By Team
Bandipora: Sajad Gul sat quietly on a wooden chair on a porch at the end of a canopy of pink roses at his family’s two-story house in the midst of apple and pear orchards, remembering the cold and snowy night of 5 January 2022, when dozens of uniformed, armed men entered his home and took him away.
After nearly 19 months in the dim, claustrophobic confines of Bareilly jail in Uttar Pradesh, more than 1,100 km southeast of home, he was happy, he said, to breathe the fresh mountain air, a reminder of freedom, both bitter and sweet.
“I was accused of crimes I never committed,” said Gul, 29, a slim, tired-looking man, dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, his voice tinged with exhaustion but resolute, as he recalled the ordeal that upended his life, killed his idealism and journalism career and fractured his sense of justice.
Gul said he was not unusually concerned after an army unit cordoned off his house in a sleepy village called Shahgund, 40 km north of the town of Bandipora. “It had been a usual thing (sic),” he said, referring to security forces showing at people’s homes after Article 370 of the Constitution granting special status to Jammu and Kashmir was removed on 5 August 2019. Before his arrest, the army visited his home three times in the 24 hours before they finally took him away, according to Gul.
“After some initial questioning outside my home, I was taken away and put in a jeep, only to be handed over to the police,” said Gul in a wide-ranging interview with Article 14, four months after his release.
Gul was later arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir police on 5 January 2022, for posting a video of a family protesting against the death of a family member killed in a Srinagar gunfight. We reported in December 2021 that he had faced police harassment for the story, which eventually led to harassment—a raid on his home with no warrant and alleged threats to his family—arrest and incarceration.
On 1 December 2021, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a global advocacy that promotes press freedom, tweeted that it was concerned about Gul’s repeated harassment in a region where on 7 March 2024 Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed Kashmiris were “breathing freely”, and on 9 November said “democracy had strengthened”.
“Amid ongoing police harassment in retaliation for his journalistic work, CPJ reiterates its call on authorities to drop their investigation into Gul and allow him to report without interference,” said CPJ.
The grounds for Gul’s arrest appeared to have been prepared almost a year before he was taken away. A first information report filed (FIR) by a tehsildar on 2 February 2021 accused Gul of trying to “disrupt peace and tranquillity”. A second FIR filed on 5th January 2022 by the Hajin police station in Bandipora accused him of “promoting disharmony and public mischief”.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
