Second death anniversary of Kashmir freedom fighter Syed Ali Shah Geelani in being marked on both sides of the Line of Control with reverence on Thursday. Kashmiris in the India-occupied valley have been observing shutter down strike.
Quran recitation congregations were held in mosques for the late Geelani who died while under house arrest.
Kashmiris living on both sides of the Line of Control and across the world will hold protest demonstrations to draw attention of the international community towards the Indian brutalities in the occupied territory.
Syed Ali Geelani was born in 1929 in village Zurimanj, in the Bandipora tehsil of the Baramulla district of North Kashmir. He was the son of a landless labourer in the canals department. He received early education in Sopore and came to Lahore for higher education. 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.
He started his struggle for Kashmir freedom from the Jamaat-e-Islami which he joined in 1953. He was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Sopore constituency thrice – in 1972, 1977 and 1987 – on a Jamaat ticket.
Geelani was co-founder of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) in 1993 and served as its chairman from 1998 to 2000. In 2003, he formed his own faction of which he was later elected as the lifetime chairman.
In 2004, he founded the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, which became the leading organisation in the APHC. Geelani served as its chairman until he quit the position in March 2018, though remaining the chairman of his faction of APHC. He later quit from his faction in 2020.
Geelani remained in prison for more than two decades and under house arrest for more than 11 years. He died on September 1, 2021, due to respiratory complications while under house arrest at his Hyderpora residence in Srinagar.
The Indian police forcibly took away his body and buried it, while his family was not allowed to attend the funeral. An FIR was later registered against his family members for clothing his body with Pakistani flag.
On 14 August 2020, Pakistan conferred Nishan-e-Pakistan, the highest civil award of Pakistan, on Geelani in recognition of his decades-long struggle for Kashmiris’ right to self-determination.
