Opinion | A Movement That Ate Its Own Valley: Hurriyat's Hypocrisy Of Separatism Politics |
When Mirwaiz Umar Farooq announced on X that he was being “pressed by authorities" to change his profile designation from “Hurriyat Chairman", he framed the moment as an assault on free expression, as a yet another instance, he suggested, of a shrinking public space in Kashmir. He called the choice before him a Hobson’s choice, implying coercion without alternatives. What the post clearly avoided was the far heavier history attached to the designation he insists on carrying, that of the Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella separatist organisation that, since 1990, has fused secessionist politics with a cycle of violence that hollowed out Kashmir’s civic life, wrecked its education system, normalised shutdowns, and pushed thousands of young men toward the gun under a romanticised, utopian promise of Azadi.
To understand why the state finally moved to ban Hurriyat’s constituents, and why Mirwaiz’s plea rings of sheer hypocrisy, one must return to the beginning. Hurriyat Conference emerged in the early 1990s as militancy exploded across the Valley. It was presented as a political platform that was an “alternative voice" claiming to represent so-called Kashmiri aspirations. In practice, it functioned as the political superstructure of an armed movement. While terror groups pulled the trigger, Hurriyat provided the slogans, calendars, shutdown calls, and moral cover. The separation between “politics" and “violence" was always rhetorical and never real.
From the outset, Hurriyat’s strategy relied on cyclical disruption. Protests would be called, followed by shutdowns, then came the violence on the streets. Schools would close “temporarily," often for weeks, and even months. Examinations were postponed; academic calendars were shredded year after year. Each killing, whether by militants, security forces, or in crossfire was converted into a mass mobilisation event. Stone pelting was reframed as “resistance." Funerals became recruitment grounds. The Valley learned to live by protest calendars rather than academic timetables. An entire generation grew up measuring time not by semesters but by strikes.
The human cost of this politics was immense and shattering. Education that was once Kashmir’s most reliable ladder out of poverty was repeatedly sacrificed at the altar of symbolic defiance. Schools were burned, teachers threatened, and students intimidated into........