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Syed Ali Shah Geelani (b. September 29, 1929, Zoori Munz, Kashmir and Jammu, British India – d. September 1, 2021, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India) was an Islamist, pro-Pakistan separatist leader in Jammu and Kashmir, regarded as the father of the Kashmiri jihad. He was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir between 1953 and 2004, and regarded as one of its top leaders. He left Jamaat in 2004 and founded Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, a key constituent of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), a conglomeration of separatist parties in Kashmir. Geelani served as the Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference until he quit the group in June 2020. Geelani was also a three-time Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Sopore constituency, elected on a Jamaat-e-Islami ticket in 1972, 1977 and in 1987.
Syed Ali Geelani was born in 1929 in a village called Zurimanj, in the Bandipora tehsil (now Sopore tehsil), in the Baramulla district of northern Jammu and Kashmir. He was the son of a landless laborer in the canals department. Geelani was educated partly in Sopore and the rest in Lahore, Punjab, British India. He studied in a madrasa attached to the Masjid Wazir Khan and later enrolled in the Oriental College. He completed Adib 'Alim, a course in Islamic theology.
Returning to Kashmir after studies in Lahore, Geelani became active in the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference. He was appointed the secretary of the party unit in Zurimanz. In 1946, during the Quit Kashmir movement of the National Conference, he came in contact with Maulana Sayeed Masoodi, the general secretary of the National Conference, who took a liking to him and made him a reporter to the party newspaper Akhbar-i-Khidmat.
Masoodi also sponsored further studies for Geelani, who completed an adib-i-fazil course in Urdu and other courses in Persian and English. After this, he took a job as a school teacher, first at Pathar Masjid and later at Rainawari in Srinagar. Here he came in contact with Saaduddin Tarabali, a follower of the Jamaat-e-Islami founder Maulana Abul A'la Maududi. Maududi advocated a hardline Islamist ideology, whereby Islam had to be the foundation of the entire political order. Geelani had borrowed a book of Maududi from the local book store, which made a deep impression upon him.
Geelani was soon moved out of Srinagar, and he came to work in the Intermediate College in Sopore. He stayed in this position for six years. During this time, he read the literature of Jamaat-e-Islami and conveyed its contents to his students in lectures. He also addressed congregations in mosques. He became a full-fledged member of Jamaat in 1952. He remained in Jamaat until 2003, when he was removed by the party leadership from the position of their representative.
Geelani was viewed as a key separatist leader in Kashmir. Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, blamed Geelani for the rise in militancy and bloodshed in Kashmir, while Omar's father and former Union Minister Farooq Abdullah urged Geelani to follow a path which would save Kashmiri people from further destruction. In October 2013 Geelani was re-elected for the fourth time to serve a three-year term as the chairman of Hurriyat Conference (G), a faction of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which split up in 2003. He founded the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party, to which he was separately re-elected as chairman for a three-year term in September 2013.
Geelani called for numerous general strikes or shutdowns, in response to the deaths of unnamed suspected militants, local militants and death of civilians in Kashmir.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani received the invitation to participate in the annual meeting of the foreign ministers of member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Kashmir Contact Group to be held in New York from September 27, 2015.
After the death of Burhan Muzaffar Wani and the ongoing 2016 Kashmir Unrest that lasted for five consecutive months, to restore normalcy in Kashmir, Geelani sent a letter to United Nations listing six Confidence Building measures (CBMS).
On November 29, 2010, Geelani, along with writer Arundhati Roy, activist Varavara Rao, and three others, was charged under sections 124A (sedition), 153A (promoting enmity between classes), 153B (imputations and assertions prejudicial to national integration), 504 (insult intended to provoke breach of peace) and 505 (false statemenr or rumor circulated with intent to cause mutiny or offence against public peace...) to be read with Section 13 of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967. The charges, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, were the result of a self-titled seminar they gave in New Delhi, "Azadi - the Only Way" on October 21, 2010, at which Geelani was heckled.
Geelani's passport was seized in 1981 due to accusations of "anti-India" activities. With the exception of his Hajj pilgrimage in 2006, Geelani was not allowed to leave India. However, he was diagnosed with renal cancer, and advised treatment from abroad in the same year. Due to the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's intervention, the government returned Geelani's passport to his son.
In 2007, Geelani's condition worsened. Although in the early stages of the cancer, it was life-threatening and surgery was advised. Geelani was set to travel to either the United Kingdom or the United States. However, Geelani's visa request was rejected by the American government citing his violent approach in the Kashmir conflict. Geelani was forced to go to Mumbai for surgery. His supporters and family alleged that this was a human rights violation.
On March 6, 2014, Geelani fell ill with a severe chest infection, shortly after returning to his home in Srinagar. He was under house arrest for most of the time after 2010, and was put under house arrest again on his return. In May 2015, Geelani applied for a passport to visit his daughter in Saudi Arabia. The Indian government withheld it citing technical reasons, including the fact that he deliberately failed to fill in the nationality column required in the application. On July 21, 2015 the Government granted Geelani a passport on humanitarian grounds, with a validity of nine months, after Geelani acknowledged his nationality as an Indian.
After the 2019 Pulwana attack, India took stronger action against pro-Pakistan separatists including Geelani.
Geelani died around 10:30 p.m. on September 1, 2021 at his Hyderpora residence in Srinagar, due to prolonged illness.
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Syed Ali Geelani, Separatist Leader in Kashmir, Dies at 91
Mr. Geelani was an uncompromising opponent of the Indian government’s control of the Kashmir valley and favored Pakistani sovereignty over the mostly Muslim region.
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Syed Ali Geelani, an influential and uncompromising leader of the separatist movement in Kashmir who refused to engage with India over the future of that troubled Himalayan region, died on Wednesday while under house arrest in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his son Naseem. He did not specify a cause but said his father had been struggling with heart and kidney disease for the past two decades and dementia more recently.
Even in death Mr. Geelani showed he could make the region’s Indian-led authorities nervous: They shut down the internet across the Kashmir valley when word of his death spread and beefed up security forces patrolling empty streets.
The police took his body away just hours after he died, Naseem Geelani said, leading to a quiet funeral for a resistance leader who could once summon thousands of people into the streets to protest.
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For years Mr. Geelani resisted dialogue with India over the future of Kashmir, a picturesque valley of eight million people, most of them Muslim. Controlled by India, the valley is also claimed by Pakistan. Their bitter territorial dispute has fueled decades of bloodshed.
Mr. Geelani had long argued that the valley should fall under Pakistan’s control because of its geographical and religious affinity with that largely Muslim country. He said India should remove its troops from Kashmir and hold a long-promised vote over whether Kashmir should be part of India or Pakistan, though he hinted in recent years that he would side with independence if that option were to prevail in a referendum led by the United Nations.
In a tweet on Thursday, Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, said Mr. Geelani had “struggled all his life for his people and their right for self determination.” He said Pakistan would observe an official day of mourning.
Officials in Kashmir and in India’s central government, which long regarded Mr. Geelani as a major hurdle in resolving the region’s violence, declined to comment.
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The Kashmir valley has long been under the control of Indian security forces. In recent years, India’s Hindu-nationalist government has made taming Kashmir a top priority.
A charismatic leader, Mr. Geelani was often called “Bab,” or “father” in Kashmiri, and he won popularity for his steadfast resistance to Indian rule. His followers would chant in demonstrations: “The one who doesn’t bow, Geelani! The one who can’t be bought, Geelani!”
“He was the most recognized face of Kashmiri resistance against India and an iconic political figure,” said Noor Ahmad Baba, a political analyst in Kashmir. “No other political figure from the valley matched his popularity.”
The authorities had long kept Mr. Geelani under watch. With only a few breaks, he had been under house arrest for 11 years.
His opposition to engaging with New Delhi was at odds with other factions of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella group of organizations seeking self-determination for Kashmir. India, he argued, pursued negotiations on the ground that Kashmir was an integral part of that country, a position he rejected.
His anti-negotiation stance put him at odds at times even with sympathizers in Pakistan. In 2006, Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s military dictator, unveiled an ultimately unsuccessful four-point formula to settle the Kashmir dispute with India. Mr. Geelani rejected it.
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Despite his popularity in Kashmir, his many critics dismissed his strict Islamic worldview. They also faulted him for failing to support the region’s independence movement, which sparked violence against Indian forces in 1989.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani was born on Sept. 29, 1929, in Zoori Munz, a village in northern Kashmir. His family subsisted on manual labor. He graduated from high school in 1945 and went to Lahore, Pakistan, to study the Quran before later earning a bachelor’s degree in Persian literature.
Mr. Geelani was imprisoned in 1962 for 13 months for participating in anti-India activities. He was arrested again in 1965, accused of nurturing secret contacts in Pakistan, and spent another year or more in prison.
The arrests and jailings continued after he joined an Islamist organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, and was elected to the State Assembly in 1972. The Indian authorities seized his passport in 1981 and never returned it, though they let him travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia in 2006 for the Muslim hajj pilgrimage.
He began calling for public protests of Indian control in the 1980s, finding a receptive audience among angry Kashmiris. After violence broke out in 1989 — the beginning of more than 30 years of conflict — Mr. Geelani became perhaps the movement’s most visible leader. His calls for workers to strike could shut down activity in the Kashmir valley for days. He was a fixture at the funerals of those who died fighting Indian forces.
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His public profile may have reached its peak in 2008, when he became the face of resistance after a land dispute unleashed a new wave of demonstrations and violence.
In 2016, protests and violence again erupted, this time after the Indian police killed a militant commander, Burhan Wani. In response, Mr. Geelani and other resistance leaders issued “protest calendars,” which dictated when demonstrations would be held and when shops would open and close. The Indian authorities tried to persuade him to help ease tensions, but he refused, calling the outreach a “mere optic for Indian media.”
Mr. Geelani’s influence ebbed in recent years. He resigned as leader of the Hurriyat Conference last year. citing infighting within the group and its inability to stop India’s crackdown in Kashmir in 2019, which swept aside a degree of autonomy that New Delhi had long extended to the region.
In addition to his son Nassem, Mr. Geelani is survived by his wife, Jawahira Begum; two daughters, Zamshida and Chamshida, and another son, Nayeem, from that marriage; and two daughters from a previous marriage, Anisha and Farhat.
Despite his growing frailty, Mr. Geelani remained defiant. In a video posted online in 2018, as he remained under house arrest, he is shown knocking at the door of his home from the inside, telling Indian soldiers outside to let him out so that he could offer prayers at the funeral of a relative.
“Open the door, I won’t fly away,” he tells the officers. “We want to perform a funeral for your democracy.”
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