On May 21, 1990, three young men came to meet Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq at his home in Srinagar. It was nothing out of the ordinary: the Mirwaiz, Kashmir’s head priest and one of its most influential political leaders, received visitors as a matter of everyday routine. Except, this morning’s young visitors were assassins. They fatally shot the Mirwaiz and got away.
The assassination shocked Kashmir and, although support for the separatist struggle was at its peak, it could have led to a public backlash against the armed separatists, who were suspected to be the assailants. That did not happen. Instead, public anger was directed at the government. The reason: as thousands of agitated people carried the Mirwaiz’s body in a procession from the hospital to his home, they were fired at by the Central Reserve Police Force near Hawal in Old City, killing at least 60 and wounding scores. The government, led by Governor Jagmohan, claimed that the CRPF had come under fire from within the procession and retaliated.
The government justification for firing further muddied the waters. In his book My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, Jagmohan would assign the blame to his police chief N S Saxena, arguing that if he had gone himself or sent a strong police contingent with the procession, the killings of the mourners would have been averted. “His conduct, to say the least, was highly irresponsible, particularly in the context of my instructions,” Jagmohan claimed. “An officer of his seniority was expected to provide leadership and show initiative on such occasions”.
The Mirwaiz’s was Kashmir’s first major political assassination. The murder and its aftermath eventually led to Jagmohan’s ouster as Governor.
The assassination was investigated by the CBI, which said that it was planned by Hizbul Mujahideen commanders Abdullah Bangroo and Rehman Shigan and executed by their operatives Ayub Dar, Javid Bhat and Zahoor Bhat. Bangroo and Shigan were killed in gunfights with the security forces not long after. Dar was caught and sentenced to life in prison. Last week, Javaid Bhat and Zahoor Bhat were arrested, after 33 years on the run.
The investigation into the CRPF firing on the mourners, on the other hand, has gone nowhere. The J&K Police’s Crime Branch had closed the case as “untraced”, but an investigation by the State Human Rights Commission in 2017 found that a Commission of Inquiry had identified 15 CRPF personnel responsible for the shooting. It isn’t known what, if any, action was taken against them.
Why is Mirwaiz Farooq’s assassination, the identity of his killers and that of his mourners of such import even after 33 years? The answer partly lies in the Mirwaiz family’s position in the sociopolitical and religious milieu of Kashmir. Indeed, such was Mirwaiz Farooq’s standing, particularly in Srinagar city, that his assassins wouldn’t dare acknowledge their act lest it invite public backlash, while the entire separatist camp denounced the assassination as a government conspiracy.
His family, after all, had, for more than a century, played a distinguished role in empowering Kashmiri Muslims through political engagement and education.
The family descended from Waiz Sidiqullah, a preacher who lived in Tral, South Kashmir. His son Mirwaiz Abdul Salam migrated to Srinagar nearly 200 years ago and the family settled in Qalamdanpora and later Rajouri Kadal. It wasn’t until Moulvi Ghulam Rasool, popular as Lassi Bab, was appointed the Mirwaiz that the family started a campaign for the educational upliftment of Kashmiri Muslims.
Kashmir didn’t have a school imparting modern education until a Christian Missionary school was set up in 1880 with just five students. On July 31, 1899, Mirwaiz Ghulam Rasool set up an educational society, Anjuman-e-Nusratul Islam, to run Kashmir’s first modern school. This school, the first to provide modern secular education alongside religious teaching in the Valley, was upgraded to a high school in 1905. The Islamia school in Rajouri Kadal, as it came to be called, would educate generations of Kashmiri leaders such as future prime minister Sheikh Abdullah and chief ministers Mufti Sayeed and Mir Qasim. The Anjuman eventually expanded to a network of at least 17 educational institutions across Kashmir, including two colleges. Srinagar’s historic Jamia Masjid, the permanent stage of the Mirwaiz, had emerged as a nerve centre for socio-political life.
Mirwaiz Ghulam Rasool also used the Anjuman as a tool to successfully fight the resistance to the introduction of modern education among Kashmiri Muslims. This helped the newly established Christian missionary schools as well, where Muslim students started to be admitted. The current Mirwaiz, Umar Farooq, attended Srinagar’s prominent missionary school Burnhall.
Mirwaiz Ghulam Rasool was succeeded by his brother Ahmadillah, who, in September 1906, had been recognised as the Mirwaiz of Kashmir by the Dogra regime — a position he occupied until his death in 1931.
Ahmadillah was succeeded by Mirwaiz Atiquallah Shah, but he couldn’t continue because of failing health. Mirwaiz Yousuf Shah then took over and set about expanding the Anjuman with the introduction of new schools. He also started a printing press which published a monthly magazine, Nusratul Islam.
This was a time of great churning in Kashmir as resentment against the regime of the Maharaja was spreading. To give voice to their aspirations, Mirwaiz Yousuf Shah helped found the Muslim Conference, Kashmir’s first major political party, along with Sheikh Abdullah and Choudhary Ghulam Abbas of Jammu. He was also a leading member of the delegation chosen at the first-ever joint public meeting of Kashmiri Muslims at Khanqah-e-Moula in June 1931 to negotiate for their rights with the Maharaja. The meeting, as Sheikh Abdullah would recall in his autobiography Aatish-e-Chinar, was “the beginning of our movement for independence”.
Abdullah and Mirwaiz Yousuf would fall out, however. While Abdullah drifted towards the Congress, the Mirwaiz grew close to the Muslim League. And when Abdullah turned his Muslim Conference into the National Conference, the Mirwaiz parted ways. The divide was so severe that its cascading consequences are still felt in Kashmir. In 1947, the Mirwaiz was exiled to Muzaffarabad, where he remained engaged in politics until his death in 1968.
In Srinagar, the responsibility of the Mirwaiz fell to Atiqullah Shah. He died in 1962 and was succeeded by Moulana Mohamma Amin. He died a year later in 1963 and his son Moulvi Mohammad Farooq took over. He was an eloquent preacher and a shrewd politician.
The 1953 coup which saw Sheikh Abdullah deposed as the prime minister and imprisoned by the Nehru government and the subsequent public discontent had strengthened the political stance of the Mirwaiz family. So when Moi-e-Muqqadas, the holy relic, mysteriously vanished from Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine in December 1963, Mirwaiz Farooq, then 19, set up an Awami Action Committee to wage a protest movement. The committee continued as a political force even after the holy relic was recovered. It looked like Mirwaiz Farooq had returned to the politics of Yousuf Shah. He was arrested and jailed for two years in 1965.
Mirwaiz Farooq, however, wasn’t a dogmatic ideologue and preferred the fluidity of realpolitik. The 1971 Indo-Pak war altered Kashmir’s political reality and when Abdullah returned to power – now as chief minister – after an accord with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the old wounds of the 1930s and 40s started to fester again. The entire opposition rallied to oust Abdullah — who was substantially weakened by surrendering his two-decade-long political position — in the 1977 election. Indira Gandhi had lost power and Morarji Desai had taken over as the first non-Congress prime minister.
In April 1977, Mirwaiz Farooq allied with the Janata Party, hinting that he would keep silent on his party’s traditional position on Kashmir. An interesting position to take, then and in hindsight, given that the ruling BJP is the flotsam of that Janata Party.
When Desai and his foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee toured Srinagar, they visited Mirwaiz Farooq and got a rousing welcome.
The political gamble didn’t work, however, because the National Conference won the election. So, ever the pragmatist, Mirwaiz Farooq bridged the gulf created by his family’s historic rivalry with Abdullah’s and his party joined hands with the National Conference. The hostility had been referred to as the Sher-Bakra feud, with Abdullah’s followers called sher (lions) and the Mirwaiz’s as bakra (goats). The bonhomie between Mirwaiz Farooq and Abdullah’s successor and son, Farooq Abdullah, was now touted as Double Farooq. They fought the 1987 election together in alliance with the Congress.
It was ironic, given his standing as a religious leader and traditional political positions, that the Mirwaiz was not with the new opposition alliance called the Muslim United Front. The ruling alliance ended up wrecking Kashmir by rigging the election and enabling the Muslim United Front’s transformation into a separatist conglomerate, the Hurriyat Conference, after militancy erupted in 1989. Mirwaiz Farooq’s son Umar Farooq emerged as its first head.
A cursory look at Mirwiaz Farooq’s 27-year political journey shows that he believed in tactical compromises to stay in the game. He wasn’t a do or die man. That’s perhaps why he was the first to be removed from the scene.
In a not dissimilar way, his son and successor Mirwaiz Umar has always been identified as a moderate. In the face of hardline hawks in the Valley’s separatist politics, he pushed for dialogue and consensus — at personal risk, too. In May 2004, his uncle Moulvi Mushtaq was shot in a Srinagar mosque and a month later, the Islamia School was burnt down. And he has been homebound for the last four years.
