Hurriyat triumphant over withdrawal of Dogra order

‘Govt bowed on Certificate today; India will buckle on Azadi tomorrow’

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Apr 29: Withdrawal of Dogra Certificate order by Omar Abdullah government has instantaneously brought a sense of pride and victory in the Valley’s separatist camp. Heads of both factions of Hurriyat Conference, Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, today celebrated the revocation as “a great achievement for the Kashmiris” and told their Friday audiences that India would be forced in the same manner one day to grant the Jammu and Kashmir “freedom”.

“We have forced them bow and withdraw Dogra Certificate (order). This is a great achievement for the proud Kashmiri people. This is now clear that our freedom struggle will reach its logical conclusion one day in future and India will have to bend on our demand of Azadi”, Geelani told a Friday prayers congregation at a mosque at Bandipore. He asserted that nothing was impossible for the Kashmiris, should they demonstrate this kind of resilience and perseverance. He expressed his gratitude to the Kashmiris, who, he said, had stood behind him in his agitation against the March 25^th Government order with the beginning of a shutdown on April 11^th.

Geelani had threatened trouble for the 28-month-old coalition government in case it failed to rollback its order on issuance of a certificate, exclusively to residents of Jammu division, by April 30^th. Two days before Geelani’s deadline, Government yesterday superseded its March 25^th and April 7^th orders by a fresh order, making the Dogra Certificate completely invalid and irrelevant.

A high-spirited Geelani, however, emphasized that a peaceful agitation was “more profitable than stone pelting” in the struggle of achieving the political goal of “freedom”. “I am not issuing a decree against or in favour of stone pelting. But, it is everybody’s observation that during last year’s stone pelting, we lost 118 of our young boys and none of the Indian soldiers died”, Geelani asserted. He emphatically advised his audiences not to call the troopers as “Indian dogs” and said that denigration of even the enemy soldiers was forbidden in Islam.

Probably for the first time in his 60-year-long political career, Geelani said that the Kashmiris and the Indian soldiers were “brothers by the relation of humanity”. He sought to make it clear that the Kashmiris’ conflict was with the “Indian Government” that, according to him, would be forced one day in future to grant “freedom” to Jammu & Kashmir. He claimed that not only every Kashmiri but also all residents of Doda, Kishtwar, Rajouri and Poonch districts were his followers in the “freedom struggle”.

Geelani claimed that Dileep Padgaonkar-led interlocutors had been fielded by New Delhi only for the purpose of splitting the separatist leadership. He asserted that it was a team that had neither mandate nor competence to resolve the Kashmir dispute politically as its recommendations would not be binding on the union Government. He reiterated that Hurriyat was ready to enter a dialogue process with Government of India but it could never be initiated until the Centre conceded “our core condition”---declaration of J&K as a disputed territory.

Meanwhile, in a separate statement, a spokesman of Geelani’s political organisation, Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, claimed that the Government had fallen into “frustration and nervousness” over the hardline leader’s deadline and under this pressure it had withdrawn the Dogra Certificate order.

While delivering his weekly sermon at the Friday prayers congregation at Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, head of Hurriyat’s “moderate faction” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq too felicitated the Kashmiris on making the Government bow. He described yesterday’s order of Revenue Department as the Government’s surrender before the Kashmiri masses. “It’s a great achievement”, he added.

“Jammu and Kashmir is an internationally accepted disputed state. (Legislative) Assembly has no competence to make laws like the one on Dogra Certificate until final resolution of the dispute”, Mirwaiz said. He asked his audiences to remain vigilant so that no anti-Kashmiri legislation was made in the Assembly. He reminded Chief Minister Omar Abdullah his own statements of October 2008 and asked the Government to restrict its business to just providing roads, electricity and power. “Pro-India politicians have no business to make political deliberations in the Assembly”, Mirwaiz said.

Like Geelani, Mirwaiz too claimed that all Kashmiris, besides residents of entire Doda and Poonch-Rajouri belts, were for “freedom from India”. “Two-and-a-half (Hindu-dominated) districts of Jammu would never be allowed to determine “this disputed state’s future”, Mirwaiz grumbled.

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