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Kashmir journalists face forbidding pattern: Arrest, bail, rearrest

Activists argue that the law violates international human rights, and lawyers say Indian authorities have used it to round up Kashmiris posing no threat of violence
Last Updated 17 April 2022, 01:46 IST

After being held in jail for close to four years awaiting trial on charges of aiding militants, Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan was granted bail by the courts last week, and he thought he could finally return home to his wife and his daughter, who was just 6 months old when he was arrested.

But Indian authorities did not let him go, levying similar charges under a different law, and have since moved him to a different jail.

Sultan’s case is the latest instance, rights activists say, in which Indian authorities have weaponized the legal system to limit free speech and harass journalists, particularly those in the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed Kashmir region. Some have been arrested under laws that allow people to be held for extended periods without trial and that make bail terms extremely difficult and sometimes impossible.

Sultan is now being held under the stringent Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law that lets the region’s authorities keep a suspect in jail for a maximum of two years — without any formal criminal charges being filed, and so without any trial and with no hope for bail — if local authorities contend that the person presents a security risk or a threat to public order.

Activists argue that the law violates international human rights, and lawyers say Indian authorities have used it to round up Kashmiris posing no threat of violence, including journalists, students and those with sizable political or economic sway in the region.

“The Public Safety Act is based on the apprehension that one may do something illegal and not that one may have done something illegal,” said Shafqat Nazir, a lawyer who practices at the High Court of Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city. “Just on the basis of an apprehension, one can rot in jail for two years.”

Sultan’s experience — a detention extended either just after a court grants bail or just before a bail hearing — has become a pattern, applied against at least two other Kashmiri journalists arrested in recent months.

Across India, activists, writers, students, academics and journalists have complained of an increased climate of intimidation as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, seeks to stifle its critics.

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(Published 17 April 2022, 01:46 IST)

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