JKLF chairman Yasin Malik will go on for hunger unto death

The chairman of banned Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Yasin Malik has issued a will, according to his family, in which he has written that he will go on for a hunger strike unto death inside Tihar jail from July 22. 

“I have decided to go in the fasting to death from 22 July 2022,” Yasin Malik, who had previously decided to start the hunger strike in July 12 but were postponed on the request of jail authorities, seeking a fair trial and physical presence in the court in two cases against him, concluded in his will. 

Yasin Malik remains lodged in solitary confinement in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. On May 19, he was convicted by an anti-terror court in Kashmir. The charges against him carry a miximum sentence of death penalty or life imprisonment.

During his online appearance from Tihar jail in Airforce case Yasin Malik told the judge on June 13 that he had written to Indian government that “if his just and legal demands for a fair trial and personal appearance in court to help him defend himself by cross-examining the witnesses were not accepted he would be left with no option but to go for an indefinite hunger strike in the prison from July 22.”

“If seeking freedom is a crime then I am ready to accept this crime and its consequences,” Malik had told the court. “I have still been deliberately deprived of the basic right to defend myself which constitutes a straight violation of Article 14 and Article 21 of the Constitution but is also not in strict compliance of Section 137, 139, 145 and 273 of the Code of the Criminal Procedure,” the chairman of JKLF, noted.

The chairman of the separatist outfit JKLF, that was banned in 2019, is facing a life sentence in connection with a terror funding case. While the trials in two cases of kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the then union home minister Mufti Saeed, and alleged killing of four Indian Air Force officials in 1990.

On May 27, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) served two life sentences and varying jail terms to him, which will all run concurrently, under the Unlawful Activities and (Prevention) Act, and the IPC. 

The chairman had last week moved an application to the government of India seeking the personal appearances in the two cases. As per reports the spokesperson of the JKLF, Mohammad Rafiq Dar, also termed the non-presentation of the chairman in the courts as “illegal, inhumane and undemocratic”. “The JKLF besides Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi will hold token hunger strike camps in AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan on July 21, 22 and 23,” the statement added.

While the NIA in their investigation found that Yasin Malik has been instrumental in bringing the disparate factions of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and had formed the Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL) which were spearheading the summer uprising in 2016, JRF used to issue protest calendars that kept the region on the edge.

In March, the court while framing charges against him, of receiving terror funds directly to orchestrate unlawful activities in Kashmir, added that there existed a “criminal conspiracy pursuant to which large-scale protests, resulting in violence and arson at a massive scale”. (IANS)