NEW DELHI, Sept 9: All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), facing a revolt by some of its smaller constituents over ideological issues, has called a grand meeting of likeminded Kashmiris next week to help cement the fault-lines, Kashmir’s spiritual leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said on Tuesday.
Pakistani diplomats said they hoped the APHC would be able to overcome its differences to enable the 23-party umbrella group “to carry out its mission unitedly”.
About a dozen members of the APHC’s general council, apparently nudged by former chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani, have challenged the leadership of its current chairman Maulvi Abbas Ansari, a Shia scholar.
Some Hurriyat leaders have described the revolt against Maulvi Ansari as a warning by the rebels against a perceived dilution of the APHC’s mission and also as a criticism of its leaders’ apparently warming ties with Indian interlocutors.
Other senior members of the group, opposed to the revolt, told Dawn that the move was inspired by Mr Geelani, a former senior member of the pro-Pakistan Jamaat-i-Islami but who was apparently “retired from the party a month ago”. Mr Geelani was not immediately available for comment.
Before his recent elevation, Maulvi Ansari was a member of the APHC’s seven-member apex executive committee, which elects the chairman.
The seven groups represented in the executive committee are: the Awami Action Committee of Mirwaiz Farooq, the Jamaat-i-Islami, Prof Abdul Ghani Butt’s Muslim Conference, slain leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s People’s Conference, Maulvi Ansari’s Jihad-ul-Muslimeen, incarcerated leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz’s People’s League and Yasin Malik’s Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.
Barring the Jamaat’s as yet neutral stance on the issue, all the other executive members are believed to be united in supporting Maulvi Ansari’s leadership.
Maulvi Umar Farooq told Dawn that he had been entrusted the task of organizing a meeting of all pro-freedom and pro-Pakistan Kashmiri groups next week to urge them to fight unitedly under the APHC leadership.
“I have been asked to do what I did in 1993,” Mirwaiz said. In November that year, he had summoned the desperate Kashmiri groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, to weld them into a cohesive unit. “I hope to be able to do the same thing again.”
Mirwaiz said among those he was hoping to have over at his meeting were the dissidents as well as people like Shabbir Shah, who had walked out of the Hurriyat’s umbrella to set up their own groups some years ago.
Maulvi Farooq said only the executive council of the APHC had the powers to elect or unseat the chairman of the group. Some of the leaders in the rebel camp, he added, were those who had been expelled by their parties some time ago.
