NEW DELHI: Not a few years ago, Kashmir separatist leader Bilal Lone had famously declared that the Kashmir issue could only be solved through a full-fledged war, and that the separatist groups, including the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), would continue to exist until Kashmir itself existed. At the time, these words did not appear to be exaggerated—Hurriyat was the driver of how things moved in the Valley. Whether the Valley functioned or would shut down was decided by a single call from the Hurriyat Conference.
Six years after the abrogation of Article 370, Hurriyat is a defunct organisation— its leaders lost to history, like a few torn posters of “bandh” calls still stuck on the dilapidated walls of downtown Srinagar, and ignored. Even its headquarters, located on Rajbagh Road opposite Zero Bridge in Srinagar, stands deserted. Once the nerve centre of separatist coordination, the building now exists as an institution of non-consequence. While many see 2019 as the year that ended the Hurriyat Raj in the Valley, internal observers say that the first blow was delivered in May 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led BJP came to power. By their accounts, by the end of 2017, the socalled “invincible” Hurriyat had already been shattered into pieces—though it still appeared to stand, waiting only for the final blow, which came in August 2019.
At one time, the Hurriyat Conference commanded the political narrative of Kashmir’s separatist movement. Its leaders were seen as the principal voice of dissent against Indian rule in the Valley, capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands through shutdown calls, funeral processions of killed terrorists, and mass street protests. Its statements would dictate the pace of daily life in Srinagar; schools and shops would shut down on its orders; and international delegations would routinely seek meetings with its representatives during visits to India. Recalling those years, veteran journalist Law Kumar Mishra, who was posted in Srinagar between 1998 and 2001, said, “A Hurriyat call would result in total shutdowns akin to police curfew, particularly during Republic Day and Independence Day, or during visits of Prime Ministers and Home Ministers.
Streets across the Valley would empty out, not on the orders of the administration, but in obedience to a fax or press note from Hurriyat. On several such occasions, its Hurriyat leaders bypassed Raj Bhawan and the CM’s secretariat, instead submitting anti-India memoranda to the United Nations office in Srinagar and Baramulla.” The two offices cited by him are run by the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) and are still functioning.
According to him, the Hurriyat’s influence over youth and students was immense, with incidents of heavy stone-pelting against security forces in Srinagar that continued well into the 2010s. “Meetings with visiting European Commission members were once mandatory, and during Eid, Hurriyat leaders were regular guests at the Pakistan high commission,” he recalled. “Now, things have changed completely—when Home Minister Amit Shah visited Srinagar recently, a representative of Hurriyat leaders called on him and assured them they had disassociated from the separatist elements.” Few would be aware that PM Modi, who was then handling Kashmir affairs within the BJP, was the first leader to rush to Chittisinghpora village in Anantnag district after the massacre of 35 Sikh villagers by terrorists on 20 March 2000.
Modi was informed of the terror attack by Mishra, at a time when communication infrastructure in the Valley was severely limited due to ongoing disturbances mostly orchestrated by the Hurriyat. The Hurriyat symbolised a potent mix of religious identity, political assertion, and cross-border patronage—one that dominated the landscape of Kashmir for over two decades since its formation in 1993. But today, the Hurriyat exists only in name. Its offices are shut, its leaders either jailed, retired, or under silent house arrest, and its influence—once described as parallel to that of the elected government—now reduced to political irrelevance.
The slow unravelling of the Hurriyat’s power began well before the final blow in August 2019, but its steepest decline came in the years following the formation of the Narendra Modi-led government, which set out to erase the perception that Hurriyat was the sole representative of the Kashmiri people. That perception owed much of its legitimacy to the attention and engagement the group received from foreign delegations prior to 2014. Between 2000 and 2014, observers recall, several prominent foreign leaders and officials met with Hurriyat leaders.
One of the most high-profile meetings took place in July 2001, when Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, during his visit to India for the Agra Summit, hosted a breakfast meeting with Hurriyat leaders in New Delhi. He repeated this gesture in April 2005, again meeting the separatist leaders during another visit to India. In 2002, a European Union delegation comprising representatives from Denmark, France, Greece, and Italy visited Jammu and Kashmir and met with Hurriyat leaders to assess the electoral climate and encourage political participation.
In November 2005, a U.S. congressional delegation led by Republican Congressman Dan Burton held closed-door talks with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and other Hurriyat members in New Delhi. Although the U.S. ambassador did not attend, but the engagement signalled American interest in the separatist perspective. In subsequent years, Pakistan continued to maintain contact with Hurriyat leaders. In July 2011, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar met with both Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq during her official visit to India. In November 2013, Sartaj Aziz, advisor to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on foreign affairs and security, met with a Hurriyat delegation at the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi.
The final major interaction in this period occurred in August 2014, when Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit met Geelani and others in Delhi despite Indian objections— prompting the Government of India to cancel planned foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan. These interactions highlight how, for over a decade, Hurriyat leaders were regularly engaged by visiting foreign dignitaries, particularly from Pakistan, the European Union, and the United States, lending them international visibility and diplomatic relevance during that era. Officials, including both former and serving intelligence personnel, stated that a fundamental shift occurred in the Indian state’s approach toward separatism after May 2014.
“What had previously been treated as a political problem—requiring outreach, dialogue, and limited accommodation—was now seen squarely as a law-andorder issue tied to national security and cross-border terrorism,” an official with one of the intelligence agencies who spent more than five years in the region told The Sunday Guardian. According to him, there were no attempts to revive talks with Hurriyat leaders; instead, the state turned its attention to systematically dismantling their networks—legal, logistical, financial, and symbolic. The first visible signs of this came in 2017, when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) launched a wideranging terror-funding probe that targeted not just top-tier leaders but their entire ecosystem. Over a dozen key figures connected with the Hurriyat—including Altaf Shah (son-in-law of Syed Ali Shah Geelani), Shabir Shah, and Masarat Alam—were arrested. The NIA alleged that they had been receiving funds from Pakistan-based handlers and routing them through hawala networks to fuel unrest, sponsor stone-pelting, and organise street violence in the Valley.
“The investigation was accompanied by coordinated raids, asset seizures, and scrutiny of NGOs, trusts, and even educational institutions loosely affiliated with separatist politics. This disrupted the financial machinery that had sustained the Hurriyat’s ability to operate on the ground. Something which they had never expected,” said another official involved in the operations. By the end of 2018, its second-line leadership was either in jail or facing prosecution, and the group’s capacity to issue protest calendars or coordinate shutdowns had withered. The death of Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani in July 2016 had triggered a wave of protests across Kashmir, but the mass mobilisation that followed revealed new dynamics: the Hurriyat was no longer leading from the front. It was reacting to the sentiment on the street, not shaping it.
And as the security situation tightened, especially with increased use of preventive detentions and intelligence-based targeting of overground networks, the Hurriyat’s residual ability to command public attention diminished. In August 2019, with Amit Shah at the helm of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Centre abrogated Article 370 and bifurcated the state of Jammu & Kashmir into two Union Territories. Nearly all political leaders, including those from mainstream parties, were placed under detention. Hurriyat leaders too were confined— Mirwaiz Umar Farooq remained under house arrest for over three years. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the most prominent face of the hardline separatist faction, had already become inactive due to age and illness.
In June 2020, he resigned from the Hurriyat Conference altogether, issuing a strongly worded letter accusing its constituents of corruption, indiscipline, and betrayal. When Geelani passed away in September 2021, the state ensured his funeral remained low-key, with restrictions on movement and communication imposed across the Valley to prevent any mass gathering. It was a quiet end to the man who was once seen as no less than the “Sadr-eRiyasat” of Kashmir. The once-popular Hurriyat protest calendars have now ceased to exist, shutdown calls—once as routine as the rising sun—have not happened for years now, and no domestic or foreign delegations have visited its now-defunct offices. The younger generation in Kashmir—once drawn to the Hurriyat’s language of self-determination—has either disengaged from politics or shifted focus toward more localised concerns.
The influence the Hurriyat once enjoyed is not just diminished, it has evaporated. Officials point out that the strategy was not merely to suppress the Hurriyat but to render it obsolete by exposing its internal contradictions, choking its funding, and cutting it off from the people. By the time the Central government announced the revocation of Article 370, the Hurriyat was no longer in a position to respond politically, let alone mobilise a resistance. Its inability to provide a coherent roadmap, coupled with years of public fatigue over prolonged shutdowns and economic disruption, had already drained much of its legitimacy. Today, the Hurriyat Conference exists as a historical reference, not a political actor—replaced by a security-led governance model, with Shah’s Home Ministry ensuring that no space remains for revivalist separatist narratives.
