By MUBASHIR NAIK & BETWA SHARMA
Srinagar/Delhi—Today marks 500 days—one year and four months—since the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) police arrested journalist Fahad Shah on 4 February 2022, sending a signal to other reporters in Kashmir and hastening the demise of critical coverage from the conflict-ridden valley.
Despite judges granting him bail in three cases and squashing a preventive detention order, the 32-year-old journalist remains incarcerated in an FIR (first information report) registered in April 2022 about a “seditious” and “highly provocative” article published in November 2011, ‘The shackles of slavery will break’, “intended to create unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, to abet the gullible youth to take the path of violence and create communal unrest” and “led to an increase in terrorism and unlawful activities” across J&K.
The chargesheet does not explain why the authorities filed a case a decade after the article was published. The allegation linking the article to an “increase in terrorism and unlawful activities” appears to be an assumption without evidence. There is no mention of the geopolitical factors that have driven the violent insurgency since the early nineties. There seems to be no proof to claim that the article was “surreptitiously deleted” by Shah and his co-workers.
The article was not authored by Shah but was published on 6 November 2011 in The Kashmir Walla, a little-known digital news magazine he founded earlier that year as a 21-year-old entrepreneur at the start of his journalism career.
The allegation about 40 “seditious” and “anti-India” articles published in The Kashmir Walla over the years suffers from the same defect; there appears to be no evidence linking this “narrative terrorism” to “gullible youth” taking up arms against the state, killing innocent civilians and carrying out terrorist acts.
The chargesheet said the author of the article, Abdul Ala Fazili, a research fellow at Kashmir University at the time, who is currently a PhD scholar in the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Kashmir University, supported by the now rescinded Maulana Azad National Fellowship till 2021, and the publisher, Shah, “under a well directed and Pakistan’s efforts have resurrected a platform for reviving the narrative in support of the terrorist and separatist ecosystem”.
But little is said about how, when or where the two of them plotted to create “a sense of hatred and disaffection towards that government of India” on the instructions of their “handlers” based in Pakistan.
The investigators do not have the email from Fazili to Shah containing the draft of the article, which could bring into question the very premise of the case.
Shah is incarcerated in Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu, over 250 km from his home in the restive locality of Soura in downtown Srinagar. So is Fazili.
Charged with conspiracy for a terrorist act, unlawful activities, attempting to wage war against the government of India, causing disappearance of evidence, assertions prejudicial to national integration and accepting foreign currency in contravention of the law in this case registered under India’s anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967 (UAPA), the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010, Shah faces between five years to life imprisonment or the death penalty.
During arguments, Shah’s lawyer, senior advocate P N Raina, argued that section 18 of the UAPA (conspiracy for a terrorist act) could be invoked if section 15 (terrorist act) was made out, not section 13 (unlawful activity).
Shah was charge-sheeted for criminal conspiracy under section 120B of the IPC but was not charged.
Shah’s arrests have mirrored a pattern of multiple cases against dissenters and critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to keep them behind bars if the courts grant them bail (here, here, here and here), as Article 14 has reported.
After Shah was granted interim bail on 26 February in the UAPA case he was first arrested in on 4 February, the J&K police arrested him in three more cases— another UAPA case from May 2020 and an IPC case from January 2021, neither of which had seen any police action till that point, and then the one in April 2022. They also slapped him with a preventive detention order under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978, on 11 March 2022.
More than a year later, Shah received bail in all the cases except the one registered in April in Jammu and being investigated by the J&K State Investigation Agency (SIA), created in November 2021 to investigate and prosecute terror-related cases expeditiously, coordinating with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and other central agencies…
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here