Mufti Mohammad Sayeed

Mufti Mohammad Sayeed (12 January 1936 – 7 January 2016) was a politician from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. He served twice as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, from November 2002 to November 2005 and again from March 2015 to January 2016. He was also Home Minister of India from December 1989 to November 1990.^[2] He founded the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party in July 1999 to "persuade the Government of India to initiate an unconditional dialogue with Kashmiris for resolution of the Kashmir problem."^[3]

Early life

Mufti Sayeed was born on 12 January 1936 in Bijbehara town of Anantnag district to a family of clerics. He completed his basic studies in Srinagar and then got his law and postgraduate degree in Arabic from Aligarh Muslim University before entering politics.^[4]

Politician Mehbooba Mufti is his daughter.^[1]

Political party affiliations

Mufti started his political career in the 1950s in the Democratic National Conference, a splinter group of the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference led by Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq. He was appointed as the district convenor of the party,^[5] which merged back into the National Conference in late 1960.^[6]

In 1962, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly from Bijbehara. After G. M. Sadiq become the Chief Minister of the state in 1964, Mufti was appointed as a Deputy Minister in his government.^[5]

In January 1965, the National Conference merged into the Indian National Congress.^[7] Thus Mufti became a member of Congress.

In 1972, Mufti became a cabinet minister and, the president of the state Congress unit.^[5][8] He is said to have brought about the downfall of the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference government, which was led by Farooq Abdullah, in 1984.^[9] He joined the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1986 as Minister of Tourism.^[8] In 1987, he quit the Congress party to join V. P. Singh's Jan Morcha, which led to his becoming the first Muslim Minister for Home Affairs in the Union Cabinet of India for one year, from 1989 to 1990.^[10][11]

He rejoined the Congress under P. V. Narasimha Rao, which he left in 1999 along with daughter Mehbooba Mufti to form his own party, the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party.

Chief Minister

First tenure (2002–2005)

Mohammad Sayeed participated in the 2002 assembly election and won 18 assembly seats for his Peoples Democratic Party. He went on to form a coalition government with the Indian National Congress, and was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir for a term of three years.^[12]

In 2003, he merged the autonomous Special Operations Group with the Jammu and Kashmir Police.^[13] It was under his tenure which coincided with the peace process led by Indian Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, with LOC opened for trade and bus service.^[14]

Second tenure (2015–2016)

Following a coalition agreement between the BJP and the PDP, Sayeed undertook a second tenure as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in 2015.^[15]

Attacks on his family and himself

In 1989, within few days of taking office as the Union Minister for Home Affairs, his third daughter, Rubaiya, was kidnapped.^[16] She was released in exchange for the release of five militants.^[10] Sayeed also survived attacks on his life by Kashmiri separatists.^[16] The viciousness with which events have connected, since the Indian Airlines Flight 814, have not escaped the intelligence agencies, since just recently when 50 people were killed in an attack at Afghanistan's Kandahar airport, 2015 Kandahar Airport attack, which began on Tuesday, 8 December 2015.^[17][18][19]

Death

On 24 December 2015, Sayeed was admitted to the AIIMS hospital in New Delhi. He suffered from neck pain and fever. His condition gradually deteriorated, and he was put on ventilator support. He died on 7 January 2016 due to multi-organ failure^[20][21] at about 7:30, according to provincial Education Minister and PDP Spokesman Nayeem Akhter.^[22] He was just five days short of his 80th birthday when he died.

Reactions to this death came from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, national Home Minister Rajnath Singh at Delhi airport and the 14th Dalai Lama.^[23] He was buried at his ancestral burial ground in Bijbehera^[24] with state honours. Former Chief Ministers Omar Abdullah and Ghulam Nabi Azad were present at his funeral.^[25] Condolences also came from President Pranab Mukherjee, former prime ministerial candidate L. K. Advani, Ram Madhav, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, BJP Vice President Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, former national Oil Minister Milind Deora, PDP member Rafi Mir and politicians Kalraj Mishra, Jitendra Singh and Ahmed Patel.^[22]

According to party member and PDP Chief Spokesperson Mehboob Beg,^[22] the PDP supported his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, as the next chief minister, while coalition ally BJP expressed "no objection" to her succeeding her father.^[25]

See also

• Indian Airlines Flight 814
• 2015 Kandahar Airport attack

References

Bibliography

• Bose, Sumantra (2003), Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01173-2 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

• Official Website
• Biography on J&K PDP website
• The Collaborator: How Mufti Mohammad Sayeed became Delhi’s man in Kashmir