NEW DELHI: On the night Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed, Kashmir’s streets exploded. Crowds swelled, stones were flung, and pellets were shot back. Delhi soon pointed to separatist leaders as the invisible hand behind the unrest. One of those named was Mohammad Yasin Malik, chief of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.
Malik has now pushed back with a simple claim. He wasn’t there.
In an affidavit filed in the Delhi High Court, Malik says he was picked up from his Maisuma home at about 8:30 PM on July 8, 2016, within minutes of the government hailing a “successful operation” on TV.
“I was first in police custody and then in judicial custody from the first week of July to November 2016,” he writes.
“It is humanly impossible that I could have planned, organised, or executed any protest or stone-pelting.”
He notes that in 10 days, from August 6 to 16, 2016, 89 FIRs were registered for stone-pelting, arson, and property damage.
“I am not named as accused or co-accused in any of these,” he says.
The affidavit also recalls an awkward duality. Even as he was accused of stirring unrest, the state presented him to visiting delegation of opposition leaders, including Sharad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, D. Raja, as a detainee in Srinagar Central Jail.
“A state guest for politics, a mastermind for headlines,” Malik says, calling it a contradiction that suits television more than truth.
Malik leans on a pointed metaphor: “Chole bhature and Sholay share something in common - masala. Indians love masala. Not just in food, but in stories as well.” The jab is deliberate. He argues that the official story of 2016 needed spice - a convenient villain directing mobs from an invisible control room, even while the ‘villain’ was locked up.
To understand why that metaphor lands, he says, you have to go back years before the Kokernag encounter. By 2011, the security “grid” in Kashmir had locked onto a teenager from Tral who had slipped out of his family home at 15. Burhan Wani did something unusual for a militant. He made himself visible. He looped into social media platforms, from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube, his feeds turning him into a local pin-up boy.
He posed with an AK-47, wrote emotional lines about hoisting the flag of Islam over Delhi’s Red Fort, and mixed it with images that resonated with the ordinary - cricket in the meadows, long walks in forests, boots on an outcrop at dusk.
The formula worked. During curfews and school shutdowns, young Kashmiris stuck indoors scrolled through his posts. A boy who once planned to be a doctor became a symbol that looked glamorous, local, and unfiltered. False reports of his death in 2013 only deepened his legendary popularity. He reappeared, as if resurrected, and his following swelled.
Tracked in Real Time
Behind the myth was relentless monitoring.
Quoting the book Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, Malik describes how Indian intelligence tracked Wani’s movements for years, sometimes letting him slip through despite detailed surveillance grids.
His popularity, the book argues, was amplified by both his charisma and by Delhi’s “narrative control” approach, where the story of Burhan became larger than his actual actions.
According to detailed accounts of the period, intelligence officers in Srinagar and New Delhi scrubbed Burhan’s photos for clues. They searched hill contours, a tin roof, a stand of poplars, and mapped his movement across Pulwama and beyond.
Every few days, from mid-October to mid-February in one cycle, Intelligence Bureau officers fed numeric-coded notes into the grid: whom he met, which hamlet, what time, what was said. Military units posted their own observations, including from a post near Masjid Kirmani in Pulwama. HUMINT piled up. SIGINT did too.
Burhan and his small crew understood fame. What they seemed not to grasp was how their phones turned them into blips. A Thuraya satellite set gifted by Hizbul’s central command, meant to raise his profile, made the tracking even easier. It turned him, as one officer put it, into a walking GPS coordinate.
The grid recorded every near miss.
On January 7, 2015, he was in Arigam. A week later, he was still there. But there was no raid. An STF team later reported it had “narrowly missed” him. In Tral that March, a sweep closed in, yet he slipped away. A bullet struck his left leg after a patrol opened fire on figures in the woods.
Still, he staged a daring recovery at Srinagar’s SMHS Hospital, where nurses bandaged him despite knowing who he was. An interception party came too late. He had already moved to a cousin’s house in Rajbagh. Again, there was no decisive raid.
Inside the agencies, the hesitations sparked debate. Officers asked if higher-ups wanted the local operations slowed to achieve a broader “narrative control.” The phrase, used by a senior IB officer in Srinagar, pointed to New Delhi’s belief that a managed story could be more useful than a sudden end.
The National Security Adviser’s office loomed large in those theories. No one outside the small circle knew the plan, only that the chase kept missing.
Magnet for Men and Selfies
Through 2015, Burhan had still not carried out a major operation. Yet he became a lightning rod. LeT and Jaish figures drifted toward him, attracted to what looked like a clean slate - Kashmiri, untainted by Pakistan’s debts. Names surfaced in the grid: “Shari,” “Saqib” from Noorpora, “Aqib” from Hayun. Many would soon be dead.
Civilians courted the risk of being seen with him for the promise of a photo. The selfie economy intermingled with the insurgency. RAW and IB traced contact chains as his videos and images surfed across WhatsApp, Twitter, and Gmail. Arrests under the Public Safety Act followed. In one case, investigators zeroed in on a 19-year-old top student nicknamed “Newton.” He, too, did not survive the onslaught.
HM’s central command took notice. A call from Syed Salahuddin, a man who usually avoided phones, offered missions. Burhan did not commit. His group swelled to roughly 20 young fighters. Veterans from across the Line of Control tried to reach him; the grid tracked them in alphanumeric clusters. Many never made it back.
The cost of fame hit home in May 2015, when Burhan’s brother, Khalid, carried food into the woods for a picnic-like visit. An army patrol stumbled on the scene. Burhan escaped; Khalid was detained and returned dead. The family alleged torture. Tral went into deep mourning. The grid noted Burhan’s grief and warned of plans to snatch weapons in revenge. Still, his own trigger finger remained idle. Others acted, he stayed back. The myth grew.
After Kokernag
By July 2016, the grid picked up Burhan moving through south Kashmir with young cadres. One stop was a tin-and-brick house in Bamdora, near Anantnag, where a relative fussed over the guests and urged them to rest. A tip reached 19 Rashtriya Rifles. The police liaison probed quietly, even sounding out a neighbour facing charges, who said a “troublesome” guest was in the house.
The cordon closed. A neighbour warned the family. Burhan told the women to run. He and two companions bolted toward the trees, hoping to repeat the old trick. This time, soldiers had orders to fire. He fell within meters of the door.
The news hit like a shock wave. “A morale-crushing kill,” a senior IB officer in Srinagar later called it. Graffiti went up fast. Intersections were renamed “Burhan Chowk.” His funeral in Shareefabad drew a sea of mourners; prayers were offered again and again as waves kept arriving. He was buried beside Khalid. The graveyard became a shrine.
Streets erupted. Stones rained on bunkers and convoys. Live fire, metal pellets, and later chilli grenades tore through the crowds. Within four days, around 50 were dead. A 14-year-old girl, Insha Mushtaq, was blinded by a volley of pellets.
The Valley slid into one of its longest lockdowns. The Internet was cut. The highway shut down. By autumn, more than 150 civilians were dead and roughly 17,000 people were injured, including hundreds with ruptured eyes recorded at SMHS. Operations All-Out followed; more than 200 were killed.
The ledger of that summer is grim. More than 150 civilians were killed. Thousands were injured. Hundreds were blinded or partly blinded. Schools were shut for months. Thousands were detained under the PSA.
Malik’s Blunt Question
Malik’s affidavit asks a blunt question: how could a man in continuous custody pilot that storm?
The document lays out a minute-by-minute details. The government announced Wani’s killing; within about three minutes, the police were at his door; by 8:30 p.m., he was under arrest; two days later, he was shifted from Kothibagh Police Station, then to Srinagar Central Jail; then on to judicial custody. He points to the absence of his name in FIRs registered during the peak weeks of violence.
There is another, quieter contradiction he underlines. While Delhi’s narrative cast him as the hand behind the scenes, the administration also used his detention as a talking point with visiting leaders. He says Sharad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, and D. Raja were taken to meet him in custody. As Malik hints, it was a message of dialogue outward, a message of conspiracy inward.
The intelligence record around Wani adds texture, and it matters to Malik’s defence. HUMINT reports mapped Burhan’s every circle. SIGINT mapped his every ping. Thuraya calls were back-traced to Pakistan, one identified as Khurshid Aamir. RAW and NTRO watched border infiltrations shaped around him. The grid identified safe houses, touts, and sympathisers - down to a local schoolteacher and an “overground worker” noted in a February 2015 sighting near Tral. Raids were proposed, delayed, or cancelled. Again and again, he slipped.
Inside agencies, some officers wondered aloud if the delays were part of a higher-order design: let the symbol inflate; let the story ripen; then end it on terms set in Delhi. They called it “narrative control.” When the end came in July 2016, the result was not closure. It was combustion.
For a court parsing Malik’s custody timeline, the spy-story backdrop does not acquit or convict. But it does reframe causality. If the state’s own grid monitored Wani in real time, and if the summer’s explosion was a largely organic burst after a galvanising death, then pinning orchestration on a man in a jail cell reads more like ‘masala’ than material fact.
This is where Malik’s line lands. “Chole bhature and Sholay have masala in common,” he says. “Indians love masala. Not just in food, but in stories.”
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