Hardline Hurriyat Conference announces Masrat Alam as Geelani’s successor

It said that Shabir Ahmad Shah and Ghulam Ahmad Gulzar have been elected as vice chairmen

Days after the death of hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani, Hurriyat Conference announced that incarcerated Masrat Alam Bhat will be the new chairman of the separatist amalgam.

A statement of the hardline faction of the Hurriyat said that the amalgam took the decision at a meeting held in Srinagar on Tuesday. “Considering the challenges, Hurriyat members have consulted through different mediums and have unanimously agreed that Masrat Alam Bhat will be made the chairman,” it said.

Apart from Bhat’s ascension, Shabir Ahmad Shah and Ghulam Ahmed Gulzar were elected as vice-chairmen, and Molvi Bashir Ahmed Irfani as the general secretary of the Hurriyat, it added.

Nonagenarian Geelani passed away at his uptown Hyderpora residence on September 1 and was buried the same night a few hundred meters away from his home. He had formed the hardliner faction of the Hurriyat in 2003 and was his lifetime chairman. But despite him resigning as its chairman last July, the separatist amalgam had not announced a new head until Geelani’s death.

Read more: Denial of last rites to Geelani's family against humanity: Mehbooba

The appointments are temporary till elections are held according to the Hurriyat constitution, the faction said.

Who is Masrat Alam Bhat?

Bhat, who was charge-sheeted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in October 2019, is at present lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail. He rose to prominence during the 2008 Amarnath land row agitation. His role in the unrest put him into the public eye and realizing his newfound political clout, the authorities arrested him for 21 months.

Days before 2010 summer unrest broke out in Kashmir in which 120 protesters were killed in security forces firing, Bhat was released from the prison. For the next four months, he spearheaded the protests in Kashmir by formulating the protest calendars. He was finally arrested in October 2010 and remains under detention since then.

In 2013 Alam was not released even after the Supreme Court disposed of his petition and ordered that no fresh detention order should come against him for a week, to give him time to mount a legal defence.

Bhat, an alumnus of Kashmir’s prestigious missionary school Tyndale Biscoe, was first arrested in 1990 and was released more than a year later, in November 1991. He was detained for a second time in 1993 and kept in custody for more than four years and was released in February 1997.

The 50-year-old, a resident of the old city Zaindar Mohalla in Srinagar, has been unapologetically pro-Pakistan and anti-India voice. He has proudly claimed that he has been a stone thrower since his childhood, maintaining that throwing stones was the only form of resistance for the Kashmiri people.

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