11 February Campaign Kit: posters, facts and photos

Campaign kit

11 February : everything you need

Posters, social media images, facts and photos for Maqbool Bhat Day, free for everyone who organises a remembrance, writes about him or shares his story. In English, Urdu and Hindi.

–days to go

Make your poster or social media image

Choose a language and a size. Add your city and event to make a poster, or leave them empty for an image you can share on 11 February. Everything is made in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

Fact sheet

Short, checked facts for speeches, leaflets, press releases and posts. Copy what you need.

Who he was, in brief

Maqbool Bhat (18 February 1938 – 11 February 1984), remembered as Shaheed-e-Kashmir, was a Kashmiri political leader who struggled for a free, independent and democratic Jammu and Kashmir, and for a society free of poverty, ignorance and injustice. He was hanged in Tihar Jail, New Delhi, on 11 February 1984 and buried inside the prison. His remains have never been returned to his family.

Key dates

18 Feb 1938: born in Trehgam, Kupwara district
1958: after his BA in Srinagar, crosses to Pakistan and works as a journalist in Peshawar
1966: returns, is arrested and sentenced to death
1968: escapes from prison in Srinagar; held in Muzaffarabad until March 1969
1971: after the Ganga hijacking, arrested again and tried by a special court in Pakistan
1976: crosses again in May and is arrested within days
1978: death sentence restored; moved to Tihar Jail
11 Feb 1984: hanged in Tihar Jail and buried inside the prison

The demand

Return Maqbool Bhat’s remains from Tihar Jail to Kashmir, for burial in the grave that has waited for him since 1984 in the Martyrs’ Graveyard, Eidgah, Srinagar. His mother, Shahmali Begum, campaigned for this for three decades.

In his words

“By liberation we don’t mean merely the end of foreign occupation from the land of Kashmir but we want our people to be liberated from the forces of poverty, backwardness, ignorance, diseases, injustice and economic and social disparities.”

– Maqbool Bhat