MUZAFFARABAD: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider and several other leaders paid rich tributes to towering Kashmiri leader Khurshid Hassan Khurshid, commonly known as K H Khurshid, on the occasion of his 32nd death anniversary on Wednesday, saying his ideology was still the way forward for liberation of India held Kashmir.

Mr Khurshid was 20-year-old when Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah picked him as his private secretary during a visit to Srinagar in 1944. In October 1947, the founder of Pakistan sent Mr Khurshid to Srinagar on a mission where he was arrested by the Indian government and repatriated in a prisoner exchange in 1949.

A democrat to the core, Mr Khurshid conducted the first ever elections in AJK under Basic Democracy System in 1961, two years after he assumed the office of AJK president.

In 1962, a year after winning AJK presidential elections under BD system, he founded Jammu Kashmir Liberation League (JKLL), which called for recognition of the AJK government as a ‘revolutionary provisional successor government’ of the deposed Dogra ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, with a freehand to take the freedom movement to its logical end.

In Aug 1964, Mr Khurshid resigned from the office of AJK president due to differences with President Ayub Khan.

In the 1965 presidential elections of Pakistan, Mr Khurshid was the chief polling agent of Ms Fatima Jinnah, who treated him like her son and had also supported him to earn Barrister at Law degree from UK’s prestigious Lincoln’s Inn.

Mr Khurshid died in a road accident near Gujrat on March 11, 1988 while he was on board a public transport vehicle, after which he was buried in the heart of Muzaffarabad.

“Freedom of occupied Kashmir was K H Khurshid’s mission. He would speak truth and logic, without fear or favour. Had his proposals been followed, the situation with regard to Kashmir freedom movement would have been much different today,” said Mr Haider in his speech as at the late leader’s death anniversary function.

“It’s a matter of pride for the Kashmiris that the private secretary to Quaid-i-Azam was someone from their ranks,” he said.

The AJK premier also paid tributes to Mr Khurshid for his invaluable contribution to introducing parliamentary democracy in AJK.

He said Kashmir was an indivisible entity and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was hell-bent upon eroding Kashmiris’ separate identity and culture.

“After its Aug 5 move, India has lodged around 11,000 youngsters in occupied Kashmir. It’s the responsibility of the government of Pakistan to raise this issue at the relevant world forums,” he said.

Prominent among others who spoke on the occasion were PTI’s joint secretary and former AJK minister Khawaja Farooq Ahmed, Jamaat-i-Islami leader Shaikh Aqeelur Rehman, JKLL leader Manzoor Qadir Kashmiri and PPP leader Shaukat Javed Mir.

Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2020