Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, other separatists deny receiving government perks

Kashmiri separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s short validity passport (SVP) was not renewed after it expired in 2013 and “he has not been allowed to travel abroad for the past many years,” claimed his party on Wednesday.

Likewise, the travel document issued to Syed Ali Shah Geelani on July 20, 2015 to enable him to visit his ailing daughter in Saudi Arabia was valid for nine months only. In fact, his SVP was suspended for four weeks after he announced that he will travel to New York to attend a meet of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that was being held on the sidelines of the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in September that year. After the expiry of its nine-month validity, the passport was not renewed.

The applications submitted by other senior separatist leaders Muhammad Yasin Malik, Prof. Abdul Gani Bhat and Moulvi Abbas Ansari, seeking a renewal of their passports or issuing them the travel document are awaiting approval from the concerned authorities as all of them fall into the “prior approval category” (PAC).

Bilal Gani Lone is the only senior Mirwaiz-led Hurriyat Conference leader who has a full validity passport of 10 years issued from outside the state, whereas his younger brother Sajad Gani Lone was issued one only after he became a minister in the PDP-BJP government on March 1, 2015. Another prominent separatist leader Shabir Ahmed Shah has never applied for a passport as “he does not consider himself to be an Indian,” said one of his aides. All-women Dukhtaran-e-Millat chief Sayeda Aasiya Andrabi also does not have a passport.