Mehbooba Mufti Holds Talks with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq Amid Calls to Ban Gurez Tantra Event

Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti met senior cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at his Nageen residence in Srinagar on Sunday. The meeting followed the Mirwaiz’s public demand for an immediate ban on a planned “Tantra” program in Gurez, a request he made after answering Mufti’s appeal. Mufti drove to the house as part of a scheduled series of visits to religious scholars, youth leaders, women’s groups and artists, a senior PDP official said. Mirwaiz told The Indian Express that the conversation covered a range of community problems, from cultural and social challenges to the current political climate in the Valley. He said the two leaders also reviewed the prevailing political situation in some detail. Sources added that Mufti used the chance to brief the cleric on issues that activists and young people have raised in recent op‑eds and informal talks. In recent weeks the Mirwaiz, who leads Friday prayers at the grand mosque, has been highlighting social ills such as drug abuse. Two weeks earlier the Muttahida Majlis Ulama announced that valley mosques would start addressing community concerns including substance misuse, mental‑health crises and environmental damage. The meeting marks a rare convergence of a mainstream politician and a separatist religious figure; during Mufti’s 2016 tenure the Mirwaiz was detained and placed in a sub‑jail at Cheshma Shahi. Four months earlier, the cleric shared a stage at a book launch for neurologist Dr Sushil Razdan alongside leaders from the National Conference, BJP, Congress and former PDP ministers. A prior visit by BJP’s Darakshan Andrabi in September 2023 also involved discussions over a proposed cancer hospital at the Eidgah site.

Context

Such dialogues are unusual in a region where political lines are often sharply drawn, and they signal a tentative effort to bridge gaps between establishment leaders and separatist voices on social and cultural matters.