When George Orwell’s book 1984 landed in the bookstores on the fashionable Residency Road, nobody in Srinagar imagined how much eventful the year would be.
Two years after a million-strong mourners’ procession attended Sheikh
Abdullah’s funeral and the Kashmiris installed Farooq Abdullah as Chief
Minister — amid enthusiastic slogans of ‘this is our promise to the
father that we will make our brother the king of the valley’— nobody
paid attention to the People’s Conference founder Abdul Gani Lone’s call
for a shutdown.
Not a single shop in Kashmir closed on February 11 when JKLF leader
Maqbool Bhat was hanged to death and buried unceremoniously inside Tihar
Jail. For many, the execution did mean nothing but a death sentence
awarded on someone for killing a police official.
Owner of Abdullah News Agency, Mohammad Abdullah Raja, placed a huge order for India Today
that carried a cover story on the assassination of the Indian diplomat
in Birmingham, Ravindra Mhatre, whose death led to Indira Gandhi’s
decision of hanging Mr. Bhat. It didn’t sell like hot cakes. Even its
editorial comment ‘a martyr to a controversial cause’ went unnoticed.
Soon the year graduated into a sequence of events, Mr. Orwell would have
loved to foretell. Operation Blue Star happened in June 1984. Farooq
Abdullah was dethroned by Mrs. Gandhi on July 2. It led to months of
curfew in Srinagar, winning Mr. Shah (the pro-Congress Ghulam Mohammad
Shah who replaced Mr. Farooq Abdullah) the sobriquet of ‘Gulla Curfew.’
Finally, Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination occurred on October 31.
It took Mr. Lone two years to see the first shutdown on Mr. Bhat’s
execution. Around the time Mr. Farooq Abdullah was knitting himself into
a tie-up with Rajiv Gandhi and Mirwaiz Farooq, Governor Jagmohan was
busy in dismissing government officials. Prof. Gani Bhat was one among
his targets. Left unemployed, he played the stellar role in laying the
foundation of Kashmir’s first pseudo-separatist alliance, the Muslim
United Front (MUF). Thus, the first shutdown on the JKLF leader happened
in February 1986.
Even after that, much of the Valley was indifferent to secessionism. Mr.
Farooq Abdullah’s government was convinced to set free the detained
Mahaz-e-Azadi activist Azam Inquillabi in 1987 but his organisation
failed to find a single surety. He was finally released when the Mahaz
chief Sofi Akbar died and the Chief Minister carried MUF’s MLA Syed Ali
Shah all the way from Jammu to Sopore in his helicopter to attend the
funeral.
Mr. Akbar was the one-odd Plebiscite Front leader who had publicly
rejected the Indira-Abdullah Accord of 1975 and estranged from Sheikh
Abdullah spearheaded a separatist movement that had no more than a dozen
known faces in it. The rest is history.
Even before Mr. Farooq Abdullah’s resignation as Chief Minister, JKLF
gunned down Neelkanth Ganjoo, the judge who pronounced the death
sentence on Mr. Bhat. Without break, February 11 has been a holiday for
the separatists’ calendar in Kashmir since 1990.
The day of Afzal Guru’s hanging came two days ahead of Mr. Bhat’s 29th
anniversary. Neither the JKLF, nor the Hurriyat, needed to call for
shutdown. The authorities did it for themselves. The Chief Minister was
taken on board at 8 p.m. on Saturday. The Army was separately asked to
be on high alert and swing into action for a valley-wide curfew.
It was in the dead of night that IGP Kashmir S.M. Sahai called up the
field DIGs and SPs to put them on the job of strict enforcement of
curfew. Hours later, the Chief Minister rushed from New Delhi to
implement the curfew in Srinagar. Mirwaiz Umar and Mr. Geelani followed
him from Delhi to enforce the shutdown. They failed to make their
journey. But, Kashmir remains shut. For how many days? Nobody really
knows.
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