“The Calendar of Unhealing: Two Martyrs, One Date”

The Calendar of Unhealing: Two Martyrs, One Date

 








Altaf Hussain Wani


In the long, scarred history of Kashmir, certain dates return like an ache in an old wound, refusing to be sealed. The 21st of May is such a day—a calendrical crossroads where two immolations converged, separated by twelve years but bound by the same litany of sacrifice, the same implacable enemy, the same sacred earth drinking the blood of its finest sons. On this date, the valley lost Mirwaiz Maulana Mohammad Farooq in 1990, and then, as if the calendar itself had ordained a second grief, Khawaja Abdul Ghani Lone fell to assassins’ bullets in 2002, at the very commemoration of his predecessor’s martyrdom. Together, their twin silhouettes stand on a crimson horizon, defining the agony and the exalted defiance of a people’s struggle against occupation.

 

Mirwaiz Farooq was the inheritor of a spiritual and political dynasty that had long been the moral compass of Kashmiri Muslim consciousness. The Mirwaiz family did not simply lead prayers from the pulpit of the historic Jamia Masjid in Srinagar; they moulded the political awakening of a subjugated nation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when illiteracy and theological stasis threatened to extinguish the lamp of reason, the Mirwaiz lineage—through the Anjuman Nusrat-ul-Islam—ignited an educational renaissance. Founded in 1899 under the aegis of Mirwaiz Rasool Shah, the Anjuman established schools, translated sacred and modern texts, and fused religious fidelity with political self-awareness. The Jamia Masjid itself became a veritable parliament of the dispossessed, its ancient chinar-shaded courtyard echoing with sermons that were as much about salvation as about sovereignty.

 

By the tumultuous pre-1947 era and the watershed of 1946, this grand alchemy of faith and politics had reshaped Kashmir’s discourse. The Mirwaiz family anchored the Muslim Conference, a platform that articulated the right of self-determination when the subcontinent was being carved along communal lines. Mirwaiz Farooq inherited this colossal legacy and led the movement for the recovery of the sacred relic of the Prophet(SAW) from Dargah Hazratbal in 1963. When the indigenous uprising erupted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he stood at the confluence of religion and freedom, his voice a thunderous antidote to decades of official silence. On 21 May 1990, enemy agents stole into his home and murdered him, seeking to behead the movement at its moral core. The void left was excruciating—a severed spiritual artery, a pulpit suddenly voiceless. He fell when his people most needed his steadying cadence, and his martyrdom became the first great lament of the armed resistance, a wound that bleeds still into the conscience of every Kashmiri.

 

Into this vacuum, it was Abdul Ghani Lone who came forward and convinced the other leaders—of different ideologies and stature—that the only way to carry the political movement forward and remain united would be to preserve the centrality of Jamia Masjid and to accept the young, 17-year-old Mirwaiz Umer Farooq as its pivotal figure. Leaders like the late Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the late Professor Abdul Ghani Butt, and later Maulana Abbas Ansari and Fazal- ul Haq Qureshi, all echoed Lone’s conviction. Thus, after the establishment of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq was elected its Founding Chairman.

 

Khawaja Abdul Ghani Lone was born into a humble family in Kupwara’s rugged peripheries. An entirely self-made titan, he had neither a dynasty to cushion him nor a minaret to amplify his speech, yet he cultivated a ferocious fearlessness that seemed etched into his bones. He witnessed tyranny not as an abstract historical narrative but as a daily, bruising reality, and he confronted it face-first. He was a lawyer, a parliamentarian, a minister who could have chosen the silken comforts of power, but instead he walked, with eyes wide open, into the furnace of rebellion.

 

What immortalised Lone was his singular act of paternity over the indigenous armed struggle. In the late 80’s , when Kashmir’s armed struggle had the raw energy of a storm but lacked an unapologetic, visible political guardian, Lone gave it ownership. He was among the very few leaders who, without a sliver of fear, provided shelter to freedom fighters, lent the legitimacy of his grave baritone to their cause at home and abroad, and defended the right to resistance in international forums. While others wavered, parsed their words, or hid behind diplomatic deniability, Lone articulated the ethics of the armed struggle with complete conviction. There was no ambiguity in him, only the lucid, terrifying clarity of a man who had seen the abyss and decided to fill it with his own frame.

 

He was one of the basic architects of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, the political front that sought to weave the fragmented threads of the resistance into a single voice. His greatest diplomatic art was his ability to bridge seemingly unbridgeable chasms between different political ideologies—the traditionalists, the Islamists, the secular nationalists. He was the scaffolder of a unity that perpetually trembled on the brink of collapse, and he knew, with tragic prescience, that his hands might be the only ones steady enough to hold the mosaic together.

 

Fate closed its circle with the precision of a Greek tragedy. In May 2002, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, the son of the martyred Mirwaiz, asked Lone to return from the United States to attend the twelfth anniversary of Shaheed Mirwaiz Farooq’s martyrdom. Lone came, because to refuse was impossible for a man who carried the dead in his heart. He delivered his address with characteristic fire, then, at the very end of the gathering, gunmen closed in. He was martyred on the same accursed date, under the same brooding sky, his blood mingling symbolically with that of the Mirwaiz a dozen years before. It was as if the enemy wished to etch an announcement: that this date must forever swallow those who speak the language of freedom.

 

Today the intellectual and political class of Kashmir feels his absence like an amputation. Lone possessed that rarest of arts—the ability to deal with enemies without betraying principle and to create pathways of friendship across the most hostile terrain. The late Pakistani diplomat Akram Zaki, recalling a meeting with Lone shortly before his martyrdom, said with a trembling finality, “Today Kashmiris have lost an advocate par excellence.” The word was not carelessly chosen; it captures the precise nature of the loss.

 

Together, these two men reshaped more than the strategies of resistance. The Mirwaiz family and the Anjuman Nusrat-ul-Islam had seeded social and economic awareness through education, breaking the chains of ignorance and teaching a subject population that political sovereignty begins with an enlightened mind. Lone, on the other hand, translated ideological consciousness into a visceral, lived courage, making the sacrifice of the gun not a clandestine whisper but a recognised, defended chapter of a nation’s biography. Where the Mirwaiz cultivated collective spiritual memory, Lone forged a house of political belonging that could accommodate a dozen divergent dreams. Their combined legacy is a syllabus of defiance: faith that educates, politics that shelters, and a leadership that does not flinch even when the bullet’s shadow is already falling across the page.

 

May 21st arrives each year like a recurring stanza of an unfinished elegy, reminding Kashmir that the graves of its guardians are still warm, their whispers still curled into the latticework of the Jamia Masjid, their testimony still an open wound. The calendar of sacrifice refuses to heal. And in that refusal lies the unextinguished, unbearable flame of a people’s hope.

Writer is chairman of Kashmir Institute of International Relations and can be reached at X : @sultan1913

 

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