JKLF co-founder Amanullah Khan dies in Pakistan

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, April 26

Kashmiri separatist leader and co-founder of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Amanullah Khan died after prolonged illness in Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, separatists leaders here said. He was 82.

“He was admitted to a hospital in Rawalpindi some days ago and died this morning,” JKLF vice-chairman Showkat Bakshi told The Tribune.

Bakshi said Khan had gone to Gilgit to take part in a demonstration when he fell ill and was later hospitalised for pneumonia.

Khan, born in 1934 in Gilgit, had a deep association with Kashmir’s separatism that dates back several decades. In the 1960s, he co-founded the Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF) along with Mohammad Maqbool Bhat. The JKNLF was later renamed the JKLF — the group that espoused the independence of the state of Jammu and Kashmir from India as well as Pakistan. Khan remained a key figure in the party’s politics.

Khan was arrested in England in 1985 in connection with the murder of an Indian diplomat and was later deported to Pakistan, where he lived for most of his life.

He rose to significance when hundreds of Kashmiri youth crossed the Line of Control between 1988 and 1990 and joined militancy under the banner of Khan-led JKLF.

Khan’s role, however, remained limited to peripheries of the region’s separatist movement and he could not take centre stage as a new militant leadership emerged in Kashmir at the onset of insurgency in late 1980s.

Khan had a fallout with the Kashmir-based leadership of the JKLF in the mid-1990s and was removed from the leadership role and Yasin Malik, then in detention, was named the new chairman. Khan then led his own faction of the JKLF.

In 2012, after nearly two decades, the two factions came together and Khan was elected the party’s “supreme leader” while Malik was elected the chairman.

Khan’s only child, daughter Asma Khan, got married in 2000 to then separatist Sajad Lone, who is currently a minister in the PDP-BJP coalition government in the state here. Lone, who was in New Delhi at the time of Khan’s death, was not available for comment.

The JKLF has planned a funeral in absentia for Khan on Wednesday in the Maisuma locality of Srinagar.