Maqbool Bhat: a life for independence and a grave in Tihar

A boy from Trehgam

Mohammad Maqbool Bhat was born on 18 February 1938 in Trehgam, a village in the frontier district of Kupwara in the north of the Kashmir Valley. His mother died when he was eleven. He studied history and political science at St Joseph’s College in Baramulla and took his degree around 1957.

As a student he worked for the Plebiscite Front, the movement that demanded the vote on Kashmir’s future that India and the United Nations had promised and that has never been held, in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir or anywhere else. When Sheikh Abdullah was jailed again in April 1958 and the police went after the Front’s student activists, Bhat crossed to Pakistan in August that year. He took a master’s degree in Urdu literature at Peshawar University, wrote for the newspaper Anjaam and worked as a teacher and an editor.

Independence from both states

In April 1965 a Plebiscite Front was launched in Muzaffarabad, on the Pakistani side of the ceasefire line, with Bhat as its publicity secretary. It asked for a referendum in which the people of Jammu and Kashmir could choose India, Pakistan or independence. Bhat and Amanullah Khan wanted an armed wing as well, and the majority refused. In August 1965 the two men set up an underground organisation of their own, the National Liberation Front, fashioned after the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, with Bhat in charge of its coordination. In May 1977 the Plebiscite Front’s chapter in Britain was turned into the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, founded in Birmingham by Amanullah Khan; Bhat, by then in an Indian prison, is credited as its co-founder.

His idea of freedom was wider than a change of flag. In words quoted by the writer Danish Khan in The Express Tribune, he said that for Kashmiris “azadi (independence) means not just getting rid of foreign occupation from our beloved motherland but also removing hunger, poverty, ignorance and disease, and overcoming economic and social deprivation”. Khan describes secular principles and social and economic justice as the heart of his struggle. Bhat rejected the claim of either neighbour: “Freedom and independence is the fate and destination of Jammu Kashmir. Indian rulers or Pakistani generals and bureaucrats cannot enslave Jammu Kashmir for a long time.”

Captured in 1966

On 10 June 1966 Bhat crossed the ceasefire line into the Valley with three companions, Tahir Aurangzeb, Mir Ahmad and Kala Khan, to recruit and to build secret cells. In September the group was discovered. According to published accounts of the case it seized Amar Chand, an officer of the police Criminal Investigation Department, as a hostage and shot him dead when he tried to escape. In the fighting that followed near Handwara Kala Khan was killed, and Bhat and Mir Ahmad were captured.

In August 1968 a Srinagar court presided over by Neelkanth Ganjoo sentenced Bhat and one other man to death for the killing. Bhat accepted the charges and rejected the label. “I have no problem in accepting the charges brought against me except with one correction,” Kashmir Life records him telling the court. “I am not an enemy agent but the enemy, enemy of the Indian state occupation in Kashmir.” He also told the court: “Have a good look at me and recognise me well, I am the enemy of your illegal rule in Kashmir.” In the version quoted by the writer Dar Wasim, he said: “I am your enemy; I am the enemy of your colonial mindset.”

In December 1968 Bhat and fellow prisoners, among them Ghulam Yasin, tunnelled their way out of the Srinagar jail. They reached the Pakistani side of the line in January 1969.

A prisoner of Pakistan

Pakistan did not receive him as a hero. Its authorities viewed the escape with suspicion, and Bhat and his companions were detained and brutally interrogated for several months as suspected Indian agents. In January 1971 two young recruits of his group hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft, the Ganga, to Lahore. Pakistan at first applauded them, then declared the hijacking an Indian conspiracy. It detained Bhat and about 150 members of the National Liberation Front at the Lahore Fort, most of them without any charge, and they were reportedly tortured for information until December 1971.

Kashmiri accounts give a further reason. When Bhat made it clear to the Pakistani administration that he wanted independence from Pakistan as well as from India, Danish Khan writes, “he was immediately arrested and imprisoned in Shahi Qila, Lahore”; his “left-leaning political inclinations and secular approach towards the freedom movement made him undesirable for the Pakistani establishment”, Khan adds. Anadolu Agency describes the same imprisonment as punishment for masterminding the hijacking. Either way, the state that claimed to champion Kashmir’s cause jailed the man who insisted that Kashmiris, and not Pakistan, should decide it.

Tihar, and a sister’s last visit

In May 1976 Bhat crossed into the Valley again. He was arrested after an attempted bank robbery in Kupwara in which a bank employee was killed; Anadolu Agency places the arrest in Handwara and describes the dead man as a bank manager. On 23 July 1976 he was moved to Tihar Jail in Delhi. The death sentence of 1968, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1982, hung over him, and his petition for mercy lay undecided from 1977. In 1976 his younger brother Habibullah, a student in class twelve, “mysteriously disappeared”, in Kashmir Life’s words.

In 1982 three members of the family travelled to Tihar to see him. His sister, Mehmuda Begum, described the meeting to The Kashmir Walla in 2021. “As soon as I saw him coming in, I lost control of myself. I cried a lot. He was bound in chains … all around his body, from his feet to his neck,” she said. “I hopelessly begged them to allow me to embrace him once. They did not allow.” He carried a pen and a notebook, which he told her held the notes for a book he had been writing in prison. “He was not sad even for a moment. I could feel that he knew he was not going to be released while he was alive,” she said. The notebook was never given to the family. “We still demand that notebook, it is our right.”

Five days in February

On 3 February 1984 Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat in Birmingham, was kidnapped by a group calling itself the Kashmir Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Liberation Front. It demanded the release of prisoners held in India, Bhat among them. The kidnappers shot Mhatre, an unarmed civilian, dead, and his body was found on 6 February. Bhat had by then spent nearly eight years in Tihar.

India’s answer came within days. The mercy petition that had waited since 1977 was rejected, and the Supreme Court turned down a last petition from his lawyers. The police arrested about a thousand opposition members to forestall protest. Bhat had written to his brother Ghulam Nabi asking him to come to the jail; on 10 February the police arrested Ghulam Nabi at Srinagar airport as he boarded a flight to Delhi for a last meeting. Another brother, Manzoor Ahmad, was arrested at the family home in Trehgam. That evening his counsel on record, R. C. Pathak, told Bhat that they would meet again on Monday. “Do you think they will permit us a second meeting?” Bhat asked.

He was woken at about 5.30 on the morning of 11 February, allowed to bathe and to read the Quran, and given tea. The jail superintendent, A. B. Shukla, read out the death warrant. The executioner, a man named Fakira, had been brought from Patiala. Bhat was hanged at 7.30 am and declared dead at 8 am. The jail gave his age as 45; his attorney, Muzaffar Beg, said he was 48. High-ranking officials said that the hanging was meant to signal a harder line against political violence. His lawyers called it a “political and hasty decision”. Abdul Ghani Lone, then a member of the state assembly, called it “judicial murder”.

A body kept in prison

On his last evening, according to his counsel R. C. Pathak, Bhat asked that his body be handed to his younger brother. His attorney Muzaffar Beg, who said he was authorised to receive it, waited outside the jail with two lawyers, unaware of what had been decided, and learned of it only after the burial. The decision, The Week reported, had been “taken at the highest level”: the jail in which he was hanged would also be his grave. About an hour after he was declared dead he was buried in the prison grounds, with an imam and ten Muslim prisoners at the rites. He was the twelfth man hanged in Tihar in a decade and the first to be buried there.

In Trehgam the family learned the news when neighbours gathered at the house. “Our brothers were not there and we were suddenly told that he has been hanged,” Mehmuda Begum recalled. They have asked for his remains ever since. “We kept demanding his dead body but they did not answer us even once,” she said. His stepmother, Shahmali Begum, took up the campaign; the documentary Bring Him Back, first shown in London in 2015, follows her campaign, and when The Kashmir Walla released it in 2018 it gave her age as 84 and said she had been asking for his remains for thirty-four years.

The brothers who followed

The family’s losses did not end in 1984. Ghulam Nabi Bhat became an organiser of the mass mobilisation of the early 1990s and was jailed for it. On 18 November 1994 his body was found on the Chanapora road in Srinagar with fatal head injuries. The administration of the governor, K. V. Krishna Rao, was quick to call his death an accident, a finding that many contested. On 4 October 1995 another brother, Manzoor Ahmad Bhat, a divisional commander of the Liberation Front, was killed in Trehgam in what Kashmir Life calls an encounter, the word used in Kashmir for a gunfight with Indian forces. Kashmiris remember him, like his brother Maqbool, as a martyr.

The youngest, Zahoor Ahmad Bhat, left for the Pakistani side as a schoolboy and came back to the Valley in 2009, after nearly two decades, with his wife and three children. He was arrested on charges of “unlawful activities”, and orders for his detention under the Public Safety Act, a law that allows imprisonment without trial, followed one another. In March 2020 the authorities issued the third such order in a row, citing what they called “anti-national” and subversive activities. On 27 December 2024 the High Court quashed another order, issued in June 2022, under which he had been held in Karnal jail in Haryana, because it recycled grounds that a court had already struck down. “I told a senior police official directly that we have shunned the gun but we will not stop asking for Aazadi,” his sister told Kashmir Life.

Every 11 February

In 1989, five years after the hanging, Ashfaq Majeed Wani, the first commander of the armed uprising, dug a grave for Bhat in a corner of the Eidgah in Srinagar. It became the first grave of the Martyrs’ Graveyard, and it is empty. Its inscription says that his body is a debt on the Government of India.

Every year on 11 February the Valley, in Indian-occupied Kashmir, shuts. Shops, fuel stations and public transport stop, and people go to the house in Trehgam to pray. Every year the Indian authorities answer with restrictions. In 2016 Srinagar’s deputy commissioner ordered restrictions in the areas of five police stations of the old city, Nowhatta, Khanyar, Maharajgunj, Rainawari and Safa Kadal, besides Maisuma. In 2017 restrictions were imposed in Srinagar and in Trehgam itself. In March 2019 India banned the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front under its anti-terror law. When the banned Front called a strike for 9 and 11 February 2020, the police registered a case against it, summoned two journalists for reporting the call, and cut the mobile internet on the anniversary until four in the afternoon. The Valley shut anyway, and again in 2021, with Indian forces deployed in strength.

To the Front that honours him as its founder he is the “father of Kashmiri nation”, in the words of its chairman Yasin Malik in 2018, and “a symbol of freedom and liberty not only for Kashmiri nation but for all the nations which are striving for their freedom and liberty”. Malik himself was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2022.

What the grave in Tihar shows

In February 2013 India hanged Afzal Guru in the same jail and buried him beside Bhat, and a second empty grave was dug beside the first at the Eidgah. In September 2025 the Vishwa Vedic Sanatan Sangh, which Maktoob Media describes as a Hindu right-wing organisation, asked the Delhi High Court to have both graves removed from Tihar, if necessary to a secret location, to prevent what it called the “glorification of terrorism”. The bench of Chief Justice D. K. Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela observed that “no law or rule prohibits cremation or burial inside the jail premises”, and on 24 September 2025 the petition was withdrawn and dismissed.

The record is plain. Bhat accepted in court the charges arising from a policeman’s death in 1966, and the judge who sentenced him was shot dead by three gunmen near the High Court in Srinagar on 4 November 1989, a killing of a civilian that most accounts attribute to the Liberation Front. But India hanged Bhat on a sentence sixteen years old, within a week of a killing carried out in another country while he sat in an Indian cell, after leaving his plea for mercy unanswered for seven years and then refusing it in days. His family was kept from him at the end and his body has been kept from them since. Both states that claim Kashmir imprisoned him, and neither would accept his insistence that Kashmir belonged to neither of them. His remains were still in Tihar Jail when this article was reviewed, more than forty-two years after his death.