Jammu : Separatist leader Masarat Alam was on Friday taken into preventive custody by the Jammu and Kashmir police over a planned rally in Pulwama District’s Tral area. Earlier, as a preventive measure to maintain law and order, Alam and another separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani had been put under house arrest.
“We have been placed under house arrest so that Tral program is not successful,” Alam said earlier in the day. “Let them (government) do whatever they want to. We will carry on with what we are doing. My message to them is that they should follow the Hurriyat program,” he added. The state government has denied permission for today’s proposed congregation, with Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed reportedly instructing the police to refuse permission for the rally.
The rally was scheduled to begin from Srinagar to Tral where a youth was killed allegedly by the army while he was in their custody. On Thursday, Sayeed said the law would take its own course when asked how Alam would be reined in following his participation in an anti-India rally in Srinagar earlier this week. There is widespread criticism against the PDP-BJP state government for releasing Alam, a political prisoner, from the Baramulla prison, as there were no criminal charges against him.
Alam is the chairman of Muslim League, a constituent of hardline Hurriyat Conference led by Geelani and is widely seen as the latter’s heir apparent. He had been convicted for organizing anti-India protests resulting in the death of 112 people in stone pelting across the Valley in 2010.
