Relatives of late Kashmir separatist leader charged under anti-terror law

[terry5]

Relatives of late Kashmir separatist leader charged under anti-terror law
Son of Syed Ali Shah Geelani alleges police in Indian-controlled area snatched body and carried out burial without family present

Associated Press in Srinagar
Sun 5 Sep 2021 12.35 BST

Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir have charged family members of the late resistance leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani under an anti-terrorism law for wrapping his body in the Pakistani flag and raising anti-India slogans, officials said on Sunday.
Geelani, who died on Wednesday at the age of 91, was a leading figure in Kashmir’s defiance against New Delhi and had been under house arrest for years.



India deploys troops in Srinagar after Kashmir separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani dies
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His son Naseem said Indian authorities buried Geelani in a local cemetery without any family members present after police snatched his body from the home. Police denied that as “baseless rumours” by “some vested interests.”


A video widely shared on social media purportedly showed Geelani’s relatives, mostly women, frantically trying to prevent armed police from forcing their way into the room where his body, wrapped in a Pakistani flag, was being kept. It showed women wailing and screaming as police took the body and locked his family and relatives inside the room.

Police said unspecified family members and some others were charged on Saturday under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. They have not yet been taken into custody.

The anti-terrorism law was amended in 2019 to allow the government to designate an individual as a terrorist. Police can detain a person for six months without producing any evidence, and the accused can subsequently be imprisoned for up to seven years. Rights activists have said the law is draconian.

Naseem said on Sunday that a police officer visited the family on Saturday and informed them a case had been registered. Naseem did not provide further details about the meeting, but said there were scuffles as the police removed his father’s body.

“Amid the chaos, we didn’t really know what was happening. We were mourning,” he said.


Kashmir has long been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan, which administer parts of the Himalayan region while claiming it entirely.

Geelani spearheaded Kashmir’s movement for the right to self-determination and was a staunch proponent of merging Kashmir with Pakistan. For many in Kashmir and beyond, he was an enduring emblem of defiance against India.

India describes the armed rebellion as Islamabad’s proxy war and state-sponsored terrorism. Most Muslim Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle and support the territory’s unification, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

The region is one of the most heavily militarised in the world. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.

Tensions flared in the region in 2019 after New Delhi stripped Kashmir’s semi-autonomy, scrapped its statehood and removed inherited protections on land and jobs.

Relatives of late Kashmir separatist leader charged under anti-terror law

Son of Syed Ali Shah Geelani alleges police in Indian-controlled area snatched body and carried out burial without family present

www.theguardian.com

 

[MH.Yang]

I suggest that his relatives hold funerals with his clothes or other commemorative items.

People gather to commemorate him. They don't necessarily need his body, his goods can also be used. And people will understand why there was no body at the funeral.

 

[terry5]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1434473052364967942

Syed Ali Shah Geelani: The man who fought for Kashmir’s freedom
2 September 2021

IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Syed Ali Geelani died at his home in Srinagar at the age of 92

Kashmir's top separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who spearheaded the resistance movement against Indian rule, has died, aged 92. Author Sumantra Bose writes about Geelani's life and his role in Kashmiri politics.


I first met Syed Ali Shah Geelani in 1995 at his then partially-built residence in Srinagar's Hyderpora neighbourhood. He had recently been released from prison. Although I have met him several times since then, it is that first meeting I remember most vividly.

Geelani had a courtly appearance and kind manner, but I could sense the steel in his personality. He took out the time to speak at length with me - an Indian in my mid-20s, I was then a graduate student at Columbia University.
At the end of the long conversation, he stood up, kissed me tenderly on the forehead and presented me with a copy of the Koran, an Arabic-English bilingual edition produced, I later noticed, in Saudi Arabia. He urged me to read it carefully. The ornate, bulky volume is still displayed in the living room of our family home in Kolkata.
Unlike some other Kashmiri leaders I met in the 1990s and later, Geelani spoke with absolute clarity, with no hedging or fudging. Our conversation revolved around two points he made gently, yet forcefully.

IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Geelani had been under house arrest for much of the past 11 years

First, he made it clear that although a proud Kashmiri, he considered his national identity to be Pakistani.

Second, he was implacably hostile to the idea of an independent Kashmir. I already knew from extensive travels in the Kashmir valley that the large majority of its people, as well as Kashmiri-speaking Muslims in parts of the Jammu region contiguous to the valley, aspired for independence.
For them, azaadi (freedom), the rallying cry of the tehreek (movement) that had exploded in uprising and insurgency in 1990, meant being free of both India and Pakistan, which had been fighting over their land since 1947. Pakistan's supporters - the core of which was made up of Geelani's Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) party - were a relatively small minority.

• Why India and Pakistan fight over Kashmir
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I frankly told Geelani this ground reality. He did not directly contradict me, but explained patiently that the notion of independence was not just a chimera but dangerous, because it risked dividing the Muslim majority of Jammu and Kashmir - on both sides of the Line of Control - into opposed camps.

He was adamant that the destiny of Kashmir - and Kashmiris - lay with Pakistan.

IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Geelani staunchly advocated the merger of Kashmir with Pakistan

A few days later, I met Mohammad Yasin Malik, the young leader of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), at his home in central Srinagar's Maisuma neighbourhood.
Malik too had recently been released from four years in prison and had renounced violence. I recounted my discussion with Geelani to him. Yasin giggled and said: "Well, that's Geelani saheb."
The JKLF leader's amused reaction made light of a deadly schism the two views of freedom - the majority view favouring independence and the minority pro-Pakistan view - had produced in the Kashmiri movement.

The JKLF had launched the insurgency in 1989-90 and was its dominant group until 1993. But by the mid-1990s, the pro-independence insurgents were on their last legs and the armed struggle had been taken over by Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM), a rival group closely aligned with Geelani's party.

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Heavily backed by the Pakistan army and especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, HM was killing independence supporters, both militants and prominent civilians. That killing spree, in turn, generated a popular backlash which helped the Indian security forces gain the upper hand over the insurgency.

Geelani was a late advocate of armed struggle. In 1986, when some restive youths in the Valley were contemplating taking to the gun like the Afghan mujahideen, he had cautioned against that path.
Instead, he wrote in Azaan, the Jamaat-i-Islami's paper, that the movement should work "to educate the people" and mobilise them in "an organised but peaceful struggle" for the implementation of "the UN resolutions" on Kashmir, which in the late 1940s and 1950s had called for a plebiscite (referendum) to choose Indian or Pakistani sovereignty.

IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Kashmir has a history of insurgency against Indian rule

But in February 1991, as an inferno of violence engulfed the Kashmir Valley, Geelani wrote from a prison in northern India to Chandra Shekhar, then Indian prime minister: "Indians fought the British for freedom both politically and through armed struggle. Mahatma Gandhi used non-violence and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose used the path of armed struggle".
The late conversion to armed struggle aside, Geelani's politics was remarkably consistent over 70 years.

• The Kashmiris waiting for loved ones to come home

He was initially mentored by Maulana Mohammad Sayyid Masoodi, a pro-independence Kashmiri leader who was assassinated, aged 87 years, by insurgents in December 1990.
But in the early 1950s, he discovered the writings of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the Jamaat-i-Islami's founder, and that set the course for the rest of his life, as narrated in his autobiography Wular Kinaray (From the Wular's Shore, a reference to his native village by the Wular Lake in the northern Kashmir Valley).

IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Indian troops blocked roads leading to Geelani's residence after his death

Geelani's death comes at a time when many Kashmiris say that the region has become even more volatile since the federal government revoked its autonomous status.
It was his steadfastness of character in the face of tribulations and adversity - rather than his Islamic orthodoxy and loyalty to Pakistan - that earned him a place of honour in the hearts of many Kashmiris.

Sumantra Bose, a political scientist, is the author of Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict (Yale University Press, autumn 2021)

Syed Ali Shah Geelani: The man who fought for Kashmir’s freedom

Syed Ali Shah Geelani believed India should not rule the region and never changed his stand.

www.bbc.com

 

[American Pakistani]

India itself is a hypocrite terrorist govt. Imagine electing Hitler as prime Minister, but Indians did it they elected modhi who conducted Muslim genocide. What a Shame world stays silent on Indian genocide in IIOJ&K.