With the passing of Syed Ali Geelani, Kashmir has lost one of its doughtiest fighters for freedom. At 92, Syed Geelani passed after a prolonged illness at his home in Srinagar, and it was perhaps symbolic of his life that even in death, his family was forced to conduct his burial rites in relative secrecy, with the main concern of the local administration that his funeral not become an occasion for an expression of separatist sentiment. Mr Geelani had personally witnessed all the vicissitudes of the Kashmiri people’s struggle for the right of self-determination.
Ninety-two at the time of his death, which meant that he had been 18 at Partition, and thus aware of how the Dogra Maharajah acceded to India, and how Pakistan waged its War over the State, and how it was partitioned too, and became subject to UN Security Resolutions calling for self-determination by the Kashmiri people in a UN-supervised plebiscite held for the purpose.
Mr Geelani had not started as a separatist. Originally a Jamaat Islami MLA for 15 years, he had initially tried to work within the framework of the Indian Union, but ultimately, in the late 1980s, when he had turned 60, he once found himself playing a leadership role of a Kashmiri freedom struggle which had entered a new, armed phase, with the Kashmiri intifada of 1989 onwards. It was in this phase where Mr Geelani, despite his advancing age, found himself facing long periods of imprisonment and house arrest despite his advancing age and fragile health, because as head of the All-Parties Hurriyet Conference he became committed not just to self-determination for all of Kashmir, but the accession of its Indian-Occupied portion to Pakistan. It was this partiality that led to his being conferred the Nishan-e-Pakistan, Pakistan’s highest civil award, in 2020.
It is a sad reality that Mr Geelani had seen his state losing its special status in August 2020, and the bifurcation of its Indian-Occupied portion into two union territories, while the floodgates were opened for Hindu non-Kashmiris to buy up property in Kashmir. He did not live to see Kashmir exercise its right of self-determination, but he will ever be held up as an exemplar for all those who struggle in the cause.
