EDITORIAL: Not content with jailing Yasin Malik, leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, the Indian government now wants him dead. During his trial last year in a special court he had stayed firm on his right to resist occupation pleading guilty on the charge of funding the separatist movement, and refusing the government offer to appoint a defence lawyer for him.
The court had rejected the plea of India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) to award him death sentence, maintaining that capital punishment is for a crime that “shocks the collective conscience” of society.
He was handed life imprisonment. Yet last week, a year later – ignoring the country’s own law under which an appeal against a court’s decision can be filed within 90 days — the NIA approached the Delhi High Court, seeking death sentence for Malik. How the case is to turn out is anybody’s guess.
Malik has been in and out of jail since 1990 for his role in the Kashmiri people’s armed struggle against Indian rule, changing strategy with changing circumstances but never making any compromise on his principled stance.
In 1994, he gave up armed resistance announcing that he would peacefully campaign for the resolution of the Kashmir issue. In 2006, when the then Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh had decided to find a way of settling the issue, Malik held talks with him along with other leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference — an umbrella organisation of several pro-independence groups.
Unfortunately, that initiative did not go far due to some unanticipated developments on a different front. Meanwhile, completely alienated from India, a new generation of Kashmiris has kept asserting their right to freedom. Despite brutal repression their chants of “Azadi (freedom)” and “Go India go” have grown louder and louder all these years.
In 2018, months before the Narendra Modi government’s August 2019 illegal and immoral move to revoke the special status of Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K) Yasin Malik was arrested yet again. It now wants one of the leading independence figures to go to the gallows.
His distraught wife, British-born Mushaal Malik who lives in Islamabad along with their young daughter, has urged the Pakistan government to raise the issue at international forums.
Others in the IIOJ&K have warned New Delhi against awarding him death penalty, saying the NIA’s plea is “dangerous” and that “justice is not a path taken vindictively.”
It can only be hoped the Delhi High Court or in the event the Supreme Court is involved at a later point will not allow themselves to be influenced by the prevailing political environment in that country, and take a lenient view of the case.
The UN Charter recognises a people’s right to resist occupation. No one should be allowed to take away that right to liberty through resort to naked force or oppression.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.