A ban under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) may be imposed on both factions of the secessionist conglomerate, the Hurriyat Conference, which has been spearheading the separatist movement in Jammu and Kashmir for over two decades, officials said.
A recent probe into the granting of MBBS seats to Kashmiri students by institutions in Pakistan indicated that the money collected from aspirants by some organisations that were part of the Hurriyat Conference conglomerate was being used for funding terror organisations in the Union Territory, officials said.
Both factions of the Hurriyat were likely to be banned under Section 3(1) of the UAPA, under which “if the Central Government is of opinion that any association is, or has become, an unlawful association, it may, by notification in the Official Gazette, declare such association to be unlawful”, the officials said.
Zero-terror policy
They said the proposal was mooted in accordance with the Union government’s policy of zero tolerance against terrorism.
The Hurriyat Conference came into existence in 1993 with 26 groups, including some pro-Pakistan and banned outfits such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, the JKLF and the Dukhtaran-e-Millat. It also included the People’s Conference and the Awami Action Committee headed by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq.
The separatist conglomerate broke into two factions in 2005, with the moderate group being led by the Mirwaiz and the hardline headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
So far, the Union government has banned the Jamaat-e-Islami and the JKLF under the UAPA. The ban was imposed in 2019.
The officials said a probe into the funding of terror groups indicated the alleged involvement of secessionist and separatist leaders, including members and cadres of the Hurriyat Conference, who had been acting in connivance with active militants of proscribed terrorist organisations such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), the Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
The cadres raised funds in the country and from abroad through various illegal channels, including hawala channels, for funding separatist and terrorist activities in Jammu and Kashmir, they said.