The dead littered the streets like fallen apples, one eyewitness recalled, as machine-gun fire raked the funeral cortege of the Srinagar cleric Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq. Fruit carts were used to evacuate the injured through the narrow lanes of the city. Fifty people were killed, and hundreds were injured. The Central Reserve Police Force opened fire on the procession, Jammu and Kashmir’s Human Rights Commission recorded decades later, and it was never properly investigated, and no one was prosecuted.
Father to the secessionist politician Maulvi Umar Farooq, the Mirwaiz was a key figure in the making of Kashmir’s anti-India movement. He was killed when jihadists learned of his secret efforts to make peace with India.
Finally, the Mirwaiz was laid to rest at what is now known as the Mazar-e-Shuhada, or martyr’s graveyard, in Srinagar. Four weeks later, the jihadist who killed him, Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo, was shot dead by police. A procession assembled again to take him to the graveyard — the Mazar-e-Shuhada and he was laid next to the Mirwaiz. Both were martyrs in the minds of their supporters for exactly the same cause.
Earlier this week, police in Kashmir arrested two of the men alleged to have been involved in the assassination of the Mirwaiz in May 1990—a single killing that ignited a massacre and thousands of other murders in the decades that followed it.
Also read: J&K Police arrest 2 Hizbul terrorists ‘involved in 1990 killing of Mirwaiz Farooq Shah’
Forgetting the killers
For decades, the alleged fugitives, Javed Bhat and Zahoor Bhat, had been living in plain sight. Following the assassination, Zahoor, a 1974-born eighth-grade school dropout who worked as a car mechanic before the jihad began, fled to Kathmandu. Then, in 2007, he returned to Srinagar and began living at home again.
Like Zahoor, Javed—who joined a jihad training camp in Pakistan soon after finishing high school—left for Nepal after the assassination. Then, he returned home in 2003 to live in the Solina neighbourhood in Srinagar.
Kashmir police sources have told ThePrint that the intelligence services were aware of the return of the two men but hoped to operate them as assets against the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen instead of pushing forward with prosecution. Two of the key suspects, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Abdullah Bangroo and his deputy Abdul Rehman Shigan, had been killed in an encounter in the 1990s. A third member of the cell, Mohammad Ayub Dar, was convicted by the Supreme Court in 2010.
Like the Hawal massacre, the killers of the Mirwaiz were subjected to a kind of wilful official amnesia.
Also read: Poonch killing of Indian soldiers shows jihad will increase India-Pakistan war risk
Enemies and friends
From early in the last century, the armies of the sher and the bakra—the first a reference to Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s favoured honorific of ‘The Lion of Kashmir’, the second to the goat-like long beards of the pious supporters of the Mirwaiz—had battled for control of Srinagar’s streets. The Dogra monarch, Maharaja Hari Singh, had allied with Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah, who controlled the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, to push back against the new generation of educated nationalist politicians battling his regime.
Even as the two sides accused each other of collaborationism and heresy, they often made common cause to contain the influence of the Indian State in Kashmir.
Following the disappearance of a revered religious relic from the Hazratbal shrine in 1963, the two sides joined to exert pressure on New Delhi. As mobs attacked properties owned by Chief Minister Ghulam Muhammad Bakshi’s family, and the state government disintegrated, scholar Navnita Behera notes, the two men ran “an unauthorised parallel administration, controlling traffic, prices, and commerce”.
From his pulpit, Mirwaiz Farooq made thinly-veiled pleas for Pakistani victory in the build-up to the 1965 war. The members of the two factions even boycotted marriages, funerals, and religious ceremonies hosted by the families of Muslim Indian National Congress members.
Later, in 1983, former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah allied with Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq in an election campaign marred by ugly communal invective. Although the alliance helped Abdullah beat off competition from the Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir—while the Congress decimated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Jammu—the ethnic-religious faultlines in the state deepened significantly.
The perils of peacemaking
The rise of jihadist groups threatened both the clerical establishment in Srinagar and the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (JKNC)—and both sides began working to tamp down the crisis. Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq publicly condemned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front terrorists for kidnapping former chief minister Mufti Muhammad Saeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Saeed. Later, scholar Balraj Puri was to reveal, he began reaching out to intermediaries in New Delhi, including former defence minister George Fernandes.
Fearing that the Mirwaiz would undermine the jihadists, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) would later determine, the Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen would order the assassination in April 1990.
Tens of thousands of lives would be claimed by the ensuing collapse of political peacemaking efforts. Mirwaiz’s murder also haunted future efforts to negotiate peace.
From 1998 onwards, secessionist leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Abdul Gani Lone began a fresh effort to end the violence. In a secret meeting with leaders in Pakistan three years later, scholar Lawrence Lifshutz records, Lone implored jihadists “to leave us alone”.
“Their presence is detrimental to our struggle,” Lone said, “especially because they have initiated an international jihadist agenda.” Lone also lobbied Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Ehsan-ul-Haq to back a dialogue process.
At the 2001 remembrance of the assassination of Umar Farooq’s father, Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq, armed men gathered around the rostrum and shouted Lone down. “Haath mein haath do, Lashkar ko saath do” [Walk hand-in-hand with the Lashkar-e-Taiba], went the slogans. “Hurriyat mein rehna hoga to Pakistan kehna hoga” [Those who want to stay in the Hurriyat must support Pakistan] was another. Lone, however, refused to cave in.
Enabled by Indian intelligence services, and with the support of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the peace process succeeded in persuading key leaders of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to accept a ceasefire. Although the ceasefire collapsed, Lone was instrumental in efforts to revive it. In a signed 2002 article, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen deputy commander-in-chief Abdul Ahmad Bhat promised that a peace process would lead his cadre to “at once give up guns and observe a real ceasefire”.
Lone was shot dead within days, just as Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq was before him. In neither case have the families of the slain politicians publicly identified their murderers. Lone’s alleged assassin Rafiq Lidri was also buried in the Mazhar-e-Shuhada, and the funeral was attended by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.
Lies have long lain at the heart of the Kashmir secessionist movement. Few of its leaders have been willing to summon the courage to blame jihadist groups and their sponsors in Pakistan for their crimes. The Indian State’s failure to ensure justice for victims of violence, and its own long record of misjudgments and opportunism, have enabled secessionists to sustain their politics of deceit.
Ensuring the truth is told will be critical to securing the hard-won but fragile peace in Kashmir.
Praveen Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)