For well over three decades, Yasin Malik has held the reputation of a top-ranked pro-freedom leader from Indian-administered Kashmir.
A leader who became synonymous with the armed struggle that broke out in Kashmir seeking independence from India in the late 1980s, then turned to the advocacy of peaceful, nonviolent resistance, Malik is currently serving a life sentence in a New Delhi jail. A villain in the eyes of many in the Indian security services and the country’s strategic establishment, Malik has also been distrusted by Pakistan, which New Delhi has long accused of supporting armed violence in Kashmir.
But a sensational affidavit that the 59-year-old filed in the Delhi High Court in late August has gripped India over the past weeks because of a series of sensational claims that it makes – and that former Indian officials and analysts say might have at least some element of truth in them.
Malik’s petition challenges the dominant narrative both about his own decades-long journey as a separatist and the Indian state’s engagement with the rebellion movement in the disputed region, also claimed by Pakistan.
At the heart of Malik’s claims is a central, stunning question: Was he actually an Indian intelligence asset all along?
What’s the thrust of Yasin Malik’s claims?
In his 84-page affidavit, Malik claims that since the 1990s – by which time the armed revolt by young Kashmiris against New Delhi’s rule was at its peak – he had been engaging with top authorities in the Indian government in its bid to resolve the conflict.
Malik says he met several Indian prime ministers and federal ministers, heads of the country’s intelligence agencies, members of the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and even two prominent Hindu religious seers who called on his residence in Srinagar “umpteen numbers of times” as part of a back‑channel diplomacy sanctioned by the Indian government to further the peace efforts in Kashmir. The RSS is the ideological mentor of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
He also says a 2006 meeting with Hafiz Saeed, the Pakistan-based founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba armed group who is wanted by India for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was not his own initiative, but managed by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India’s domestic spy agency, as part of efforts to make Saeed give up arms.
Who is Yasin Malik?
Born in the riverside neighbourhood of Maisuma in the region’s main city of Srinagar, Malik was 21 when a local election in Indian-administered Kashmir was allegedly rigged by the Indian government in 1987 to prevent pro-separatist candidates from winning.
As a young polling agent deployed at one of the election booths in the city, Malik said he had firsthand experience of the irregularities and subterfuge in that election that have since been widely acknowledged – a prelude to the violent rebellion movement that erupted in 1989.
Furious over the alleged vote-theft, Malik corralled a motley crew of aggrieved volunteers and crossed over to Pakistan, where he is accused of having received arms training by the Pakistani security establishment. He came back and took over the command of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Force (JKLF), a rebel group founded in 1977 that was behind a series of deadly attacks on Indian security forces.
However, Malik soon reportedly fell out with Islamabad over his support for Kashmir as an independent state as opposed to the region merging with Muslim-majority Pakistan. As he carved out a different path to resist the Indian rule, it was the JKLF’s rival, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, that increasingly gained Pakistani patronage.
Meanwhile, Malik was arrested and imprisoned by the Indian authorities in 1990.
He claims that after his arrest, he was driven to New Delhi’s sprawling Tihar Jail and later kept at a guest house in Mehrauli on the outskirts of the Indian capital, where top officials from the Indian security apparatus met him “almost every day”, insisting that he must have dinner with the then Indian Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. He says the visiting officials urged him to renounce armed rebellion.
He says he continued to engage with four more Indian prime ministers across political lines. They include PV Narasimha Rao of the Congress party; Inder Kumar Gujral, who led a coalition government under the so-called United Front briefly in the 1990s; Atal Behari Vajpayee from Modi’s BJP; and Manmohan Singh from the Congress. During their tenure, Vajpayee and Singh were actively involved in peace talks with Pakistan. Modi replaced Singh as prime minister in 2014.
Malik was released from jail in 1994 – he claims this was part of a tacit understanding with New Delhi, which saw him publicly abandoning the armed rebellion, declaring a ceasefire and resolving to fight for Kashmir’s independence through nonviolent means propagated by India’s anticolonial icon, Mahatma Gandhi.
After that, Malik led several peaceful protests on Kashmir’s streets against allegedly illegal arrests, torture and killings of civilians by Indian forces, denial of political and human rights to the region’s residents, and to demand an end to Indian rule. He was frequently arrested during these restive years, bolstering his credentials as an incorruptible leader of the Kashmir cause.
But Malik’s public life took a drastic turn in 2019, when 40 Indian soldiers were killed in a suicide attack by suspected rebels in Kashmir’s Pulwama area. Malik was arrested and imprisoned, and his JKLF group was banned.
Cases pending against him for decades – for which he claims the Indian government had already granted him amnesty – were reopened. Some of the serious charges against him included those related to the 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of former Indian home minister and Kashmiri politician Mufti Mohammad Sayeed; the 1990 killing of four members of the Indian Air Force; and receiving funds from Pakistan to create unrest in India.
In May 2022, a special court served him two life sentences, along with five punishments of 10 years of rigorous imprisonment each and a fine of 100,000 rupees ($1,127). He has been lodged in Tihar Jail since.
Why did Malik file the affidavit?
Malik’s affidavit to the Delhi High Court, submitted on August 25, was in response to India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) seeking to increase his sentence from life imprisonment to a death penalty.
In the affidavit, Malik says while he maintained a public posture of a hard-willed, unbending figure adored by millions of Kashmiris for having challenged India’s authority, he had simultaneously entered into a collaborative partnership with successive Indian governments, which, he claims, assured him that serious charges against him or JKLF will not be pursued as long as he adhered to a nonviolent path.
He says the Indian government had honoured this understanding for about 25 years, and that charges against him are now being distorted by the NIA to frame him as a “terrorist”.
Therefore, his affidavit, he says, is intended to present his side of the story, to show the mitigating circumstances under which he acted, and to expose betrayals by Indian authorities after years of political talks and clandestine meetings.
Malik claims his 2006 visit to Pakistan to meet Saeed was endorsed by a senior official in Indian intelligence, and that upon his return, he had briefed India’s top security advisers about the meeting.
A United Kingdom-based journalist, who has written on the Kashmir issue for decades, told Al Jazeera that Malik’s affidavit “highlights the reality of smoke-and-mirrors” in conflicts like the one over the Himalayan region.
Malik’s case, he said, is a “litmus test”.
“To stand with Malik is to stand against India, the prosecution says,” said the journalist and author on condition of anonymity because he feared he could be barred by the Indian government from visiting the country. “But he proved the exact opposite of that: that he stood for himself, his different factions, the state, and its different emissaries in the multifaceted conflict.”
AS Dulat, who held senior positions at the IB and headed the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency, however, told Al Jazeera that New Delhi’s decision to reach out to Malik in the 1990s must be seen in the light of the peace processes that successive Indian governments had attempted to pursue in Kashmir.
“Everybody who could have helped in the peace process was tapped, and that included everybody. The idea was to try to bring peace. There was consensus, it varied from government to government, degree to degree,” Dulat said.
“Everybody agreed that what Kashmir needed was peace. I don’t think there’s any disagreement on that. Times keep changing, people keep changing, the situation today would not be the same as yesterday.”
Dulat, however, did not comment on the specific claims made by Malik and whether he believed they were true.
What other revelations has Malik made?
Malik’s affidavit also claims he was instrumental in helping the Indian government stymie a popular uprising in Indian-administered Kashmir in 2016 following the killing of young rebel leader, Burhan Wani.
He mentions meeting the deceased Kashmiri pro-freedom leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani during the uprising, “something which the [Indian] government agreed to and had given their principal go-ahead”, according to the affidavit.
In the meeting, Malik says he asked Geelani to suspend the strike – by giving “a breather of two or three days”, as he writes in his affidavit, in a “protest calendar” the agitating Kashmiris were following. Malik says he was able to prevail despite opposition from the alliance of separatist groups that Geelani headed.
He says the pause was incorporated, preventing the street protests from further escalating, and the movement tapered off within weeks. He claims his proposal to pause the protests was also supported by Kashmir’s business and trading communities, who were losing their income due to the strike.
In his affidavit, Malik also reveals that he was in secret back-channel talks in 2000 with the Indian business tycoon, Dhirubhai Ambani, the deceased father of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man.
At that time, the senior Ambani was investing in an oil refinery in the western Indian state of Gujarat, which he worried was located within “shooting distance of Pakistan”. The tycoon, fearing that the continued military tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir threatened to jeopardise his refinery project, began talks with Malik through a close aide.
But Malik does not reveal much about this encounter, only saying he and Ambani exchanged pleasantries and bonded over a shared background of men with humble beginnings. He does not say if he was able to assuage the industrialist’s anxieties over the project, which today is one of the largest oil refineries in the world.
Malik also boasts of having received an Indian passport during Prime Minister Vajpayee’s tenure in 2001, when hardline Hindu nationalist Lal Krishna Advani was the home minister. He says he was able to travel to the United States, the UK, Saudi Arabia and many other countries after that, and that he kept Indian authorities informed about who he was meeting there.
How credible are Malik’s allegations?
In a post on X on September 19, Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir, said she has written to federal Home Minister Amit Shah, urging him to “take a compassionate view” of Malik’s case in light of the new revelations as the NIA seeks the death penalty against him.
Mufti is the sister of Rubaiya Sayeed, the former Indian home minister’s daughter, whom Malik is accused of having helped abduct in 1989.
A week later, in a column for The Wire news website, Mufti wrote that the Indian state has “used individuals to serve short-term goals and then discarded or punished them once they outlived their usefulness”, comparing Malik’s case with the secretive hanging of Afzal Guru inside Tihar Jail in 2013. Guru, a Kashmiri, was convicted of an attack on the Indian parliament building in 2001.
In a 2004 letter to his lawyer from prison, Guru had named an Indian police officer named Davinder Singh, who had allegedly asked him to help the people accused of the parliament attack. Guru’s allegations were never investigated. In 2020, however, Singh was arrested in Kashmir when he was travelling in a car with two men suspected to be members of the Pakistan-based Hizb-ul-Mujahideen armed group, raising serious questions about the functioning of Indian police and intelligence authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir.
“If whistleblowers are executed, if peace-builders are imprisoned, if trust is betrayed over and over again, then what future remains for reconciliation in Kashmir?” Mufti wrote in her column.
However, security expert Ajai Sahni believes Malik’s disclosures could have the opposite effect of what he may have intended – they have ended up revealing him as a person of “doubtful” vintage who played both sides.
“There are cases of murders and terrorism against him. He must have been close to someone in the government. That’s why he was allowed to be free. Otherwise, action would have been taken against him in all these years,” said Sahni, who is the executive director at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
“Just because you have been used by the state doesn’t mean you are a man of integrity,” said Sahni, referring to Malik’s labelling of his ongoing trial as a “breach of faith” because he was allegedly promised amnesty by the Indian government.
“In fact, it is the other way around. If you were a man of integrity, you wouldn’t have been used by the state.”
But journalist and author Vikram Jit Singh, who covered Kashmir at the height of the rebellion in the 1990s, says India’s political leadership and the security agencies “were very much in the loop of what was going on” and that Malik’s claims sound “plausible”.
“It is a known fact that governments harnessed these elements in building bridges,” he told Al Jazeera.
“They reveal how governments operate when mandated by a political will that seeks reconciliation with an adversary, which is an amalgam of the nation-state and non-state actors.”
