PROFILES
The Jammu-Kashmir Plebiscite Front (JKPF), the parent organisation of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), was founded by Maqbool Bhat, a Kashmiri school teacher, in 1966, the same year Yasin Malik was born. Last week, Malik, who is the current chairman of the JKLF, was sentenced to life imprisonment in an illegal cross-border funding case.
Amanullah Khan, from the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), was the first chairman of the JKLF, set up in 1977 for “liberating” J&K from both India and Pakistan. Khan died in Pakistan in 2016. The JKLF, as an armed group, came under spotlight in 1984 when its men living in the U.K. kidnapped Ravindra Hareshwar Mhatre, a 48- year-old Indian diplomat, from a bus stop. The first ever kidnapping by the JKLF was a desperate bid to get its jailed patron Bhat released. But it didn’t work out as per plan. Mhatre's body was found three days later in Birmingham. The incident spurred the case proceedings against Bhat, who was hanged in 1984 in Tihar, for the murder of a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officer in 1968.
