A BLOODY PAST COMES KNOCKING
Born out of the amateur groups operating since the 1960s, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was the most prominent armed organisation in the Valley when insurgency broke out in 1988-90. Besides scattered incidents on home base prior to that, it had left its mark overseas with the killing of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre, in Birmingham, in 1984—which led to the hanging of Maqbool Bhat, Kashmir’s insurgent icon. In its objective, the JKLF is distinct: it sought an independent Kashmir, not merger with Pakistan. The banned outfit has since turned to non-violent methods of advocating that cause, but in the wake of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, its alleged role in attacks on Pandits has come back to haunt surviving leaders, especially Yasin Malik and Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate. Both are in Delhi’s Tihar jail on charges of funneling funds from Pakistan into terror activities in the Valley. That case is being investigated by the NIA (National Investigation Agency).
The eruption of insurgency saw a high turnover of newly-formed outfits but, according to Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti president Sanjay Tickoo, 90 per cent of the Pandit killings were carried out by JKLF. The Hizbul Mujahideen—perhaps the largest militant outfit in Kashmir today—was formed out of a separate pool of jihadists in September-October 1989, but other than issuing publicised threats telling Pandits to leave the Valley [the first of these on January 4, 1990], it became active only in mid-1990, by which time most Pandits had already fled.
A TALE OF TWO MILITANTS
One figure central to the case is Bitta, a young JKLF ‘commander’ in 1990, who admitted on camera that year to having killed 20 Pandits on the orders of seniors like Ashfaq Wani—though he later said he had given the statement “under duress”. His first victim was Satish Tickoo, shot dead on February 2, 1990, in Habba Kadal, Srinagar. In 2006, Bitta was granted bail in the case after spending 16 years in prison without being convicted—with the court censuring the prosecution for its “total disinterest”. This month, Tickoo’s family demanded the reopening of the case. A Srinagar court has listed it for hearing on March 31.
The son of a mason, Bitta grew up in Srinagar’s Guru Bazar, going to a school that had many Pandit teachers. He dropped out in Class 10 and took to selling cinema tickets in black. A neighbour recalls that Bitta’s hatred of Pandits ran deep. Physically strong, he was trained in the martial arts, which is how he came to acquire his nom de guerre. Arrested in 1990, he developed differences with Yasin while in jail, ended up being virtually disowned by the JKLF and, after his release in 2006, joined a rival faction against Malik.
Yasin presents a touch of contrast: less trigger-happy gunman, more the ideologue who abjured violence in 1994 and sued for peace, a key figure of the overground separatist pantheon and part of numerous Hurriyat negotiations with New Delhi. But as one of the so-called HAJY group (he was the ‘Y’) that was among those to inaugurate Kashmir’s insurgency in 1988, Yasin too is under the scanner for the Pandit killings. After the killing of his predecessor Ashfaq Wani on March 30, 1990, Yasin had served as the local JKLF chief that year from April to August 8, when he was arrested. In jail till 1994, he announced a ‘ceasefire’ upon his release, going against his former associates and causing splits in the JKLF.
In a 2002 interview on the BBC’s HARDTalk, he told Tim Sebastian that “JKLF boys” had killed retired judge Neelkanth Ganjoo in 1989 because he had sentenced Maqbool Bhat to death. Yasin is also among the eight accused of killing four IAF personnel in Srinagar in 1990. The case is pending with the J&K High Court.
Yasin was drawn to the cause early, participating in protests and pelting stones at security forces. A graduate from Sri Pratap College, he was part of the campaign team of Muslim United Front candidate Syed Salahuddin—who later went on to head the Hizbul—in the 1987 election that became infamous for alleged rigging. Yasin led a call for a shutdown under the banner of the Islamic Students League and faced one of his early arrests. In 1988, after his release, he crossed the LoC with Hamid Sheikh, Ishfaq Majeed and Javid Mir—the HAJY—to receive arms training in Pakistan for three months. On December 8, 1989, the JKLF made headlines with the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed.