Mirpur, November 24
He spent his best years in Indian jails. He was just 22 when he crossed the Line of Control (LoC) and fell into the hands of the Indian security forces. He remained in Srinagar and Jammu jails for 12 long years and was repatriated to Pakistan where again he remained behind bars for sometime.
He is Abdul Hamid Butt, self-styled leader of the National Liberation Army (NLA), accused of sending hordes of “infiltrators” across the border into India.
Butt was not alone in the jails at that time. There was one Maqbool Butt and a Riaz Dar. They were all accused of many heinous crimes, the least of all being crossing the LoC. He and Dar were found guilty of only “infiltrating” into India and punished.
“I told the judge that I respected his decision to punish me for “entering” India but I still held the view that for a Kashmiri to move across the LoC was an inalienable right”, Butt said in an exclusive interview with The Tribune.
His senior colleague Maqbool Butt, who founded the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in 1965, was not as lucky as him. He was found guilty of masterminding the hijacking of an Indian Airlines’ Fokker Friendship aircraft and the killing of an Indian diplomat in the UK. Maqbool Butt was sentenced to death and hanged at Tihar Jail.
“Instead of releasing me immediately as I had already spent over a decade in the jail during the trial period, the Indian authorities handed me over to the Pakistani police. Pakistan too punished me for crossing the LoC.”
Butt has “fond” memories of his stay in the jails, particularly the one in Jammu. “I had more Hindu friends there than Muslim. After all, I am from that part of Kashmir”. His father was born in Jammu. The family migrated to the Pakistan side of Kashmir during the Partition. “I was born at Gujranwala in Punjab. It had always bugged me why Kashmir should remain divided.”
In his impressionable period of life, he was inspired by the ideals of Netaji Bose and others who took up arms to fight for freedom. However, it was the setting up of the JKLF by Maqbool Butt that really fired his imagination. It is a different matter that his gravitation towards militancy ended up in the Indian jails. His colleagues in the JKLF tried in vain to have Maqbool Butt and his comrades in arms released from the jails.
Though Butt is now a much mellowed man, he is yet to accept that it was futile to wage an “armed struggle” against India. “Yes, it is difficult for me to reconcile to the fact that our sacrifices have not yielded any results. If suppose you walk several miles in difficult terrain to reach a house and you find that it is locked. That is the kind of feeling I have today”.
Butt, who is accused of setting up “terrorist” camps, admitted that such camps did exist in Azad Kashmir. “Now you won’t find any on this side of the LoC. We too are inspired by the peace process initiated by India and Pakistan. We want to give peace a chance.” Suddenly he sounded more a Gandhian than a militant.
The tall, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken militant leader said half the problems would be over if the people on both sides of the LoC were allowed to mix freely. “If Europe can do it, why can’t India and Pakistan?” As a prelude, he wanted both countries to withdraw all their forces from Kashmir.
In Butt’s scheme of things, there should be a revival of the Kashmir as it existed under the Maharaja. “No region is more or less important.” How is this possible?
“Let the entire Kashmir be administered by a body consisting of the representatives from the UN, the G-8 and other international groupings for 15 years. Afterwards, there should be a plebiscite in which the Kashmiris should have the full freedom to choose to remain independent or join India or Pakistan.” That was his prescription for Kashmir.
What if the peace process is derailed and his ambitions thwarted? “Then we can try our own ways. I have 3,000 dedicated boys in the NLA who are ready to fight for the Kashmir cause. But I do not want them to be cannon fodder.”
