No member of JeI participated in Bosnia conference on Kashmir: Dr Hameed Fayaz

SRINAGAR — Former president of banned Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) J&K, Dr Abdul Hameed Fayaz on Wednesday said the Jamaat refutes allegations levelled in DisinfoLab report that the organisation and its associate members were involved in the conduct or promotion of the Conference held in Bosnia on Kashmir.

Addressing a press conference here, Dr Fayaz, who was flanked by former JeI spokesman Advocate Zahid Ali, said that the allegations being circulated on social networks particularly reported by an entity named DisinfoLab that Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir (presently banned) and its associated organizations were involved in the conduct or promotion of a conference in Bosnia are totally baseless as the Jamaat is not functional due to ban and it has no associate organizations anywhere in the world nor any representatives.

“Any organization or individual claiming to be an associate organization or representative of the Jamaat is quite against the facts and is hereby challenged. The Jamaat was restricted to the territory of Jammu and Kashmir only and its activities too were restricted thereto and after it was banned in February 2019, it stopped all its activities and functions. Some names shown in the report to have attended the conference have no nexus or association with the Jamaat,” Dr Fayaz said as per news agency Kashmir News Observer (KNO).

He said that it is hereby clarified that neither the Jamaat nor any of its members were involved in the conduct or promotion of the said conference.

“It is also hereby made amply clear that any member migrating to any place outside the territorial jurisdiction of Jammu and Kashmir ceases to be a member of the Jamaat as per the party constitution. So any person residing permanently outside Jammu and Kashmir cannot claim to be a member of the Jamaat and the organization cannot be held responsible for any activities done by such persons as any person settled abroad cannot have the membership of the Jamaat,” Dr Fayaz said.

He added, “Nobody has taken any verbal or written consent from any erstwhile leader or functionary of the Jamaat to speak in any conference and at present due to the ban, it is quite out of question to get such consent.”

He said that all queries raised about the participation of Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir in the conference Russell Tribunal on Kashmir held at Sarajevo Bosnia openly or tacitly are not justified at all.

“Jamaat before the ban was a socio-religious organisation working for the betterment of humanity at large in accordance with the divine guidance of Islam for seeking the pleasure of Allah,” he said. He, however, refused to take any questions.

Pertinently, on March 2, 2019, the Centre announced a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir for a period of five years, citing reasons that the outfit was in “close touch” with militant outfits. The Jamaat-e-Islami was banned under “anti-terror laws” as the Centre had claimed the step was taken to prevent any “escalation of secessionist movement” in J&K.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had issued the ban order a few days after the Jammu and Kashmir Police arrested around 100 people, including the Jamaat-e-Islami chief, and claimed that the outfit was involved in activities intended at disrupting India’s integrity.

Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir was a socio-political and religious organisation that was founded in 1945 as a chapter of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind during the Independence movement.