Take a look at these photos of Kashmiri journalist Sajad Gul. The one on the left is from 2021, when he was a fresh-faced, enthusiastic and determined 25-year-old journalism student and freelance reporter. The one on the right is from 2024, his determination – as we found out – intact, but the fresh face and enthusiasm gone.
That will happen if you’ve been in jail for 910 days.
When I chatted with Gul last week, I was struck by his resolve to let the world know what happened to him: how he was taken into custody for merely reporting a story and spent more than two-and-a-half years in four jails, even though two courts granted him bail and quashed his detention under a draconian law that allows the state to lock up someone without charge or trial for two years.
It is not the kind of story that many in his situation are eager to share because Narendra Modi’s “Mother of Democracy” – an oxymoron if there ever was one – does not appreciate defiance or deviation from its one-nation-one-narrative approach.
As Gul said in his interview to us at Article 14 last week, the first since a judge ordered his release in July, he wondered if he would ever get out. “I was locked up for 23 hours a day in a narrow, dark cell, with 30 minutes of walking in the morning and again in the afternoon,” Gul told us. “I had never been in isolation, and every hour seemed like a year.”
His main hope of getting out of jail was Fahad Shah, his immensely supportive editor at The Kashmir Walla, Kashmir’s last independent outlet before the government shut it down; and Nazir Ahmed Ronga, his main lawyer. But Shah was himself arrested a month after Gul was and emerged from jail after 21 months exhausted and dispirited.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
