Quratulain Rehbar: A Year On, Kashmiri Man’s Family Despairs His Continued Incarceration Under PSA
Abdul Rashid Mir, who
had waited for 57 days and traveled 1,327kilometersto meet his son Fayaz Ahmad,
said that his ordeal did not end even after he reached his destination,
Bareilly Central Jail in Uttar Pradesh. The jail authorities,
the 55-year-old Kashmiri said, made him wait for five hours outside the jail,
and told him to speak only in Hindi, when he tried speaking to his 29-year-old
son in Kashmiri from behind a plexiglass. Mir, who has never
been to school and knows no other language, was dumbfounded until his
23-year-old daughter Zahida Jan said that she would translate.
“There was an officer
in civil clothes who was listening to our conversation and jotting it down in a
notepad,” she said in a recent interview with HuffPost India. Ahmad was among the
more than 7,000 Kashmiris, including politicians, activists, and
minors, who were arrested before and immediately after the Narendra
Modi government revoked Jammu and
Kashmir’s (J&K) autonomy, guaranteed under Article 370 of the
Constitution, on 5 August, demoted India’s only Muslim majority state to a
Union Territory, and imposed a several months long lockdown and communication
ban.
Of the 7,357 taken
into preventive custody since August 2019, Union Minister G Krishan Reddy said in March that 451 people were under preventive
detention, including 396 under Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), which
allows for detaining a person without a formal charge and without trial for up
to two years. 65-year-old Ghulam
Mohammad Bhat, who was detained under the PSA in July, 2019, died in a prison near Allahabad in UP in
December. When contacted, V.K.
Singh, the Director General of Prisons in J&K, did not comment
on the total number of people who are still incarcerated in connection with the
5 August crackdown.
Singh said that 930
people were released from prisons inJ&K from 1 April to 23 July following a
Supreme Court directiveto decongest prisons, in the wake of the
coronavirus pandemic, including some of those detained in connection with 5
August. HuffPost India reached out to the Principal Secretary in
the Home Department of the J&K government, Shaleen Kabra, for more
information, but did not receive any response. ..
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