Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani passes away at 92

News Network
September 2, 2021

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The patriarch of separatist politics in the Valley and Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, passed away at his residence in Srinagar late Wednesday night. A former elected legislator, the ailing 92-year-old had been under house detention for more than a decade. 

His death comes when both his and the moderate factions of the Hurriyat are in disarray in the wake of a crackdown by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the abrogation of Article 370 and the downgrade of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories.

Apprehensive that his funeral may attract large crowds, the security establishment has imposed restrictions across the Valley, including Internet suspension. Police sources say curfew would be imposed.

“With shock and grief, we inform (you) that the father of revolution Syed Ali Geelani passed away tonight,” tweeted Geelani’s Pakistan-based representative Abdullah Geelani. “As per his will, he would be buried at the martyrs’ cemetery in Srinagar. The timing of the funeral would be announced later.”

However, it is unlikely that the government will allow Geelani to be buried at this cemetery.

Geelani’s legacy will be that of the hardliner who stood up to New Delhi, seeking resolution of the Kashmir dispute under the aegis of the United Nations. In fact, he was the only separatist leader to oppose Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf when the latter climbed down on Islamabad’s traditional stand on Kashmir and proposed a four-point formula to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Born on September 29, 1929, at Zurmanz, a village on the banks of the Wular lake in Bandipore, Geelani rose to become the face of separatist politics.

A school teacher, he started his political career under the tutelage of Maulana Mohammad Sayeed Masoodi, a senior National Conference (NC) leader, but soon moved to Jamat-e-Islami. The socio-religious organisation stood up to the NC leadership and saw Kashmir as an “unfinished agenda” of Partition.

Geelani’s electoral career started from Sopore, a traditional separatist and Jamat stronghold. He first contested the Assembly elections in 1972, and represented Sopore in the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir Assembly for three terms. The last term ended abruptly in 1987 when militancy erupted in Kashmir.

Geelani had been one of the four candidates of the Muslim United Front (MUF) — an alliance of political, social and religious organisations — who won in the widely rigged 1987 elections that brought the NC-Congress combine to power and set off militancy in the Valley.

An ardent supporter of armed struggle for resolution of the Kashmir issue, Geelani was among the seven executive members of the Hurriyat Conference when it was formed in 1993. But his support for militancy and unwavering ideology on Kashmir sowed the seeds of discord between him and his colleagues in the Hurriyat Conference, finally culminating in a split in 2003.

In 2004, Geelani also parted ways from Jamat-e-Islami when it distanced itself from militancy, and formed his own political outfit, Tehreek-e-Hurriyat.

While Geelani has been bedridden for years now and incommunicado for the last two years, he sprang a surprise on June 30 last year when he dissociated himself from the faction of Hurriyat that he founded. He left the reins to his deputy Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, who died in custody in Jammu jail earlier this year.

And though Geelani said he wanted the resolution of the Kashmir issue as per the aspirations of the people, he himself was an ardent supporter of its merger with Pakistan. Last year, the Pakistan government awarded him with Nishan-e-Pakistan, the highest civilian honour of the country.

The NIA, which has till date arrested 18 separatist leaders from Kashmir including those from the Hurriyat in a case of terror funding, has alleged that they received funds from Pakistan to foment unrest in the Valley. The agency had even named Geelani and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq in the chargesheet, claiming they had been pushing for secession and fuelling unrest but had stopped short of naming them as accused.

In February, 2019 the NIA had raided Umer Farooq’s and Geelani’s son Naseem Geelani’s house among others in the case. In March 2019, the Enforcement Directorate had levied a penalty of Rs 14.40 lakh on Geelani in a 17-year-old case of alleged illegal possession of $10,000 in alleged contravention of the foreign exchange law.

Former chief minister and PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti condoled Geelani’s demise, saying, “We may not have agreed on most things but I respect him for his steadfastness and standing for his beliefs.”

People’s Conference leader Sajad Lone tweeted: “Heartfelt condolences to the family of Syed Ali Shah Geelani sahib. Was an esteemed colleague of my late father. May Allah grant him Jannat”.

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News Network
March 17,2024

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New Delhi: The Election Commission on Sunday made public fresh data on electoral bonds, which it had submitted in sealed covers to the Supreme Court and was later asked to put it in public domain.

These details are believed to be pertaining to the period before April 12, 2019. Electoral bond details after this date was made public by the poll panel last week.

The BJP encashed electoral bonds totalling Rs 6,986.5 crore; maximum Rs 2,555 crore received in 2019-20, as per the EC data.

The Trinamool Congress received Rs 1,397 crore through electoral bonds, second largest recipient after BJP, as per the EC data.

On the other hand, the Congress redeemed a total of Rs 1,334.35 crore through electoral bonds.

DMK received Rs 656.5 crore through electoral bonds, including Rs 509 crore from lottery king Santiago Martin's Future Gaming.

BJD encashed electoral bonds worth Rs 944.5 crore, YSR Congress Rs 442.8 crore, TDP Rs 181.35 crore.

Political parties had filed data on electoral bonds in sealed cover as directed by the Supreme Court's interim order dated April 12, 2019, the poll panel said in a statement.

"Data so received from political parties was deposited in the Supreme Court without opening sealed covers. In pursuance of the Supreme Court's order dated March 15, 2024, the Registry of the Supreme Court has returned physical copies along with a digitized record of the same in a pen drive in sealed cover. The Election Commission of India has today uploaded the data received in the digitized form from the registry of the Supreme Court on electoral bonds on its website," EC said.

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News Network
March 27,2024

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At least seven people have been killed when Israeli warplanes bombed an emergency center in southern Lebanon near the border with the 1948 Israeli-occupied territories with air-to-surface missiles, according to Lebanese security sources.

Two sources, speaking on condition of anonymity said early on Wednesday that the strike targeted the Islamic Group’s emergency and relief center in Lebanon’s southern village of Habbariyeh.

Jamaa Islamiya, a Lebanese group closely linked to the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, said in a statement that “a number” of people had been killed, and called the strike a “heinous crime.”

An official from the group said “seven rescuers” were killed in the aerial assault.

Another Jamaa Islamiya official, also requesting anonymity, said a dozen medical staff were in the emergency center at the time of the strike, adding that bodies were being pulled from the rubble.

Lebanese lawmaker Hassan Mrad said “the Israeli aggression on Habbariyeh adds to the long list of Israeli crimes.”

Israel has been launching air strikes against Lebanon since the beginning of its onslaught against the Gaza Strip in early October.

An Israeli strike knocked down part of a building in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh on February 14, killing seven members of the same family, including a child, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said. A boy initially reported missing was found alive under the rubble.

In a separate Israeli attack, a woman and her two children were killed in the village of as-Sawana in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli regime launched its devastating hostilities in the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the territory’s Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the occupying entity.

Israel's raids have resulted in retaliatory strikes from Hezbollah in support of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The movement has vowed to keep up its retaliatory operations as long as the Tel Aviv regime continues its onslaught on Gaza.

The Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed at least 32,414 people, most of them women and children. Another 74,787 individuals have also been wounded.

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News Network
March 21,2024

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New Delhi: India has now become more unequal in terms of wealth concentration than the British colonial period as income and wealth of the top 1% of the country’s population have hit historical highs, according to a paper released by World Inequality Lab.

By 2022-23, the top 1 per cent income share in India was 22.6 per cent and the top 1 per cent wealth share rose to 40.1 per cent, with India’s top 1 per cent income share among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil and the US.

Co-authored by economists Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, the paper stated that the “Billionaire Raj” headed by “India’s modern bourgeoisie” is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces. 

The paper said there is evidence to suggest the Indian tax system might be “regressive when viewed from the lens of net wealth”. A restructuring of the tax code is needed, the paper said, adding that a levy of a “super tax” of 2 per cent on the net wealth of 167 wealthiest families would yield 0.5 per cent of national income in revenues and create space for investments.

“A restructuring of the tax code to account for both income and wealth, and broad-based public investments in health, education and nutrition are needed to enable the average Indian, and not just the elites, to meaningfully benefit from the ongoing wave of globalisation. Besides serving as a tool to fight inequality, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest families in 2022-23 would yield 0.5% of national income in revenues and create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the paper said. 

The paper has analysed data based on the annual tax tabulations published by the Indian income tax authorities to extract the distribution of top income earners between 1922-2020.

The share of national income going to the top 10 per cent fell from 37 per cent in 1951 to 30 per cent by 1982 after which it began steadily rising. From the early 1990s onwards, the top 10 per cent share increased substantially over the next three decades, nearly touching 60 per cent in the most recent years, the paper said. This compares with the bottom 50 per cent getting only 15 per cent of India’s national income in 2022-23.

 The top 1 per cent earn on average Rs 5.3 million, 23 times the average Indian (Rs 0.23 million). Average incomes for the bottom 50 per cent and the middle 40 per cent stood at Rs 71,000 (0.3 times national average) and Rs 1,65,000 (0.7 times national average), respectively.
The richest, nearly 10,000 individuals (of 92 million Indian adults) earn on average Rs 480 million (2,069 times the average Indian). “To get a sense of just how skewed the distribution is, one would have to be at nearly the 90th percentile to earn the average income in India,” the paper said.

In 2022, just the top 0.1 per cent in India earned nearly 10 per cent of the national income, while the top 0.01 per cent earned 4.3 per cent share of the national income and top 0.001 per cent earned 2.1 per cent of the national income.

Enlisting the probable reasons for sharp rise in top 1 per cent income shares, the paper said public and private sector wage growth could have played a part till the late 1990s, adding that there are good reasons to believe capital incomes likely played a role in subsequent years. For the shares of the bottom 50 per cent and middle 40 per cent remaining depressed, the paper said, the primary reason has been the lack of quality broad-based education, focused on the masses and not just the elites.

“One reason to be concerned with such high levels of inequality is that extreme concentration of incomes and wealth is likely to facilitate disproportionate influence on society and government. This is even more so in contexts with weak democratic institutions. After largely being a role model among post-colonial nations in this regard, the integrity of various key institutions in India appears to have been compromised in recent years. This makes the possibility of India’s slide towards plutocracy even more real. If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” it said.

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