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Maqbool Butt - man and his mission

Maqbool Butt was born in Trehgam, district Kupwarah (Indian Held Kashmir) in 1938, buried in Tihar jail, Delhi, he was wrongfully imprisoned in Pakistan and unlawfully hanged in India exactly one week before his 46th birthday, on 11th February 1984, while awaiting trial for a case later registered against him.

Today Maqbool Butt is known as the Baba-e-Quam, father of the movement and Shaheed-e-Kashmir. He was the first Kashmiri to be judicially murdered on Indian soil - making him the first authentic martyr of the Kashmiri independence movement. Critics of the Kashmiri freedom movement dubbed him as an 'enemy agent' to undermine his struggle for the liberation of his motherland.

Maqbool Butt went to St Joseph's College in Baramulla for graduate studies. He crossed over into 'Azad' Kashmir via the Sialkot border in 1958, at a time when Indian state repression increased against Sheikh Abdullah's supporters. After some time in Azad Kashmir's capital Muzaffarabad, he moved to Lahore and then settled in the northwestern Pakistani City of Peshawar. He worked there with a daily newspaper during the day and attended post-graduate classes in Urdu literature during the evenings at the University. He also got married there.

In 1962, Maqbool Butt formed a campaign group, Kashmir Independence Committee and became its president. He later merged this group into the newly formed Jammu Kashmir Mahaz-Rayee-Shumari (Plebiscite Front) in Azad Kashmir, which was to campaign for independence.

The 1965 war and the subsequent Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan brought fundamental changes in Maqbool Butt's political thinking. He disapproved of Pakistan's role in the struggle for liberation of Kashmir from India. He wanted to see the leadership of the struggle in the hands of the Kashmiris. He was of the view that the controvercial war between the Indian and Pakistani armed forces had harmed the advancement of the Kashmiri movement. He was convinced that it was time to review the strategy in light of national liberation struggles and anti imperialist movements around the world. With this in mind, he put his energies into organising the Kashmiris under the banner of an underground armed organisation called the National Liberation Front (NLF). Maqbool Butt's NLF thus became the first Kashmiri organisation to take up the armed struggle against the occupation forces of India.

In 1966 Maqbool Butt lead a self-trained, ill-equipped but enthusiastic group of NLF activists into Indian Occupied Kashmir to establish underground cells. On their way back from occupied territory they were spotted by an Indian intelligence officer who alerted the army. The group was ambushed and in their attempt to escape certain death a bloody confrontation followed. An army officer and one of Maqbool Butt's youngest recruits from Gilgit called Aurangzeb were killed. Maqbool Butt and his three comrades were arrested and taken to Srinagar's Mehtab Bagh interrogation camp. They were lodged in Srinagar jail and tried for murder - without being able to make any legal representations. Maqbool Butt was sentenced to death by a special court, which was held within prison walls.

Nearly two years later, in December 1968, Maqbool Butt along with Mir Ahmed and Ghulam Yasin (another Kashmiri prisoner held on separate charges) broke out of the prison by digging a 38-foot underground tunnel. The trio managed to cross into 'Azad' Kashmir after several weeks of playing hide and seek with the Indian armed forces. As soon as they entered the 'liberated' territory, they were once again arrested by the army and later sent to the notorious Black Fort of Muzaffarabad by the puppet state authority of Azad Kashmir, where they were brutally interrogated. However, three months later they were released as the campaign to seek their freedom intensified all over Azad Kashmir.

Maqbool Butt's experience in Muzaffarabad's Black Fort was not much different to his experience in Mehtab Bagh at the hands of the enemies of the Kashmiri freedom movement.

Narrating his bitter experience in a letter to a friend, he wrote: "I was happy to be safe in my home but this happiness was short lived... What happened in the Black Fort had shaken me and forced me to rethink on who was a friend and who was a foe."

He was however, not born to give up that easily. In November 1969, Maqbool Butt was elected the president of the Plebiscite Front in Azad Kashmir. His first action was to launch an awareness campaign throughout Azad Kashmir and the Gilgit-Baltistan territories. His group faced severe restrictions and persecution by the state authorities, which misunderstood his campaign as anti-Pakistan. He also continued to build his underground movement and recruit and train young activists.

In January 1970, two 16 and 17 year old NLF activists (Hashim and Ashraf) hijacked an Indian aeroplane code-named "Ganga" from Srinagar airport to Lahore. This was an extra ordinary event in the history of the peaceful Kashmiri struggle, which not only highlighted the issue of Kashmir but fuelled passion into the Kashmiri movement as it gave a new dimension to the struggle.

What followed has had deep impact and repercussions for the Kashmiris as well as for Pakistan. Maqbool Butts NLF and Plebiscite Front were smashed and most of their party workers were imprisoned by Pakistan's military regime. They were all but one released from prison and ventually Pakistan's Supreme Court upheld an appeal in their favour and even called them "Kashmir's true patriots."

The years between 1968-76 set the scene for the indigenous Kasmiri liberation movement, which in actual fact only took off after his death when the JKLF came on the scene with full force.

In 1976 Maqbool Butt went back to the Indian occupied territory, against the advice of his senior colleagues, where he was once again arrested and imprisoned. On this occasion he was charged for murder of a police officer, which he denied. While awaiting trial for this case, he was transferred to the top security Tihar jails in 1980 as rumours of a possible 'rescue' attempt were spread.

By now Kashmir's political scene had been turned in favour of India - with Sheikh Abudulla and Indra Gandhi signing a new accord. Kashmir's tragedy was not to end here. In February 1984, a previously unknown Kashmiri group kidnapped and killed a member of India's Consulate staff in Birmingham, England. They demanded Maqbool Butt's release from prison. As the news of the death of this man reached India Indra Gandhi's government there decided to hang Maqbool Butt in vengeance. He was hanged in the early hours of 11th February before his family and friends could meet him for the last time. They were all arrested at Srinagar airport.

Ever since his execution Kashmir has never been the same again. In 1989, a JKLF lead rebellion in Indian occupied Kashmir rocked the foundations of Indian rule. The struggle continues and Maqbool Butt's message is getting stronger by the day ..