On August 27, a 17-year-old girl led a small rally of local residents to a district magistrate’s office in South Kashmir to file the nomination papers on her father’s behalf.
Her father and cleric, Sarjan Barkati, has been in Srinagar central jail for a year, accused of raising funds for militants.
The teenager from Reban village in South Kashmir’s Shopian district, Sugra Barkati, said she convinced her father to contest the Assembly elections as an independent candidate because that was the only prospect for his freedom. “The courts have not given us any relief,” she told Scroll at her home. “If he chose to contest elections, it was not only to push for his release. There are hundreds of Kashmiris in jails. Once free, he would have raised his voice for them too. Because we have seen what it is to be in jail and what it does to a family.”
Barkati’s decision to jump into mainstream electoral politics follows the path shown by Engineer Rashid, Member of Parliament from Baramulla. In Delhi’s Tihar jail since August 2019, Rashid contested the recent Lok Sabha elections from prison and rode a sympathy wave to victory, defeating former chief minister Omar Abdullah. After Rashid was granted a two-hour parole from jail to take oath, many believe his election has increased his prospects of getting bail.
Barkati and Rashid have one other thing in common – both took ideological positions that were at odds with the Indian state in Jammu and Kashmir. While Rashid advocated for a plebiscite to decide the Kashmir dispute even while being part of mainstream politics, Barkati believed in the separatist cause.
In August 2019, Jammu and Kashmir was downgraded from a state to a Union territory. There have been no Assembly elections held since those radical changes. The first such polls will be held in three phases from September 18.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
