Separatist factions face discontent within ranks

Samaan Lateef

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, December 7

Due to unending shutdown calendars, the separatist camps are facing discontent within their ranks as insiders term the coming together of three top separatists — Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Yasin Malik — as an alliance of individuals instead of parties.

The announcement of shutdown during government-imposed curfew days, shutting doors on Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh-led all-party delegation and ignoring the constituent factions, which were mostly against the calendars, have become a bone of contention among the separatists.

Geelani and Mirwaiz’s Hurriyat Conference factions and Malik-led Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) have been jointly issuing shutdown calendars following the killing of Burhan Wani on July 8.

However, sources said the leaders were taking decisions at an individual-level and their programmes did not represent the views of constituent parties.

As the discord is growing within the three factions, the sources insisted that the disintegration of the Geelani and Mirwaiz factions could happen soon while Malik would continue to be the lone horse in his faction.

The sources said Geelani never held any party meeting or consultation with the leaders of constituent parties like Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) of Shabir Shah, Muslim League of Masrat Alam, National Front of Nayeem Khan and others.

Similar discontent is in Mirwaiz’s Hurriyat Conference which has been a part of the “joint resistance” shutdown programme. The sources said Mirwaiz had no support of senior leaders liked Prof Abdul Gani Bhat of the Muslim Conference and Bilal Lone of the Peoples Conference. “Mirwaiz represents his Awami Action Committee and not the Hurriyat Conference. He never consulted us because we would have never supported the shutdown calendars keeping the failure of the 2010 unrest in mind,” a Hurriyat leader said.

The Home Minister-led 26-member delegation of politicians to the Valley was not given audience by separatists on September 5 when they landed here for a two-day visit. The separatists even showed cold response to CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury and three fellow members of the delegation who tried to meet them.

Simply shutting doors on senior politicians, who have been supporting the Kashmir issue in Parliament, would not solve the problem, said a separatist leader, whose party is the constituent of Geelani faction.

The disgruntled leaders alleged that the three leaders “without application of mind closed the Rs 8,000 crore fruit industry and are now worried about the tourism industry to appease a few hoteliers and bureaucrats.”

“What was the need to impose shutdown when the government had announced curfew for the first two months of the agitation,” a senior leader of the Mirwaiz faction told The Tribune.

He said the unrest was an opportunity for them to gain political space in the J&K and also get acceptance from the international community. “Because of the lack of vision, we failed to mobilise the civil society in the country or garner the support of international community,” he said.

There is a general feeling among the leaders of the separatist factions that they should pull out from both Hurriyat Conference factions and work independently.