Jailed Kashmiri separatist Yasin Malik has claimed he had since 1990 been engaged by “six consecutive” governments, from V.P. Singh’s to Manmohan Singh’s, to help resolve the Kashmir issue by holding dialogues in India and abroad.
In an affidavit before Delhi High Court, the 59-year-old former militant has further said that he met Lashkar-e-Toiba chief Hafiz Saeed and other militants in Pakistan in 2006 at the request of then Intelligence Bureau (IB) special director V.K. Joshi.
Malik, lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail and serving a life term since 2022 for terror funding, also claims that national security adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval had met him in jail in 2000, when he was IB special director, and later arranged meetings with the then IB director and NSA.
Underlining the scale of his purported involvement with the Indian political establishment, Malik says he had met Sonia Gandhi and communist leaders to secure support for then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s peace process in Kashmir.
Malik further claims to have had dialogues with senior RSS leaders, and says two Shankaracharyas made multiple visits to his home in Srinagar and held news conferences with him.
In the affidavit, the chief of the banned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front denies various allegations against him, such as the genocide and gang-rape of Kashmiri Pandits and support for stone-throwing protests following militant poster boy Burhan Wani’s encounter death in 2016.
The affidavit was filed in response to the National Investigation Agency’s appeal to enhance Malik’s life term to a death penalty in terror-funding cases. The matter is scheduled for hearing on November 10.
Malik, one of the top leaders of the insurgency that broke out in Kashmir in 1989-90, faces many other cases, including the 1990 abduction of then Union home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s daughter Rubaiyya.
Seven PMs
While Malik says that six governments at the Centre enlisted his help in their efforts to resolve the Kashmir issue, he actually names seven Prime Ministers.
“After my arrest in 1990, I was actively engaged by six (6) consecutive dispensations under the leadership of VP Singh, ChandraShekhar, PV Narsimha Rao, HG Devagauda (HD Deve Gowda), Inder Kumar Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee till Manmohan Singh,” Malik, who is arguing his case himself, says in the 86-page affidavit, parts of which are poorly drafted.
“Not only, I was (sic) provided domestic platform to speak about the Kashmiri cause, but I was actively roped in time and again by the said governments in power and was actively persuaded to speak on international platforms.”
Meeting Saeed
On then IB special director Joshi’s purported request to him, Malik says: “I was specifically requested for this meeting with Hafiz Saeed and other militant leaders of Pakistan on the pretext that militancy and peace dialogues cannot go in tandem….”
He claims that after returning to India from this meeting, he met then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and national security adviser M.K. Narayanan and briefed them about it.
“I briefed him (Manmohan] on my meetings and appraised him on the possibilities, where he conveyed his gratitude me for my efforts, time, patience and dedication,” he says.
“But as luck would have, it (is) this meeting of mine with Hafiz Saeed and other militant leader of Pakistan whichwas initiated and executed only on the request of Special Director IB VK Joshi, were portrayed in a different context against me.”
Vajpayee, Doval
After his arrest in 1990, Malik was released in 1994. He was booked under the Public Safety Act in 1999, during a crackdown on Kashmiri leaders, and lodged in a jail in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.
A year later, he was transferred to Tihar where, he claims, Doval visited him and told him he would be released. “In the same evening I was released,” Malik says.
In the year 2000-2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee declared a Ramzan ceasefire.
“Then Special IB Director Ajit Kumar Doval met me in New Delhi and arranged a meeting for me with IB Director Shyamal Dutta & Mr Brajesh Mishra, National Security Advisor to the then Prime Minister independently,” the affidavit says.
“They both stated that our Prime Minister is serious in the talk’s (sic) process to resolve the Kashmir issue, and that I should support his Ramzan ceasefire.”
RSS meeting
“In 2011, the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation (a think tank) facilitated a marathon of a meeting between RSS leadership and me at India International Center and it lasted for good5 hours,” Malik says.
“Again the question arises that instead of keeping an arm’s length distance from me or rather not touching someone like me with a ten-foot pole, be it RSS’s leadership even RSS Organization’s think tank Vivekananda Institute’s Chairperson Admiral KK Nair frequently invited me to his residence in New Delhi for luncheons and also at India International Centre.”