Why does New Delhi want death penalty for Yasin Malik?

The recent hasty plea of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) before the Delhi High Court seeking the death penalty for Yasin Malik, chief of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), has given clear signals that New Delhi wants to continue its iron fist policy against separatists.

After Hurriyat hawk Syed Ali Geelani’s death in September 2021, Malik is the last of the leading separatists in the Valley who still commands influence on both sides of the Line of Control, as well as in Pakistan and the UK, which has a significant immigrant population from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

57-year-old Malik was charged with terror funding in 2017 and arrested in April 2019 by the NIA. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 24, 2022. Besides terror funding the JKLF chief is also facing trials in the kidnapping of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter Rubiya Sayeed in December 1989 and the killing of Indian Air Force officers in January 1990.

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On May 26, the NIA sought the death penalty for Malik and three days later, Delhi High Court ordered he be produced before it on August 9 for defending himself. Malik was among the three most influential separatists in Kashmir for two and half decades. While Geelani is already dead, moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has gone into a sort of hibernation since 2019.

Malik, a former militant, who advocates the separation of Kashmir from both India and Pakistan, renounced violence in 1994. As a militant, he remained active for more than a year before he was arrested in August 1990. He was released in April 1994.

In a letter released from jail through family, he said the JKLF had announced the unilateral ceasefire after assurances of suspension of “militancy-related cases” against him and his colleagues. In 2009 Malik married Pakistani national Mushaal Mullick, an alumna of the London School of Economics.

However, the hardening of the stand against separatists by the BJP government from 2019 onwards signals the end of the political immunity that Malik and his group enjoyed after renouncing the gun.

“After Geelani’s death, it is only Malik who has the capacity and capability to revive the separatist movement in Kashmir. New Delhi understands this and they won’t get rid of him through a legal process,” a senior officer wishing anonymity said.

However, he cautioned that Malik’s execution can turn the tables in Kashmir as it may provide new oxygen to the separatist movement in the Valley. “After Maqbool Bhat (JKLF founder) was hanged in 1984, hundreds of young men joined his party as militants, including Malik. The same situation can’t be ruled out if Malik is hanged,” the officer warned.