Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami

Tarigami was born on 17 July 1949 to a farmer family in Tarigam village of Kulgam.[6] His family name, comes from his village – Tarigam. His father is Late Gulam Rasool Rather.[7] He could not appear for the B.A. Final Year examination, due to the political turbulence in Kashmir.[7] He lost his wife in childbirth in 1975, during which he was a political prisoner.[6]

Yousuf Tarigami was shaped as a communist under the influence of Abdul Kabir Wani of chawalgam. In 1967, when he was 18, Tarigami and his friend Ghulam Nabi Malik, now the J&K secretary of the CPI(M), organised a protest to demand an increase in intake capacity at Anantnag Degree College.[6] The two were then part of a local communist group called the Revolutionary Students and Youth Federation.[6] They did a hunger strike for 36 hours at the deputy commissioner’s office and the authorities were forced to raise the total intake of the college.[6] After the successful campaign, Tarigami took part in various farmer movements in J&K under farmer leader Abdul Qadir, but their political activism took a more solid shape when they joined the Democratic Conference, which was part of the CPI(M), in 1967.[6] Tarigami grew close to communist leader Ram Pyaare Saraf and served as his understudies. When Saraf split from the CPI(M) to lend support to the Naxalite movement and joined the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), so did tarigami.[6]

In 1967, he was imprisoned for taking up the cause of farmers against the forcible procurement of rice. After the 1975 Indira-Sheikh Accord, under which Jammu and Kashmir was made a constituent unit of the Union of India, Tarigami demanded the right to self-determination, and his activism landed him in jail. While he was in prison, his wife died. The government released him on parole for a month but rearrested him after three days.[8]

In 1979, when the execution of former Pakistan PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto led to riots in Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, confronted Marxists and Tarigami became among the first people to be booked under the controversial Public Safety Act (PSA).[6] In the aftermath of the Bhutto episode, both Malik and Tarigami rejoined the CPI(M) and restarted their journey in Kulgam as mainstream politicians.[6] In his political journey, he has been imprisoned in various jails like the Sub-Jail Reasi, the very dangerous torture centres of Red-16 and Papa II.

In 2005, militants entered the heavily guarded Tulsibagh colony in Srinagar and attacked the homes of Tarigami and the Minister for Education Ghulam Nabi Lone. Lone was killed. (In 2015, ten years after Ghulam Nabi Lone's death, there was another minister in Kashmir with the same name belonging to People's Democratic Party PDP)[9] In the attack in 2005, Tarigami's guards fought off the attackers, although one of his guards was killed.[10] He is a Z category protectee by Government of India.[11]

In 2016, he slammed the former MP Tariq Hameed Karra for resigning from Lok Sabha membership and said he should have raised the Kashmir issue in Indian Parliament.[12] He added that the dialogue with Kashmir should not be through interlocutors but with the involvement of the Parliament by constituting a committee of senior Parliamentarians.[12] He views the tradition of Kashmir as built on the sacrifices of the working class. He said that the Zaldagar martyrs of 1865 laid the foundation of a struggle against the exploitation and atrocities on the artisans and the Shawlbaff protest launched at Zaldagar against the ruling class has given vent to numerous movements of the working class which are awaiting successful culmination.[13]

He saw the BJP’s policy vis-a-vis Kashmir as successful in distracting people from pressing issues such as unemployment and economic stagnation by centring its campaign around Kashmir as a vehicle to further its bellicose nationalism.[14] He views BJP's approach on Articles 370 and 35A as a great disservice to the nation’s unity as it will lead to disintegration of the State of J&K from India, also by eroding the Kashmiris’ sense of unity with the nation.[14]