Fatah pays tribute to Burhan Muzaffar Wani, commander of Hizbul Mujahideen and martyr of the Kashmiri resistance, on the tenth anniversary of his martyrdom at the hands of Indian Occupation Forces on July 8th, 2016.
Born in 1994 in the town of Tral—a longstanding center of resistance in Indian-occupied Kashmir—Burhan joined Hizbul Mujahideen in 2010, after he and several others were subjected to an arbitrary beating by Indian security personnel. By 2013, he had risen to the position of commander.
Burhan possessed an extraordinary ability to articulate the aspirations, frustrations, and grievances of a generation that had come of age under occupation. He was among the first leaders of the Kashmiri resistance to harness social media effectively, giving voice to young Kashmiris who had long been denied political expression. His authenticity, conviction, and charisma earned him immense admiration throughout the Valley.
The Indian occupation recognized the significance of Burhan’s influence. It understood that figures capable of inspiring a new generation of resistance represented a profound challenge to its hold over Kashmir. In response, it sought first to wage an information war—circulating allegations that sought to portray him as a collaborator or informant, tarnishing his reputation before ultimately assassinating him in July 2016.
Any attempt to shape Burhan Wani’s legacy collapsed in the face of the public response to his martyrdom. Hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris poured into the streets in one of the largest uprisings witnessed in the Valley in decades, rejecting the occupation’s propaganda and embracing him as a symbol of resistance.The Indian state responded with overwhelming violence against protesters, killing more than one hundred civilians and injuring over fifteen thousand people during the initial crackdown.
The protests continued in successive waves for nearly two years, during which the systematic use of pellet shotguns against demonstrators came to be described as the world’s first mass blinding. Since Burhan Wani’s martyrdom, more than 5,000 Kashmiri civilians have been partially or completely blinded by Indian occupation forces.
We believe Burhan Wani was a hero of the Kashmiri people. He was born into a land defined by military occupation, where generations of Kashmiris had been denied their UN-guaranteed right to self-determination. Faced with those conditions, he chose resistance over submission.
Most of the South Asian Left remains unwilling to recognize Burhan Wani’s heroism because he was the commander of a religious movement. In doing so, it abandons concrete political analysis in favor of narratives manufactured by the Indian state, reducing the Kashmiri national liberation struggle to familiar tropes of “Islamic extremism” and “terrorism.” Rather than analyzing the movement in its historical and material context, it adopts the ideological vocabulary of the occupier.
Fatah rejects this approach entirely. The ideological character of a national liberation movement must be understood in its concrete historical and material conditions, not judged against abstract ideological expectations. For nearly a century, Islam has been the principal language through which much of the Kashmiri Muslim population has expressed its political aspirations. This reality is rooted in a long history of Hindu nationalist domination, first under the Dogra monarchy and later under the Indian state.
The title of Mindu Rai’s book, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects, aptly captures the historical foundations of this political consciousness.
As Rai writes, “The Dogra kings maintained firm control. They rode roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of their Kashmiri Muslim subjects, planting the seeds of a political movement that remains in thrall to a religiosity thrust upon it for the past 150 years.”
More than two centuries after the establishment of Dogra rule, Kashmiri Muslims continue to live under a political order shaped by Hindu majoritarianism. Under the fascist BJP regime, public holidays commemorating key moments in the Kashmiri Muslim struggle have been abolished, while the birthdays of Dogra rulers have been elevated to official state holidays. The persistence of this historical pattern should prompt Marxists to understand the historical conditions that produced the ideological character of the Kashmiri national liberation movement, rather than dismiss it because it does not conform to their secular expectations.
On this tenth anniversary of Burhan Wani’s martyrdom, Fatah honors not only his memory, but also those who carried the torch of resistance after him. We remember the fallen heroes of the Kashmiri Islamic resistance—including Riyaz Naikoo, Saifullah Mir, Sabzar Ahmad Bhat, Yasin Itoo, and Bashir Ahmed Peer—whose lives, like Burhan’s, were dedicated to the liberation of their homeland.
Burhan Wani belongs to the long tradition of anti-colonial revolutionaries who chose resistance over submission. Like Bhagat Singh, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and countless others before him, he understood that freedom is never granted by an occupying power, but won through struggle and sacrifice.
There are those who claim that Kashmir will never again witness an uprising on the scale of that which followed Burhan Wani’s martyrdom. They point to a manufactured “normalcy,” measured by the temporary silence imposed through military occupation, mass arrests, constant surveillance, and fear.
Fatah rejects this narrative entirely. National liberation movements are not defeated by periods of relative calm, nor are they sustained by any single individual. They endure because the conditions that gave rise to them endure. Until the Indian occupation ends and the Kashmiri people are permitted to freely exercise their right to self-determination, the desire for liberation will continue to find new voices, new leaders, and new forms of resistance.