Mohammad Sayeed Malik
In their respective public lives, Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq and Abdul Ghani Lone had practically nothing in common. Yet, they were destined to share a tragic common fate: Both were assassinated on May 21 — the former in 1990 and the latter in 2002.
Mirwaiz Farooq, with a revered urban pedigree, headed the ‘separatist’ Awami Action Committee floated by Maulana Mohammad Sayeed Masoodi in 1964 in the wake of the Holy Relic agitation in Kashmir.
Abdul Ghani Lone, with rustic lineage from a remote Handwara village in north Kashmir, came into the political limelight as a self-made Congress MLA from Handwara in 1967 under GM Sadiq’s leadership and eventually floated his own ‘pro-autonomy’ Peoples Conference in the 1970s.
In his last lap, Lone jumped on to the Hurriyat bandwagon though ‘insiders’ in that separatist outfit were never comfortable in his company and made it known to him openly and not-so-openly.
More often than naught, the two basic parallel streams adopted by Mirwaiz and Lone looked as chalk and cheese in terms of their political ideologies.
Mirwaiz flirted between soft separatism and mainstream politics but always taking care to pull himself back from the brink.
Lone was temperamental but politically shrewd which also explains his journey from pro-India Congress to pro-autonomy Peoples Conference via Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s amorphous political ideology and ultimately that under the Hurriyat’s shadow.
Today, both Mirwaiz and Lone lie buried in ‘Shaheed Mazar’ near Idgah in Srinagar which came up during the armed insurgency in 1990s.
While Mirwaiz was gunned down on May 21, 1990 by ‘unidentified militants’ at his Hazratbal residence, Lone was killed in a militant attack at the Idgah Shaheed Mazar itself where he had gone with several other separatist leaders to pay homage to the slain Mirwaiz on his 12th death anniversary.
Now, when the politico-ideological landscape of the border state has been upturned beyond recognition, the perception of the ‘martyrdom’ of Mirwaiz and Lone hangs in balance with their progenies standing poles apart.
Both have since been succeeded by their respective sons, Mirwaiz Ummar Farooq and Sajjad Ghani Lone, belonging to two different camps.
Their story forms a small but significant chapter of Kashmir’s recent history which itself is yet to take a clearly definable shape and complexion.
But one thing is certain: things aren’t going to be the same any more in and about Kashmir.
Familiar old landmarks have disappeared and new ones are yet to show up clearly.
Even so, if and when that part of the Kashmir history is written names of Mirwaiz Farooq and Abdul Ghani Lone would figure in it prominently.
Tragically, however, it might remain an intriguing mystery as to who actually killed them or got them killed and why.
In local parlance, ‘unidentified’ gunmen are usually taken as pro-Pakistan militants. But then both, Mirwaiz and Lone were perceived to belong to the ‘separatist’ camp, as against the ‘mainstream’ camp. Lone had travelled that path in the 1990s via the Hurriyat Conference.
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