Late in the night on 25 October, the air in Old Town, Baramullah, was thick with shock and grief. Thousands had gathered in curfewed Kashmir for the funeral of the locality’s most well-known man—Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani. Two tents had been erected for the mourners, in the grounds of a nearby masjid. In one of these, over one hundred and fifty women had gathered. Geelani’s wife, Arifa, sat opposite the entrance to the tent, at the centre of a group of women. The mourners were quiet, somber. They had waited an unusually long time.
Geelani had died early the previous evening, following a cardiac arrest. He was a professor of Arabic at Delhi University and a human-rights activist who campaigned for the rights of political prisoners. His activism was a direct outcome of his own circumstances—Geelani was accused of masterminding the 2001 attack on Parliament. He was arrested and brutally tortured. A special court convicted him of “waging war against the state,” and sentenced him to death. In 2003, after human-rights activists and lawyers spearheaded a nationwide campaign that drew attention to the lack of evidence against Geelani in the case, the Delhi High Court acquitted him. The Supreme Court later upheld the high court’s order.
After he was acquitted, Geelani swore himself to the cause of those who had been wronged by the state. He began campaigning against the Prevention of Terrorism Act, under which he had been convicted. At the time of his death, Geelani was the president of the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, a civil-society collective.
“I’ve never met a man as interesting, as intelligent and as firm as him,” Abdul Rashid Mir, a neighbor, told me. “His death is a loss not just to his family and his locality, but to all Kashmiri people.”
After Geelani died, his family members in Delhi, which included his son Atif, his daughter Nusrat and his brother Bismillah, had wished to take his body home immediately, but were asked to instead wait until a post-mortem was conducted. A video uploaded online showed Delhi Police officials commandeering an ambulance outside Fortis Hospital in Delhi, where Geelani was first brought and declared dead, even as some young Kashmiri men argued against their actions. Eventually, the professor’s body was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences for an autopsy. “We were made to wait for six hours” that evening, Bismillah told me. “Everyone was waiting outside the ambulance … all we wanted to do was take the body home as early as possible, but it did not happen.”
For most of the next day, Geelani’s relatives and neighbours in Baramullah waited anxiously. I arrived at about 4.30 pm, when the sun was setting. I did not see any other journalists there. The professor’s death had been sudden, and the delay due to the post-mortem appeared to have deepened the family’s ordeal, shocking them almost into silence. Though about three thousand people had gathered—the tent I was in was filled with over one hundred and fifty women—hardly any one spoke.
The body arrived in Baramullah at around 7.30 pm, and the funeral rites began thereafter. Geelani was buried at about 11 pm that night, near the Darul Aloom Al Mustafawi, a mosque where he had taught Arabic before he moved to Delhi.
I stayed at the late professors’ home that night, with his family. The next morning, the women of the family read passages from the Quran in his memory, offering prayers for his soul. I visited Geelani’s grave with his nephew, Syed Uzair Geelani.
Uzair, a 23-year-old, spoke tenderly of his uncle. For eight years, Uzair has been reading the Tarawih, a set of prayers offered every evening during Ramzan. Whenever Geelani visited home for Ramzan, Uzair recalled, he would attend the prayer and repeat verses after Uzair. “I was proud,” Uzair said. “Yeh meri khuskismati thi”—this was my good fortune. “At next year’s Ramzan, that’s what I will miss most.” He told me that he and many other children in their family affectionately referred to Geelani as “abbu ji,” or father. “He used to always tell the family members to not speak ill of others,” he said. “He used to say, ‘Death will come to everyone … par sach ka saath dena chahiye”—one must always take the side of the truth.
