Yasin Malik: The Conspirator

AKASHMIRI WRITER ONCE described Yasin Malik as the Che Guevara of Kashmiri Muslim youth. Yasin Malik tried to describe himself as the Mahatma when he gave up the gun between 1991 and 1994. This week, though, he was finally exposed for what he always has been: a terrorist who has not merely fomented trouble in the Kashmir Valley but actually pulled the trigger himself.

The head of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in the 1989-90 period, he ousted the founder Amanullah Khan and was able to move the organisation’s headquarters from Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Srinagar. Malik was part of the HAJY group, the other three militants being: Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, and Javed Mir. Both Sheikh and Wani are now dead and Mir was picked up and then released on bail for his role in the 1990 assassination of four Indian Air Force (IAF) officers who were waiting for a ride to their base in Awantipora. Malik is accused of the same crime as well as the abduction of the late Union home minister’s daughter Rubaiya Sayeed. In an interview with a magazine, he had admitted to both, saying “that was the need of the hour.” In fact, in the same interview, he had gone on to say the IAF officers “were not innocents” but “were defence officers of another country.”

But after his experience in Mehrauli jail, Malik spoke the language of peace—but only outside the Valley. When he was released on bail on medical grounds in 1994, there was a huge outpouring of love and sympathy for him. But once he started publicly speaking of peace in the Valley, going on dharnas and fasts unto death, he was picked up and thrashed by a group of pro-Pakistani Hizbul Mujahideen, curing him of the Mahatma complex, as former R&AW chief AS Dulat has written in Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (Harper Collins, 2016).
That did not stop several people in the establishment in Delhi from trying very hard to make an acceptable leader out of him. Though he is currently chairman of the JKLF, the organisation itself has lost out to the hardline Hizbul, and anyone who is looking for a moderate extremist (if such a thing exists) will always prefer Sajad Gani Lone or Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.

Powerful backers over the years have tried to transform the former election agent in the fateful 1987 Assembly into a popular leader, from the late Kuldip Nayar to the late Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court Rajinder Sachar. But the man they liked to project as a freedom fighter has never been able to shed the tag of terrorist. The media, once more than kind to him during his heyday when he was a permanent part of any Kashmir story, now demands blood for blood.

Malik’s marriage in 2009 to a Pakistani woman Mushaal Hussein Mullick, daughter of a former member of the women’s wing of the Pakistan Muslim League, undermined his credibility a long time ago, especially given his brother-in-law Haider Ali Hussein Mullick is a professor at the Naval War College, a fellow at the Joint Special Operations University in the US and a protégé of former CIA chief David Petraeus. The marriage to a Pakistani is not unusual—several Kashmiri separatist leaders’ wives are from across the border—but his closeness to the US establishment is.

Malik has been convicted by a National Investigation Agency (NIA) court for hatching a criminal conspiracy, waging war against the state, and other unlawful activities, and sentenced to life imprisonment but it is the 1990 murders, recently recreated to horrific effect in Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, that he will have to account for. For any reconciliation to happen, retribution is a starting point. Forgiveness can follow.

JKLFKashmir ValleyNIAterror-fundingterrorismYasin Malik