By Jehangir Ali / The Wire

Srinagar: Confined to his Srinagar residence for more than four years, All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has decided to wage a legal battle against the Jammu and Kashmir administration over his “arbitrary and illegal” detention.

In a legal notice to J&K’s chief secretary Arun Kumar Mehta, Mirwaiz, who is also the chief cleric of Kashmir, has threatened to challenge his “unwarranted” detention in court if the administration, which is run directly by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government, doesn’t lift the curbs imposed on him since 2019.

Mirwaiz was put under house arrest along with other mainstream and some separatist leaders of Jammu and Kashmir on August 4, 2019, a day before the Union government introduced the J&K Reorganisation Act 2019 as a Bill in parliament for downgrading the erstwhile state into two union territories.

While mainstream political leaders such as National Conference president Farooq Abdullah and his son Omar Abdullah, and Peoples Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti were freed within months after J&K lost its statehood, two key Hurriyat hawks – Syed Ali Geelani and M. Ashraf Sehrai – died while in detention.

Several separatist leaders and activists, including JKLF chief Yasin Malik, Shabir Shah and Nayeem Khan, were booked under terrorism charges and shifted to Tihar jail in the national capital. Barring senior Hurriyat leaders Abdul Ghani Bhat and Bilal Gani Lone, who were also affiliated with the Mirwaiz-led APHC, all Hurriyat leaders are presently incarcerated.

J&K’s Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has consistently maintained that there were no restrictions on Mirwaiz and that “he is free to go wherever he likes”.

However, in the legal notice, Mirwaiz has rejected Sinha’s claims, saying that a “large contingent of security personnel” has been deployed outside his residence in Nigeen locality of Srinagar that “nullifies the aforesaid stand of lieutenant governor which speaks volumes”.

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