Amanullah Khan: The journey from bullets to ballots

Kashmiris usually are sceptical about their leaders. In the last 462 years, ever since Mughal Emperor Akbar captured and exiled their last king Yusuf Shah Chak by deceit, they yearn for someone who holds his/her head high against any authority. Most leaders, who started as crusaders in this region, have later succumbed to the lure of power and easy life, leaving people in the lurch.

Amanullah Khan, 82, co-founder of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), who had passed away in Rawalpindi on April 26, remained a thorn for India as well as Pakistan till his last breath, even though he never rose to the position of a public leader. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) website still lists him as wanted by law in India. The agency characterises him as Indian national and citizen of Pakistan (not confirmed). Khan was from Gilgit, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir(PoK). His daughter Asma is married to Peoples’ Conference leader Sajjad Lone, a minister in the BJP-PDP coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir.

Khan studied in Srinagar during 1940s and 50s and had migrated to Pakistan in 1952 where he began a political movement for an independent Jammu and Kashmir, thus inviting wrath of Pakistani authorities as well. He co-founded the JK National Liberation Front (NLF) with Maqbool Bhat. The group shot into prominence when Hashim Qureshi and his cousin hijacked an Indian Airlines Fokker F27 plane Ganga in 1971. This gave India an excuse to deny over-flight facilities to Pakistani planes, on way to their eastern part, now Bangladesh. Khan and his associates were arrested after this and they spent long terms in Pakistani jails.

In 1976 he immigrated to UK and in May 1977, he formed JKLF by renaming JKNLF. He found himself in a spot when on February 3, 1984, a group calling itself the Kashmir Liberation Army kidnapped India’s Deputy High Commissioner in Birmingham, Ravindra Mhatre, demanded a ransom and killed him two days later. On February 11, Maqbool Butt was hanged in the Tihar jail.

Amanullah Khan was deported to Pakistan on December 15, 1986, where he was soon embraced warmly by Pakistani agencies who were sniffing unrest in Kashmir Valley following mass rigging of assembly election that year.

Elated over the success of its “low cost, little risk, high return” investment in Punjab, and Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, General Zia-ul-Haq  had turned his attention to Kashmir. Following refusal by Jamaat-e-Islami to get drawn into an armed struggle, he turned to Amanullah Khan. In one of his interviews, he stated: “Our armed struggle started on July 31, 1988, by blasting three government buildings in Srinagar”. With Zia’s death in August 1988, Khan had lost a patron. The eruption of insurgency in December 1989 and the enormous and unexpected popular support it evoked alarmed Pakistan as much as India. Khan and his mentor Maqbool Bhat were never public leaders, but they did mesmerise Kashmiri youth, who were angry at the failure of electoral process due to mass rigging of elections. Khan was perhaps key to transition from ballot to bullet politics.

 In February 2000, when I met him in his office in Rawalpindi, an affable Khan said, his organisation had never expected such a burst of support. Khan and his JKLF had abandoned militancy, but he was prophetical in saying, even if militancy is crushed, the deep popular alienation which provides haven to insurgency would remain. He had a complaint that Indian leaders do not acknowledge his letters or suggestions about Kashmir, and that it did not befit democratic India to ignore him. He did mention that communalism in any form is condemnable and killings based on communalism are still more condemnable. But had no answers when I mentioned to him the killing of Kashmiri Pandits by his cadres early 1990, and that along with other factors led their migration to torrid plains of Jammu and elsewhere. I have met him twice — in 2000 and in 2015. He was frail and could hardly speak, when I met him last time. Let us hope that Asma, his daughter, will have faith in ballots and not in bullets. And will she through her husband’s party, Peoples’ Conference, get Kashmir justice and peace, for which her father stood and invited the wrath of governments?

The author is Chief of Bureau, dna