Muhammad Yasin Malik: From Underground Militant Leader to Kashmir’s Gandhi

Muhammad Yasin Malik: From Underground Militant Leader to Kashmir’s Gandhi

Background

Muhammad Yasin Malik, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), has undergone a 15-year transformation from underground militant leader fomenting violence to an advocate for a non-violent solution to the festering crisis plaguing South Asia’s northernmost tier for decades. He describes himself as a “pioneer of armed struggle in Kashmir” beginning in the mid-1980s who now leads a non-violent movement that is suing India for peace and a de-escalation of the world’s largest military occupation. [1] Malik leads his JKLF faction in the Maisuma area of central Srinagar, the capital of Indian-held Kashmir, after a split divided the movement between the disputed territory’s Indian and Pakistani sectors. [2] Malik’s wing of the JKLF is a secular, ethno-nationalist movement with irredentist aims. Its primary goal is the reunification of a bifurcated Kashmir and the creation of a sovereign Kashmir free from Indian or Pakistani rule yet economically and politically integrated into wider South Asia with secure borders. Malik was an early adapter to Kashmiri militancy, but radically altered his view upon release from an Indian prison in May 1994 when Malik unilaterally declared a ceasefire between the militant fighters under his command and the Indian security forces without the approval of the JKLF’s most senior leadership. Malik’s ceasefire eventually caused an ideological rupture within the movement, causing the JKLF to fracture, a wound that has not yet healed. [3] Malik espouses a Gandhian mantra of peaceful resistance in the Valley, as Kashmir is known colloquially in the region, but can sometimes signify that he still holds a militant card should matters continue to deteriorate and peace continue remain a distant prospect for Kashmir’s burgeoning young populace. Malik, 44, has expressed his lifelong struggle for the liberation of Kashmir is strictly political in nature and he lacks the Islamism imbued in other militant groups operating in the region. In 2009, he married a London School of Economics-educated, controversial Pakistani artist named Mushaal Mullick in Islamabad (Reuters, January 22, 2009).

In a 2010 interview that preceded a deadly summer season intifada that left more than 100 dead, Malik stated: “It has taken us so many years with a very hard effort to bring a transition from violent movement to non-violent movement. This transition needs to be respected … If Kashmiris are not given respect they could fall back to a violent past” (Reuters, January 25, 2010). Malik is a key figure in counterinsurgency (COIN) and the over-militarization in South Asia, in that many analysts believe the key to solving the Afghanistan-Pakistan Taliban crises lay in finding a working solution to Kashmir. In a constant tug of war between Islamabad and Washington over the positioning of Pakistan’s armed forces, Washington tries to demand that Pakistan move huge numbers of troops away from the border between Pakistan’s Punjab Province and India’s Punjab State and along the Line of Control (LoC) that has acted as the de facto border dividing Kashmir following the signing of the Simla Agreement of 1972. The American position is that the Pakistani Army must mass its troops along the Durand Line facing Afghanistan if the Pentagon’s COIN strategy in eastern Afghanistan is to ever meet success.

A Militant Life

Yasin Malik entered Kashmiri politics as a vocal member of the Islamic Students League in support of the Muslim United Front, an opposition political party in the Valley. Being intensely disaffected with the outcome of a rigged legislative election in Kashmir, Malik eventually fled to Pakistan as a young man with three like-minded friends who came to be known as the HAJY Group (Frontline [Chennai], September 30-October 13, 2000). After receiving guerrilla training in Pakistani-held Azad Kashmir in the late 1980s, Yasin Malik crossed back over the LoC into Indian-held Kashmir and took up a very active role in the growing insurgency. Malik was allegedly involved in two major incidents at the beginning of Kashmir’s troubles which helped to shape events for years to come. On December 8, 1989, a group of four JKLF militants abducted Rubaiya Sayeed, the then 23-year-old daughter of Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, the Indian home minister. Rubaiya was held in exchange for five jailed militants of the JKLF that Malik demanded released. For years there was speculation in the Valley that Malik was personally involved in the logistics of the kidnapping if not the actual act itself. The operation was successful in that Rubiaya was set free 15 days after the five militants were freed by Indian authorities, and though Malik was never conclusively linked to the it, the accusation continues to surface in the Indian media and in interviews with JKLF Vice Chairman Javed Mir (Press Trust of India, February 8, 2004; India Today, May 9, 2000). [4] The other incident for which Malik is most associated is the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel in 1989 at Awantipora airbase (The Hindu, January 25, 2006; Deccan Chronicle, September 16, 2010). The insurgents led by Malik were under immense pressure from the start of his imprisonment as the Indian security forces attempted to neutralize them, the ISI encouraged the splintering of the JKLF into groups it could control, and the rise of the Pakistan-backed Hizb-ul Mujahideen. [5]

Malik was jailed from August 1990 to May 1994 but was never convicted for his involvement in either of these cases, both of which he is accused of having integral involvement. He stands accused in a total of 23 cases related to the JKLF’s early militancy but because of the stultifying bureaucracy of Jammu and Kashmir’s court system, which operates under a provision known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that requires authorization from the central government before cases can be properly tried, Yasin Malik continues to remain free at present (Hindustan Times, April 25, 2008).

Malik and the JKLF in Geopolitical Context

The United States regularly tries to insist that Pakistan shuttle troops poised eastward in a traditionally defensive stance toward India (or offensive from the Indian view) to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and the perennially troubled Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to act as the anvil to America’s COIN hammer in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces. American ambitions in Islamabad are often met with ambiguity at best, as Pakistan views India as a constant external threat. In response, Pakistani elites attempt to explain to the Americans that they are under constant threat from a rising India with an ever-increasing military capability, a cry that tends to fall on deaf ears in Washington. Both parties are talking past one another with divergent interests in the region. The Obama administration has virtually no political leverage in Kashmir because India has for decades insisted the dispute is strictly to be talked of in bilateral terms, and considers even mere comments on the issue by foreign leaders a grave condescension to Indian sovereignty. Malik and other leading separatists have discarded a policy concept known as the “Musharraf formula” put forth by the former Pakistani leader in 2004 that was abhorred by hard line religious parties in both India and Pakistan. The Musharraf formula consisted of a demilitarization of the LoC, shared sovereignty over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, and facilitating travel and trade across the LoC, making it irrelevant over time as Kashmir would eventually endure a kind of soft reunification (The Pioneer [New Delhi], January 18). This formula was proposed as an interim arrangement to help facilitate a lasting peace at a later, unspecified date and was a pragmatic decision by Musharraf at the time in consideration of Pakistan’s post-9/11 geopolitical realities vis-à-vis American strategy in Afghanistan (Frontline [Chennai], November 6-19, 2004).  Islamabad’s prestige in Indian-controlled regions of Kashmir has greatly declined in light of Pakistan’s domestic slide into militant chaos and internal Talibanization. Yasin Malik, as the JKLF’s politically astute champion of Kashmiri identity, recognizes that over two decades of insurgency have resulted in few if any serious gains for his JKLF, and Islamist Kashmiri leaders are moving closer to his independence line as Pakistan’s Kashmir policy becomes less and less viable.

Yasin Malik has been an independent, largely secular player in the Kashmir dispute much to the consternation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prefers to use more pliable, hardline Islamist-inspired militant groups like Hizb-ul Mujahideen, Harakat al-Ansar, and Lashkar-e-Taiba in proxy warfare against Indian forces and as a political lever inside Indian-controlled Kashmir. Hizb-ul Mujahideen, whose position was that Indian-controlled Kashmir should merge with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and thus put it greatly at odds with Malik’s JKLF, essentially went to war against Hizb-ul Mujahideen in the insurgency’s early period in the 1990s as the two rivals fought for primacy in the rebellion. A rift developed between Malik’s independence-minded outfit and jihadis supported directly by the Pakistani state who have viewed Kashmir through a lens of Islamism and Pakistani regional policy. It is important to note this schism in light of the summer 2010 uprising in Srinagar in which “Pakistan zindaband” (“long live Pakistan”) was not shouted by protestors who in the past used pro-Pakistani slogans to taunt Indian authorities and goad them into violent confrontations (The Asian Age, January 28). An array of Kashmiri separatists pulling further away from Islamabad’s center of gravity may eventually create a more genuine political space for negotiations with Delhi and Kashmiri leaders like Malik.

Malik defiantly does not tow the Pakistani line in Indian-controlled areas evidenced by his very public calls for the return of the Valley’s Pandits, Kashmir’s indigenous Hindu population that began fleeing the region over two decades ago when they were targeted during the early phases of militant violence. The right of return of Hindu Pandit refugees from their internal exile in Jammu and Delhi has been one of the most contentious issues of the Kashmir conflict. The remaining Pandits in Srinagar live in a large walled compound in regular fear of Pakistan-backed militants. In his vocal reaching out to the threatened Hindu population, Malik is trying build credibility to negotiate on behalf of all Kashmiris and disavow that separatism is synonymous with the construction of a hostile Islamic state in the Himalayan territory.

Conclusion

Symbolically, on the twentieth anniversary of the Gawakadal massacre, a catalytic moment in the insurgency’s early days when Indian paramilitary forces massacred a group of unarmed protestors, Malik returned to the notorious site along the Jhelum river and told those assembled: “The minorities [Hindus] living in the valley are not here because of the [Indian] government backing, but they stayed back because of cooperation and support of the [Kashmiri] Muslim neighbors” (Hindustan Times, January 21, 2010). [6] Malik’s outwardly pro-Pandit stance signifies an attempt to return the Valley to the concept of Kashmiriyat, an ancient notion of inclusive, cooperative Kashmiri nationalism that aspires toward harmony between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists hailing back to the era of an undivided pre-1947 princely Kashmir. The promotion of anti-communalist Kashmiriyat erodes the credibility of Islamic nationalism espoused by many Pakistan-backed jihadi groups and takes steam away from Delhi which insists that Muslim-majority Kashmir, from which the father of the modern Indian state, Jawaharlal Nehru, had his origins, is an integral part of a multi-religious, highly heterogeneous Indian republic in contrast to Muslim Pakistan.

A recent report on the outcome of the 2010 violence that erupted in the Valley by an Indian think-tank called the Centre for Policy Analysis found that Pakistani influence had greatly lessened and that the uprising was an indigenously inspired and led one and that protestors expressed the azadi (independence) sentiment with no strong desire to merge with the Pakistani state (The Telegraph [Kolkata], December 28, 2010). Malik’s former JKLF comrade and mentor, Amanullah Khan, heads the other JKLF faction based in Muzzafarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Pakistan proper. Khan’s JKLF continues to promote the idea of an armed struggle against Indian domination as a means to emancipate occupied Kashmir. Khan’s faction of the JKLF was virtually destroyed by Indian forces in an assault on their headquarters in March 1996 near Srinagar’s Haratbal shrine on the majestic Dal Lake leaving Malik’s non-violent wing of the party the dominant and relevant faction in Kashmir today as a constituent member of the umbrella All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), an amalgam of militant groups in Kashmir (see Militant Leadership Monitor, September 2010). Malik sees a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir crisis as the only means to end the conflict now in its twenty-second year that has brought nothing but unending bloodshed to the tortured Valley. Though he may have the credibility to negotiate with Delhi under particular circumstances when the Indian government sees fit, his life-long quest for azadi for the whole of Kashmir remains as distant as ever. In the context of 2010’s massive summer uprising, the administration of an enlightened PM Manmohan Singh may finally view the status quo in Srinagar as untenable and finally begin a troop drawdown. Whatever develops in the near term, Yasin Malik will be involved in Kashmir’s political evolution for many years to come as a key figure who has seen virtually every side of this tragedy.

Notes

1. The Government of India does not publish precise figures on its troop presence in Jammu and Kashmir but it is estimated to be between 300,000-500,000 depending partly on massive troop movements and the sheer size of India’s military (BBC, January 14).
2. The third sector of Kashmir, known as Aksai Chin, is held by China and is mostly a people-less expanse controlled by the People’s Liberation Army and is free of militant violence.
3. Arif Jamal, Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009), pp.148-149.
4. Pradeep Thakur, Militant monologues: Echoes from the Kashmir Valley, (New Delhi: Parity Paperbacks, 2003), pp.125-126.
5. Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2005), pp.128-129.
6. For a description on the Gawakadal episode and its effects, see Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in conflict: India, Pakistan and the unending war, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000 first ed.), p.148.