India has weaponized its legal system to limit free speech and harass journalists, particularly those in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir. In a dispatch from New Delhi, the newspaper said the clampdown on Kashmir’s media had intensified since 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked the state’s special status, bringing the disputed region under direct control of the federal government. Journalists in the disputed Kashmir region faced forbidding pattern arrest, bail and re-arrest. Activists argue that the law violates international human rights, and lawyers say the 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.
Charges of sedition, under a law that dates to the British colonial era, have been on the rise in recent years. Thousands of people, including poets, political organizers and a Catholic priest, have been jailed under an anti-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, it was pointed out. That law, the one under which Sultan was originally detained, does require that a trial ultimately be held and does allow for bail, though it can take years for it to be granted. But in Kashmir, it is the Public Safety Act that is used more often to silence dissenters, including minors, in part, the law’s critics say, because it invests so much authority in the region’s government and is subject to so little judicial oversight.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent a New York-based watchdog body, has repeatedly called for the immediate and unconditional release of Sultan. 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. Activists point to the government’s grounds for detaining Fahad Shah, who has reported widely on Kashmir for international publications, as evidence of how loosely the Indian government interprets the Public Safety Act to silence journalists. Shah was described by the police as an anti-national element under the cover of journalism who is continuously propagating stories which are against the interest and security of the nation.
The New York Times said it made multiple requests for comment on how the Public Safety Act was being used in the region, to India’s Home Ministry, the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, the police and the district magistrate’s office, but none responded. 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. Kashmiri journalists have long found themselves in a precarious situation, squeezed between violent militants seeking independence and the Indian government, which has tried to keep the largely Muslim region under a tight grip. Sultan, who has been a journalist for more than a decade, was charged after his 2018 arrest under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act when he wrote an article on Burhan Wani, a top commander of the banned Kashmiri militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, who was killed by the Indian security forces in 2016. His death was followed by protests and clashes, among the worst in the restive region in years.
