Journalism of Courage
Former Hurriyat chairman Abdul Gani Bhat, a strong proponent of dialogue for the resolution of the Kashmir issue, died Wednesday after a brief illness. He was 90.
A founding member of the separatist conglomerate, Bhat never shied away from striking the middle ground even if meant flouting the constitution of the Hurriyat Conference. This often landed him in controversies and led to calls for his expulsion from the separatist camp.
Born in 1935 in Botengoo village of Sopore, Bhat completed his Bachelors from the Sri Pratap Singh College in Srinagar, where his college mates were Farooq Abdullah and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, both former chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir. He then went to Aligarh Muslim University, where he completed his LLB and Masters in Persian.
After a short stint as a lawyer in Sopore, Bhat was appointed as a college lecturer in 1963 and posted in Poonch. For 23 years, he taught Persian in different colleges of Jammu & Kashmir.
In 1986, when Jammu & Kashmir was administered directly by the Centre through Governor Jagmohan Malhotra, Bhat along with four other government employees was terminated for security reasons.
With his job gone, Bhat gravitated towards political activism, and was one of the instruments for the formation of a political amalgam — Muslim United Front (MUF) — that emerged as the first major political and electoral challenge for the National Conference in J&K.
After MUF’s loss after the alleged poll rigging, Bhat was arrested for the first time. He would be arrested several more times. When Hurriyat Conference was formed as a separatist alliance in 1993, the Muslim Conference was its founding constituent, and Bhat became one of its seven executive members. Bhat was later appointed as the chairman of the separatist amalgam.
As a Hurriyat leader in early 1990s, Bhat would mesmerise people with his fiery speeches — often bordering fantasy — in chaste Kashmiri, making his audience believe azadi (freedom) was just round the corner. But with time, he became more pragmatic.
An advocate of dialogue and reconciliation, Bhat was part of the Hurriyat delegation that met then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and then deputy prime minister, L K Advani, in New Delhi.
