- a clear indication that the people have realised that the so called Pakistan sponsored “armed struggle” that Malik and his associates thrust on them in the late nineties was nothing but farce.
When Kalashnikov-wielding Kashmiri youth trained in camps established by Pakistan army’s spy agency Inter Services Intelligence [ISI] first appeared in the Valley, JKLF justified the unprecedented violence as a means to achieve azadi [freedom]. Its four member core group was called HAJY [name derived by including the first alphabet of its members- Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majeed Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir and Yasin Malik] and they made Kashmiris believe that “azadi was just around the corner.”
Malik maintains that he deserves leniency since he eschewed violence in 1994 and had actively worked with the New Delhi and several Indian prime ministers to restore normalcy in J&K through ‘back channel’ diplomacy. While his claim is correct, can a change of heart absolve an individual of the ghastly crimes of the past? And can Malik being a member of HUJY deny brazenly ushering a culture of violence that turned Kashmir, which was known as “paradise on earth” for centuries into hell?
The present generation in Kashmir may not be fully aware of the scale of violence perpetrated by JKLF in those days. According to a study, while 390 terrorism-related incidents were reported in 1988, this figure jumped to 2,154 the next year and in 1990 this figure jumped to a whopping 3,905. These included bombing a state passenger bus, several grenade attacks in crowded places as well as abduction and wanton killing of civilians.
In his well researched book Shadow War- the Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, Arif Jamal mentions that “The JKLF continued its campaign of terror by targeting intellectuals and public figures, in and outside of government, adding, “The JKLF targeted an entire class of intellectuals in Indian Kashmir [sic], in hopes of establishing a monopoly on the movement for self-determination and rooting out dissenting groups.” Malik has been identified by Dr Rubaiya Sayeed [daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed] who was kidnapped in December 1989 as one of her abductors.
Similarly, in January 2024, an eyewitness to the January 25, 1990 killing of four service men of the Indian Air Force in Rawalpora, Srinagar while they were waiting for the bus to work identified the JKLF chief as the main shooter. Three months later JKLF abducted Kashmir University vice president Mushirul Haq and his special assistant Abdul Ghani Zargar and after publicly announcing their deaths dumped the bodies by the roadside outside Srinagar.
There can be no two views that bombing of a public bus carrying civilian passengers, kidnapping a lady to secure release of jailed compatriots, extra-judicially executing Kashmiri intellectuals/academicians and killing unarmed service men who had no role in anti-terrorism whatsoever is downright terrorism. Moreover, Malik can’t evade moral responsibility for misguiding thousands of Kashmiri youth in an impressionable age to pick up the gun and thereby sending them to their untimely death.
Whether the JKLF chief finally ends up with a life term or capital punishment is a legal issue and hence is best left to the judiciary to decide. However, one wonders if the ex HUJY member Yasin Malik is haunted by his willingness to knowingly further Pakistan army’s proxy war against India through a so-called “armed struggle” which in senor separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farook’s words achieved “nothing other than creating more graveyards”?
While his apologists may contend that Malik is a genuine person and a great patriot whose intense desire for azadi of J&K was exploited by ISI, but this excuse is indeed laughable as the JKLF is a sharp person and certainly not someone naive who can be manipulated.
Moreover with JKLF headquarters located at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied J&K [PoJK], Malik would have definitely read the interim PoJK constitution, Para 7[3] of which states “No person or political party in Azad Jammu and Kashmir [PoJK] shall be permitted to propagate against, or take part in activities prejudicial or detrimental to, the ideology of the State’s accession to Pakistan.”
So, when Para 7[3] of PoJK’s constitution categorically rules out any option that goes against the morbid “accession to Pakistan” ideology, didn’t Malik, who’s a graduate of Srinagar’s Sir Pratap College realise that ISI’s support to JKLF’s so-called “armed struggle” for achieving J&K’s azadi was obviously a grand deception?
The courts may take a lenient view of his wrongdoings. But will those who lost their near and dear ones and whose own lives were destroyed due to Pakistan army’s proxy war in J&K that was wholeheartedly commenced by Yasin Malik more than three decades ago, ever forgive him?

Email:--------------------nileshkunwar.56@gmail.com