SRINAGAR: For more than three decades, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik has faced allegations that he and the militant movement he once led were responsible for violence against Kashmiri Pandits and contributed to their flight from the Kashmir Valley.
But in a newly filed affidavit, Malik offers personal counter-narratives.
He recalls friendships and unusually warm encounters with Kashmiri Pandit journalists, one of whom accompanied him through the forests of Yousmarg and another who met him in the gardens around Delhi's India Gate.
Malik highlights that they felt safe in his company.
"Why is it that certain members of the Kashmiri Pandit community, when meeting me privately, speak to me with affection and regard me as a family member," Malik asks, while some of the same sections publicly blame him for Pandit killings and their migration.
The affidavit, filed before the Additional Sessions Judge, TADA/POTA Court, Srinagar, is Malik's testimony in the case concerning the 1990 killing of Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat. The State Investigation Agency filed a chargesheet on June 29, 2026, naming Malik among the accused, more than three decades after Bhat was killed. Malik denies involvement and disputes the prosecution's case.
Beyond the legal arguments, however, several passages read almost like a memoir of Malik's complicated encounters with members of the Pandit community. He uses them to argue that the public image of him as someone intrinsically hostile to Kashmiri Pandits is inconsistent with his personal relationships and conduct.
Perhaps the most striking episode concerns Kashmiri Pandit journalist Aarti Tikoo, who later became a prominent public voice on the displacement and suffering of Kashmiri Pandits.
Malik says Tikoo had initially strongly opposed his decision to establish an office in Jammu. Their relationship apparently changed after she joined The Times of India and interviewed him.
He says he subsequently invited Tikoo and her husband, the son of IAS officer B.R. Singh, to dinner at his residence. According to Malik, Tikoo introduced her husband and described Malik as being "like a close friend and family member."
The relationship described in the affidavit went beyond formal journalist-source interaction.
Malik says that on another occasion Tikoo came to his residence and expressed a desire to visit the revered Charar-e-Sharief shrine in central Kashmir. Malik accompanied her.
From Charar-e-Sharief, the two travelled to Yousmarg, the picturesque meadow and forest area about 10 kilometres away.
Malik says they were walking through the forest when an Army Colonel recognised him and approached.
Tikoo introduced herself as a The Times of India journalist. The officer offered them tea, which they declined.
What Malik says the Colonel told him forms the centrepiece of the anecdote: the officer had heard many negative things about Malik but was surprised to find "an educated Kashmiri Pandit woman feeling safe and secure" while travelling with him through a forest.
Kashmir Times reached out to Aarti Tikoo to get her version of the story. She, however, has not responded. This report will be updated if she replies and her version will be carried in full.
Off Camera
The Tikoo episode is not Malik's only example.
He goes back to 1997, when actor Shatrughan Sinha hosted a Zee TV programme called Shot Gun Show. Malik says he appeared on an episode devoted to the migration of Kashmiri Pandits alongside veteran journalist Kuldeep Nayar and Panun Kashmir leader Agnishekhar.
The studio audience, according to the affidavit, included between 70 and 80 Kashmiri Pandits, ranging from young people to elderly men and women.
During the recording, Malik recalls, several audience members fiercely criticised him and accused him of causing their community's suffering.
Then the cameras stopped.
At a lunch arranged by Sinha's wife, Poonam Sinha, Malik says the mood changed dramatically. Many of those who had confronted him during the programme approached him warmly. The gathering became emotional, with what Malik describes as expressions of "affection and reconciliation."
Malik says that as he was leaving Sahara Studio in Mumbai, he overheard the producer's wife expressing astonishment at the contrast. The people who had attacked him before the cameras, she reportedly observed, had behaved very differently toward him once the recording ended.
She suggested, according to Malik, that the programme should be broadcast without editing. Malik says he understood that the unedited recording was subsequently shown over three consecutive weeks.
It is precisely this difference between public confrontation and private warmth that Malik repeatedly asks the court to consider.
Evening at India Gate
Even more intriguing is Malik's account of an unnamed Delhi-based female journalist in 1996.
The affidavit identifies her as Kashmiri but does not name her.
According to Malik, the journalist telephoned him seeking an interview. He invited her to dinner at his residence.
Two of Malik's friends were present and were speaking Kashmiri. Malik says the journalist became upset because, being Kashmiri herself, she thought they were discussing her.
Malik's elder sister intervened, embraced the journalist and gave her, her own wedding pheran as a gesture of affection. Malik says the journalist was "deeply moved" and happy.
Their contact continued.
When Malik was later admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi under cardiologist Dr Upendra Kaul, the same journalist visited him twice.
A day before he was due to return to Srinagar, the journalist called and asked him to meet her for coffee at India Gate.
The two sat in the gardens surrounding India Gate, an area that, particularly in those years, was a popular evening destination for Delhi residents.
Malik says a police party headed by an inspector approached them and began questioning them about their identities and "relationship."
Police then directed both of them into the same taxi Malik had been using. According to him, officers drove them around parts of Delhi before eventually telling them they were free to go.
Malik says the encounter made him suspicious. He asked the journalist whether she had links with intelligence agencies. She denied it.
Six days later, he says, The Indian Express published a half-page report about the encounter, raising questions about his meeting with the woman and the circumstances in which police had allegedly found them.
Malik says he regarded the report as deeply distressing and damaging to his reputation.
Months later, according to the affidavit, the woman called him from Dubai, where she had taken a job. She feared JKLF members or sympathisers might harm her because of what had happened.
Malik cites his response as evidence for his defence in the Sarla Bhat case. Despite believing that the episode had harmed his reputation, he says he neither threatened the journalist nor authorised retaliation against her.
"I neither threatened her nor caused any harm to her," he states.
Night in Pandit Colony
Another episode in the affidavit moves away from journalists and directly addresses security fears among displaced Pandits.
Malik recalls an incident in 2014 when Syed Afadul Mujtaba, then a senior police officer and later Inspector General of police in Kashmir, contacted him about a migrant colony in Budgam.
According to Malik, residents of the colony had received threatening letters purportedly issued by an unidentified militant organisation and were frightened.
Malik says the police officer asked him to visit them.
Malik says he went to the migrant colony and remained there with its residents until midnight, attempting to provide "confidence, reassurance and a sense of security."
The anecdote is significant to Malik's broader defence because he presents himself not simply as someone who maintained personal friendships with Pandits but as someone whom a senior police officer could approach when Pandits themselves felt threatened.
Pandits Who Stayed
Malik also points to Kashmiri Pandits and other non-Muslims who continued to live or work in areas associated with separatist politics and unrest.
He asks why Pandit shopkeepers in Maisuma continued their businesses there and what gave them confidence not to migrate.
He extends the question to non-Muslim residents and shopkeepers in Dalgate, Residency Road, Lal Chowk, Koker Bazaar, Sarai Bala and Hari Singh High Street, asking who supported them and gave them confidence to remain.
He specifically names well-known Kashmiri Pandit professionals Dr Upendra Kaul and Dr Anil Bhan and businessman I.K. Raina, asking what persuaded them to continue their professional activities in Kashmir and whether their presence helped rebuild trust between Pandits and Muslims.
These are Malik's questions rather than independently established conclusions, but they reveal the central theme running through this part of his affidavit: he wants his relationship with the Pandit community judged not solely through political accusations but also through individual encounters.
Malik also invokes some of the darkest episodes involving killings of Kashmiri Pandits.
He recalls reaching Wandhama with JKLF colleagues on the day Pandits were massacred there and says they helped arrange the victims' cremation.
Malik says Ali Mohammad Sagar, then a Jammu and Kashmir minister, and P.S. Gill, Inspector General of Police for operations, were also present. He recalls a young IPS officer appreciating the JKLF group's assistance and saying they had arrived and made arrangements before others.
The affidavit contains another striking memory from Doda.
Malik says he reached the site of a massacre in the Doda foothills at about 10.00 PM, where senior BJP leader Nirmal Singh, who later became Jammu and Kashmir's deputy chief minister, was present at the cremation site.
According to Malik, Singh remarked that he had told those around him that Malik would "most certainly come here."
He also says he publicly mourned Pandit victims, condemned massacres, called shutdowns and participated in cremations.
By recalling memories of dinner tables, television studios, migrant colonies and cremation grounds, he asks one question.
How, in effect, could a man whom some Pandits privately treated as a friend or family member, whom a Pandit journalist felt safe accompanying through a forest, and whom police allegedly asked to reassure frightened Pandit migrants, simultaneously be portrayed as inherently hostile to the entire community?
It is a question Malik puts before the court, while deciding not to defend his case.
Whether those personal memories can carry weight against the criminal allegations is now for the judicial process to determine.
(This news article has been updated with addition of Part-IV)
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