Srinagar, 17 September (IANS) Abdul Ghani Bhat, former president of the Hurrit Conference and Abdul Ghani Bhat, died on Wednesday at his home in Bottingu village in Sopore, Jammu and Kashmir.
Family sources confirmed that Professor Bhat, a resident of Bottingu village in Sopore area of Baramulla district, breathed his last at his residence this evening after a brief illness.
A prominent political person, he was active in the separatist politics of Kashmir for several decades. According to the family, the details about their funeral prayers will be declared later.
Born in 1935 in Bottingu, a village near Sopore in Jammu and Kashmir grew up in a house, who gave importance to education. He studied at the historic SP College in Srinagar before proceeding for postgraduate studies in Persian and later obtained a law degree from Aligarh Muslim University.
Returning to his home state, he began teaching Persian at Government Degree College in Poonch, a career that he nurtured and chased for more than two decades, before politics pulled him into a separate calling.
He co-established the Muslim United Front (MUF) in 1986, later served as the chairman of the alliance of separatist groups formed in 1993, the Chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), and he was the president of the Muslim Conference, Jammu and Kashmir (MCJK), who was a restricted political faction by the government of India.
He was a teacher in a government college in Sopore, when the then Governor, Jagmohan, ended his services for anti-national activities.
Bhat later actively participated in separatist politics and was a leading leader of the Muslim United Front (MUF), who was coming with separate separatist parties, who contested in the coalition in the 1987 alliance headed by Farooq Abdullah in the coalition.
It is believed that in the 1987 elections, MUF leaders were rigged to keep the leaders out of the state assembly.
It is generally believed that after being dissatisfied with the Democratic process, in 1987, supporters of young election agents and separatist leaders in the elections were first to cross the border and return with weapons to cross an armed militancy in Kashmir in 1989.
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SQ/PGH