Jailed separatist Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, who was the front-runner to succeed ailing hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani as the leader of the hardliners, died in a Jammu hospital on Wednesday, triggering allegations in Kashmir that the 77-year-old had been left unattended in prison till his condition deteriorated.

Sehrai has spent years in jail and was arrested the last time in May 2020 after his militant son Junaid died in a gunfight in Srinagar. The government had apprehended that Sehrai might don the mantle of the azaadi movement in the absence of Geelani who has retreated from public life because of his failing health.

Hospital sources said Sehrai had developed pneumonia at Udhampur jail. He was taken to the Government Medical College Hospital in Jammu on Tuesday. The RT-PCR test result to confirm Covid is awaited.

A spokesman for the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, quoting family sources, said Sehrai had been suffering from multiple ailments. He alleged that the authorities did not attend to Sehrai in jail until his condition worsened on Tuesday.

“The APHC (All-Party Hurriyat Conference) deeply regrets this inhumane attitude of the authorities and is pained by it,” the statement said.

Sehrai had emerged as an ideal candidate to lead the hardline separatist camp after his son Junaid, an MBA graduate, died in a gunfight on May 19 last year.

Geelani is incapacitated, in house arrest, and has rarely issued a statement in the past two years, while other senior leaders are in jail.

Senior separatists, including Geelani, have been accused by critics of preaching violence to the ordinary Kashmiri but suggesting peace to their own families so that none of their kin picks up arms.

Sehrai is a hardliner like Geelani and had been his close aide for decades. But he appeared angry with Geelani for choosing silence in the aftermath of the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. There have been rumours that Geelani had not protested for fear of his immediate family being hounded by government agencies. The NIA had in the run-up to the cancellation of the special status questioned Geelani’s two sons in a terror-funding case.

“You should know there was no consultation with us (over the silence),” Sehrai, who headed the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, a constituent of the hardline Hurriyat faction, told this correspondent during an interaction with a group of journalists at his residence in November 2019.

Sehrai had said the initiative to protest against the move should have come from Geelani or the Mirwaiz, adding that they had “been issuing protest calendars all these years”.

Sehrai had said he too was waiting for Geelani and the Mirwaiz to launch a movement and had reached out to the duo’s aides but there was “no response”.

Sehrai’s family had repeatedly requested the Jammu and Kashmir administration to release him “because of his failing health in jail”.

Former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti said he had paid a price for his ideology.

“Deeply saddened to know about Ashraf Sehrai sahab’s sudden demise. Like him, countless political prisoners & other detainees from J&K continue to be jailed purely for their ideologies & thought process. In today’s India one pays a price with his life for dissent,” the PDP leader tweeted.

People’s Conference leader Sajad Lone, who is believed to be in the good books of the central government after he parted ways with an alliance fighting for the restoration of Article 370 provisions, regretted Sehrai’s death in incarceration.

“Why did he have to die in incarceration and not at his home amongst his kin and loved ones? Have we become so weak that an old, infirm, dying person is a threat to the state? I am not being critical. But please introspect. Sehrai Sahib was a political leader, not a terrorist,” Lone tweeted.