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    Yasin Malik charged with Rubaiya’s abduction

    Synopsis

    Militants kidnapped Sayeed days after her father, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was sworn in as India’s first Muslim home minister in the VP Singh government.

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    Srinagar: A special Tada court on Monday framed charges against Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief Muhammad Yasin Malik in the Rubaiya Sayeed case, 31 years after then Union home minister’s daughter was abducted by militants. The trial will start soon.

    Militants kidnapped Sayeed days after her father, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was sworn in as India’s first Muslim home minister in the VP Singh government. She was kidnapped on December 8 and released on December 13, after the Farooq Abdullah government released five militants as demanded by the JKLF.

    The abduction and release of militants triggered an uprising in J&K, shattering several decades of peace. Mufti later formed the J&K People’s Democratic Party in 1999 and became chief minister in 2002 and 2015. Rubaiya never joined politics but her sister Mehbooba took over the mantle from Mufti after his demise. Malik is lodged in Tihar jail along with other Hurriyat leaders in an alleged illegal funding case that the National Investigation Agency registered in 2017. The JKLF stands banned since 2019.

    DIGGING


    “For 31 years, he was neither arrested nor summoned in the case. What is the exigency now? They (government) want to stop him from coming out of jail,” said Malik’s advocate Raja Tufail. “The government is digging cases against Malik. They want to curb his liberty and destroy him completely,” Tufail alleged. Last March, the Tada court had framed charges against Malik and six others for the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel in 1990. Malik’s family alleged that his trial was not fair. It made public a letter Malik wrote from jail which said that he had ‘declared unilateral ceasefire’ in 1994 ‘without surrendering his ideology to give peace a chance’ on ‘insistence of top intelligence officers’ and civil society members like Rajmohan Gandhi, Rajinder Sachar, Wajahat Habibullah and Kuldip Nayyar, who met him in jail in 1992. Malik wrote that he was promised with genuine political space and efforts would be made for resolution of the Kashmir dispute if he shunned armed struggle and pursued peaceful protests.


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