How Yasin Malik’s JKLF kidnapped, killed diplomat Ravindra Mhatre to free terrorist Maqbool Bhat

34 years ago, Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo was gunned down by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists in the then restive Kashmir valley in cold blood and now in a historic step, the Government of India has declared that it will reopen cases of Kashmiri Hindu genocide from 1989-90.

The first case to be reopened is that of Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo who was killed in 1989 by JKLF terrorists of Yasin Malik. Justice Ganjoo had sentenced JKLF terrorist Maqbool Bhatt who was later hanged by India in response to killing of Indian Diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in UK.

That immediately brings to mind the kidnapping (on 3rd February 1984) and the subsequent brutal beheading of an Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham, UK by Yasin Malik’s men as they sought exchange parleys with the Indira Gandhi-led government to get terrorist Maqbool Butt released. Incidentally, the system failed the Mhatres and more than 48 hours after the kidnapping, some 40km from Birmingham, farmer Joyce Tellis discovered a dead body in the drive of her farm in Hinckley, Leicestershire. It was Ravindra Mhatres. Shot in the head twice. Dead.

Maqbool Bhat the terrorist lodged at Tihar Jail in New Delhi was hanged to death on 11 February 1984.

Those were the days when television news was disseminated by Doordarshan that had only a certain number of news bulletins. Newspapers were a better source of complete news albeit almost a day late.

The image on the front page of a national daily a few days later – showing a 13-year-old girl arriving at the Mumbai airport with a distraught and even lost looking mother in tow stays etched in memory.

Politically, a lot happened in India the year 1984, but this tragedy with an India angle shook even Scotland Yard.

Then, 32 years later, New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University – a few misguided students held a shocking event. JNU campus was rocked by protests over the individual death penalties of Maqbool Butt and Afzal Guru. One could not but reflect on whatever happened to the family that suffered directly as a consequence of the actions of Maqbool’s terror outfit.

I connected through my journalist team members with Mrs Shobha Ravindra Mhatre the doctor wife of the slain diplomat. Mrs Mhatre refused to talk on the topic as she is still apparently still extremely traumatised by whatever happened in Birmingham.

Asha D’Souza the daughter agreed to speak and here’s what she told us.

“It was the third of February 1983 and it was my birthday the next day. He called up home and told us that he was leaving office and that he would be picking up a cake on the way.”

Incidentally, that day was also a Friday and a relatively quiet day at the consulate as Deputy Commissioner Baldev Kohli was away in London attending a farewell reception for Dr Syed Mohammed, the Indian high commissioner who was due to retire in a few days.

Ravindra Hareshwar Mhatre – the 49-year-old assistant commissioner, was the man in charge of the consulate then. He was so well known as a disciplined man who was a stickler for time that it was said that one could set stopwatches by his clockwork moves. His routine to clock in and out of the office too had his signature metronomic exactness.

At 7 pm when Mhatres still had not returned, his anxious wife Shobha checked with the consulate and learnt that her husband had left at his usual hour.

“There was no sign of him; I was concentrating more on my mother who had completely collapsed. She had to be sedated and was in complete shock as to how could her husband just vanish without a trace so suddenly!” said Asha D’Souza nee Mhatre.

A handwritten amateurish note – signed by a group calling itself the Kashmir Liberation Army (KLA) – was delivered to Reuters in London late Friday declaring that it had kidnapped an Indian diplomat who would be shot if its demands were not met.

Apart from the release of several other Pakistan-backed terrorists and a ransom, the key demand of the outfit was that Maqbool Butt be released from jail.

“There was an organization called JKLF (Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front) and the news filtered to us and then the police machinery swung into action. Scotland Yard was there, the press got hold of it and by evening there was paparazzi camping at our door,” said Asha D’Souza.

She said that her diplomat father had earlier had postings in various “disturbed” places like Bangladesh in 1971 etc. With the UK posting it was the first time he thought it was safe for the family to be taken along. Eighteen months into the posting, he was kidnapped, murdered, and thrown into the wilderness.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited the parents and family of Ravindra Mhatre in Mumbai and Mrs Gandhi held senior Mrs Mhatre’s hands – saying she understood how horribly it hurts to lose a child.

“It did not bring my father back, but this visit and talk by the PM soothed and mitigated the pain, a bit,” says Asha D’Souza. Then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also wrote a letter to Ravindra Mhatre’s brother in February the following year, expressing condolences and apprising him of Britain’s efforts to get the Zia-ul-Haq government in Pakistan to send back the killers from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.

Maqbool Bhat and Yasin Malik: Partners in crime

Asha says that with her father so brutally killed and her mother in a state of shock, she had to grow up in a hurry and had to take a lot of decisions that a fourteen-year-old need not have to take. Asha says as a 14-year-old to hear the name of the terrorist Maqbool Butt ever earlier.Maqbool Butt was a Kashmiri terrorist who founded the notorious Jammu-Kashmir Plebiscite Front (JKPF), which further became the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) – the latter with Yasin Malik, Amanatullah Khan, etc.

In February 2019, days before then wing commander Abhinandan Varthaman was captured, braved custody in Pakistan and returned home, and months before Article 370 was abrogated by the Centre, terror-sympathiser Yasin Malik told the media, “Maqbool Butt was an ideologue, a statesman, a warrior, a political leader and a diplomat who led nation of Kashmir on all fronts and sacrificed his life for the sacred cause.” He even called the dead terrorist “Kashmir nation’s Baba-I-Qoum” like MA Jinnah is called in Pakistan’s perspective. Malik – whose wife is of Pakistani origin – would routinely demand and impose upon Kashmiris a complete shutdown on 11th February, in remembrance of the day Butt was hanged in 1984.

Yasin Malik is in jail. Ample evidence of Yasin Malik accepting his role in the assassination of Justice Ganjoo who had passed the death penalty verdict on Maqbool Butt. But subsequent governments failed to haul him up for the same. The Narendra Modi government changed it all.

The late Justice Ganjoo’s family welcomed the move by Modi Government to reopen case against JKLF terrorist Yasin Malik and others for killing Justice Ganjoo. SIA J&K has launched investigations into the case. Here’s what Swapna Raina, granddaughter of Justice Ganjoo told a journalist.

 

 

Meanwhile, Ravindra Mhatre’s killers in the UK – terrorists of the JKLF who were possibly handled by Yasin Malik, had fled to Pakistan in 1984 but Islamabad repeatedly denied their presence or cited difficulties in tracing them to British authorities.

Finally, two accused in the Mhatre case – Mohammed Riaz and Abdul Qayyum Raja were convicted of the murder. Another JKLF terrorist, Mohammed Aslam Mirza was put in US jail as he was caught living illegally in the United States. Interestingly, Scotland Yard was found that Aslam Mirza’s fingerprints matched with those found on the murder weapon of Ravindra Mhatre.