When former PM Manmohan Singh shook hands with Srinagar butcher Yasin Malik – who had pumped 26 bullets into IAF Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna – none other than the Prime Minister of Bharat compromised national security.

When someone like Malik is sent abroad to New York for alleged medical treatment on taxpayers’ money, it implicitly encourages terrorists to kill our security personnel & citizens.

In the morning hours of 25 January 1990, on the eve of Republic Day, terrorists stormed a bus stop in Rawalpora chowk where over 40 Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel were waiting to board a bus.

These terrorists from the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), led by Yasin Malik, started pumping bullets at unarmed IAF officers indiscriminately. The terrorists were so barbaric that they took rounds around the wounded IAF men lying in pools of blood. Four IAF men – Squadron leader Ravi Khanna, Corporal DB Singh, Corporal Uday Shankar and Airman Ajad Ahmad – died on the spot, whereas many others were critically injured. Two local Kashmiri women were also killed in this attack.

Yasin Malik was also involved in the kidnapping of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s daughter in 1989 to release 5 dreaded terrorists.

Two charge sheets had been filed by the CBI in August and September 1990 against Malik before the designated TADA court in Jammu. However, no progress took place. In 1995, a single bench of Jammu and Kashmir High Court granted a stay on trial as there was no TADA court in Srinagar. In 2008, Malik approached the special TADA court saying that the trial should be shifted to Srinagar as, according to him, he was facing security problems in Jammu. Then CBI filed objections and opposed the application, which was rejected in an order dated April 20, 2009.

However decks were finally cleared in April this year, after 30 long years, for hearing to resume in the TADA court in Jammu after J&K High Court struck down the earlier orders and ruled that transfer of cases from Jammu to Srinagar was not permissible under law.

Malik is currently lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail after being arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in connection with a terror funding case.

The trial finally resumed yesterday at the TADA court in Jammu, and the judge issued a fresh production warrant to Malik and asked the Tihar jail authorities to produce him in court on the next date of hearing on October 1.

How can a government provide security cover and pay for overseas treatment of a separatist and terrorist? Unfortunately, this is how successive governments appeased and pampered the terrorist Yasin Malik who blatantly admitted in a BBC interview with Tim Sebastian that he had led the terror attack to kill IAF personnel.

Justice was not only delayed but denied to security forces of the nation, and UPA government rubbed salt into their wounds by treating a terrorist like Yasin Malik as their state guest.

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