Kashmir’s chief cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has dropped the title of ‘chairman’ of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) from his X handle, formerly Twitter, citing a verbal directive from the Jammu and Kashmir administration.
In a post on X on Friday (December 26), Mirwaiz said that he was “pressed by the authorities… for some time now” to make changes to his X handle which described him as ‘chairman’ of the APHC, an amalgam of separatist outfits which advocated for the resolution of Kashmir problem.
A J&K police team of “several high-ranking” officials is believed to have conveyed the directive of the authorities verbally to Mirwaiz who was also the first chairman of the APHC when it was formed in 1993 in the aftermath of the assassination of his father Mirwaiz Farooq.
The APHC was widely seen as a vehicle of dialogue for Kashmiri militants with the government of India in the backdrop of the eruption of armed insurgency in the early 1990s.
“I told them (police officials) that Hurriyat is not a banned organisation, so what is the issue? They said that as all the constituents of the Hurriyat are banned, so it stands banned and it is against the law that you are posting tweets as head of a banned organisation,” Mirwaiz said.
All the separatist outfits affiliated with the Hurriyat in Kashmir were banned by the Union government under the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the years following the reading down of Article 370.
