Aasiya hails for a well-known family in Srinagar and is a science graduate. A fiery orator, she today leads the biggest women’s separatist group in Kashmir.
The Jammu and Kashmir police on Saturday achieved a major breakthrough when they arrested Syeda Aasiya Andrabi, head of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughers of the Prophet) and a leading person in the current agitation in the valley. She was picked up from a residential house in the Habak-Zakoora locality of suburban Srinagar.
Farooq Ahmad, inspector general of police, Kashmir range, confirmed her arrest.
Aasiya, 46, has been evading arrest for many months now and the police had been raiding several of her hideouts with little success.
She and Masrat Alam, general secretary of the separatist Hurriyat Conference, were seen as the leaders who incited mobs of youngsters to hurl stones at the police and paramilitary.
The police say that Aasiya and Alam had chalked out the protest programme under the banner of “Quit Jammu and Kashmir” wherein they organised protest marches, sit-ins, and general strikes. Aasiya, who wants Kashmir to be merged with Pakistan, had recently issued a diktat asking parents not to send their wards to schools till this goal was achieved.
Aasiya hails for a well-known family in Srinagar and is a science graduate. A fiery orator, she today leads the biggest women’s separatist group in Kashmir.
Her extreme religious views was due to the influence of her brother, Inayat ullah Andrabi, a former teacher of linguistics at Kashmir University, and who now lives in self-imposed exile.
Inayat Andrabi was member of the Islamic Jamiat Tulba, the student wing of Jamat-e-Islami. This left a deep impression on Aasiya who first shot to fame when in 1987-88, when she started a campaign against obscene posters and hoardings in Srinagar.
Back then, Srinagar saw a few black veiled women blackening the obscene posters outside the cinema halls and chanting Islamic slogans.
When anti-India violence broke out in 1989, her group echoed the separatists’ line and was promptly banned by the government. She married a militant commander of the Jamait-ul-Mujadeen, Mohammad Qasim Faktoo, in the early 1990s.
She and her husband were arrested with her new born baby and sent to jail. Her husband is facing a life sentence for allegedly killing a human rights activist in Kashmir. Incidentally, her husband completed his PhD in jail.
After she was released, she started the purdah campaign asking women to wear veil or abaya (full black gown with veil).
Such was her impact that at one time, there was a shortage of black cloth because of the heavy demand from women. Her supporters would sprinkle colour on women who did not observe purdah.
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