Yasin Malik Drops a Bombshell: In an explosive development that has already stirred intense debate across political and security circles in India, incarcerated Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Yasin Malik has filed an 85-page affidavit in the Delhi High Court on August 25, 2025. In this document, Malik alleged that former Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh had personally thanked him in 2006 following a controversial meeting in Pakistan with Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the mastermind behind the devastating Mumbai terror attacks of November 26, 2008.
According to NDTV Exclusive Report, This revelation, if accepted at face value, carries alarming implications. It raises unsettling questions about the secret methods employed in India’s peace initiatives with Pakistan, the extent to which certain separatist figures were drawn into these processes, and the uncomfortable proximity between individuals accused of terrorism and leading figures of the Indian state. Malik, currently serving a life sentence in a terror funding case, insists that the 2006 meeting in Pakistan was neither his idea nor a personal initiative but rather an officially sanctioned exercise encouraged by senior officials of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB).
Intelligence Bureau’s Alleged Role
Malik’s affidavit traces the origins of the controversial meeting back to 2005. That year, following the catastrophic earthquake that devastated regions of Pakistan and parts of Kashmir, Malik was invited to Pakistan. Before departing, according to his sworn statement, he was summoned in New Delhi by V. K. Joshi, then Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau.
Joshi, Malik claims, made a direct appeal: he was to use the opportunity of his Pakistan visit not simply to meet politicians and civil society players but also to engage militant leaders, including Hafiz Saeed. This, he was told, was not a mere suggestion but part of a larger peace gambit initiated under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s secret Track II process with Pakistan.
The argument advanced to Malik was pragmatic but controversial. Any peace process with Islamabad, Joshi allegedly explained, risked being meaningless without involving the very men who were actively directing or enabling violence across the border. To achieve a semblance of credibility and durability, it was necessary to bring even the most radical stakeholders, including terrorist leaders, into discussions.
Malik, far from devising the idea himself, says he found himself reluctantly pressed into a role that he later came to view as both precarious and morally ambiguous. Nevertheless, accepting the IB’s premise, he agreed to approach individuals who were otherwise untouchable in India’s political and legal imagination, most prominently Hafiz Saeed.
The Meeting With Hafiz Saeed
According to Malik’s narrative, once in Pakistan, arrangements were quickly set in motion. On his request, Pakistan-based jihadi leaders including Saeed convened a broad gathering of militant outfits under the umbrella of the United Jihad Council.
During this conference, Malik addressed the assembled militants. His speech, as he recounts it, appealed to the fighters not to reject peace but to embrace it. Drawing upon Islamic principles and Quranic injunctions, he argued that reconciliation and non-violence could offer a path forward. He reminded the militants of the doctrine that if peace is offered, it should be accepted rather than rejected.
For Malik, this moment was important. He claims his role was not about endorsing violence or militancy but rather serving as an intermediary to nudge militant voices toward dialogue and moderation. What he had seen as a political risk undertaken for the cause of peace would, in years to come, be reframed by his critics as proof of his proximity to Pakistani terrorists.
A Controversial Legacy
In the aftermath of that 2006 meeting, Malik’s photograph alongside Hafiz Saeed surfaced in the public domain. For Indian security agencies, nationalist commentators, and Kashmiri Pandits who had suffered during the 1990s insurgency, the image stood as incriminating evidence of Malik’s enduring ties with violent jihadists. Years later, when the tide of Indian public opinion against Pakistan hardened after the Mumbai attacks, the meeting became a political weapon to question Malik’s credibility as a Kashmiri leader.
Yet, in his latest affidavit, Malik calls the entire episode a betrayal. He insists that what had begun as a government-approved contact in the service of peace talks was deliberately distorted by successive political regimes in India to discredit and criminalize him.
Debriefing and Prime Ministerial Meeting
Perhaps the most explosive element of Malik’s affidavit is not merely that the Indian intelligence apparatus allegedly encouraged him to meet terror leaders, but that his account of the meeting was directly reported to the top decisionmakers, including the prime minister himself.
When Malik returned to India from Pakistan, he was first debriefed by IB officials. Special Director Joshi, according to him, met him at his New Delhi hotel for a thorough debriefing exercise. The very next step, Malik recounts, was extraordinary: Joshi asked him to brief the Prime Minister directly.
That same evening, Malik says he was ushered into a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Also present on the occasion was then National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan, a key architect of India’s security policies in the mid-2000s.
In that meeting, Malik claims he gave Singh a detailed account of his interactions in Pakistan, including the conversations with Hafiz Saeed and other militant leaders. What followed, by Malik’s telling, has the potential to cause a political storm. Dr. Singh, far from condemning Malik or distancing himself from the operation, allegedly thanked him. Singh reportedly expressed appreciation for Malik’s patience, risk, and dedication in persuading the hardest-line actors to even consider peace.
“The Father of Nonviolent Struggle”
Malik goes further still. He alleges that during that meeting Singh remarked that he saw Malik as the pioneer of non-violent struggle in Kashmir. This astonishing statement, if true, would represent one of the most startling acknowledgments ever made by an Indian prime minister about a man long accused of terrorism, militancy, and acts of brutal violence.
Such a remark, if it indeed occurred, would suggest Singh was convinced that Malik, despite his past, represented a possible bridge between militancy and a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue.
Malik’s Wider Political Contacts
The affidavit does not confine itself to this single incident. Malik provides a long record of his engagements with senior Indian political figures across decades. Among those named are Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Sonia Gandhi, P. Chidambaram, I. K. Gujral, and Rajesh Pilot. He claims these meetings were not incidental but consistent, reflecting the willingness of multiple Indian governments cutting across party lines to involve him in Track II dialogues and even international platforms.
He also points out that between 1990 and 2006, no fewer than six governments led respectively by V. P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P. V. Narasimha Rao, H. D. Deve Gowda, I. K. Gujral, Vajpayee, and later Manmohan Singh engaged with him, extended him platforms, and even encouraged him to pursue peace advocacy abroad.
The Darker Record: Accusations Against Malik
But set against these claims of cooperation and dialogue is Malik’s own bloody track record. He remains accused of the murder of four Indian Air Force personnel in Srinagar in January 1990, one of the first high-profile attacks of the insurgency that shook Kashmir to its core. He also faces charges of leading the abduction of Rubiya Sayeed, daughter of then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, in late 1989.
Moreover, Kashmiri Pandits, who were forced into mass exile in 1990 following targeted killings and intimidation by militants, hold Malik personally responsible for engineering the terror campaign that uprooted their community. For them, Malik’s later attempts to rebrand himself as a Gandhian non-violent leader strike as brazen hypocrisy.
What the Affidavit Implies
If Malik’s affidavit is credible, it throws new light on India’s secretive peace diplomacy. It challenges the simplistic narratives often promoted in public that the state never engaged with men like Malik, and that any separatist leader’s proximity to militants must automatically be read as personal betrayal.
By his account, the Indian government not only tolerated but encouraged backchannel engagement with the very architects of terrorism, believing that without their inclusion, peace would never be durable. That this included Hafiz Saeed, who would later direct attacks that killed 166 people in Mumbai, is shocking to many.
For Dr. Singh, a prime minister known for his cautious, understated approach, the allegation that he personally expressed gratitude to Malik for meeting Saeed is combustible. Even if framed as part of a broader peace gambit, Singh’s name now sits uncomfortably alongside one of the most reviled terrorists alive.
Political Fallout
The political reverberations are inevitable. For Singh’s supporters, the affidavit may be dismissed as a desperate ploy by Malik, a convicted terrorist, to rewrite history and portray himself as a reluctant intermediary rather than a guilty conspirator. They may argue that Singh never made such remarks and that Malik is fabricating stories to salvage his legacy behind bars.
For critics, however, the allegation could spark an uproar. Questions will be asked: Why was Malik allowed to meet Saeed? Who authorized it? How much did the prime minister know? And if Manmohan Singh indeed thanked him, what does that say about the ethical limits of statecraft during peace talks?
A Tale of Two Realities
The truth may lie somewhere between competing narratives. Governments often operate through deniable backchannels, using figures like Malik to interact with outlawed groups while maintaining public distance. It is certainly possible that Indian intelligence facilitated Malik’s contacts, believing them useful as informal confidence-building steps.
At the same time, it is equally plausible that Singh’s alleged gratitude has been exaggerated or stylized by Malik to elevate his own relevance in history’s eyes. Behind prison walls and amid mounting charges, Malik may have every motive to portray himself as a pivotal figure in peace, not violence.
The Kashmir Question and Its Shadows
At its core, the affidavit once again highlights the tortured complexity of the Kashmir question. Since the insurgency erupted in 1989, India has alternated between repression, negotiation, and engagement with an array of actors including civil politicians, separatists, and militant leaders. Figures like Malik blurred the lines between these categories, sometimes holding guns, sometimes dialogue tables, and sometimes both.
The choice to treat him as a stakeholder during sensitive years rested on the hope that he and other separatists could serve as conduits to peace. Whether that hope was naive, calculated, or misguided remains an open question. What is clear is that the legacy of those choices is now resurfacing in controversy.
Malik’s Position Today
As of 2025, Yasin Malik sits in prison under a life sentence in a terror funding case. His past cannot be whitewashed: the murders, the abduction, the ethnic cleansing allegations against Kashmiri Pandits are all part of his enduring notoriety. Yet his affidavit demands attention, if only because of the gravity of what it alleges and the prominent names it invokes.
It may serve as a reminder that the dark underbelly of peacemaking often involves unsavory bargains, covert channels, and morally ambiguous interlocutors. The gap between what governments say in public and what they do in private has long been a feature of the Kashmir conflict.
