Kaisar Andrabi
A day after the Jammu and Kashmir district court at Bandipora on January 15 granted bail to 23-year-old journalist Sajad Gul in a criminal conspiracy case levelled against him by police, Gul was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA) and shifted to Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu.
Gul who is a trainee reporter with the portal The Kashmir Walla and a student, was arrested on the night of January 5 from his home in Hajin area of Bandipora district. He was charged under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration) and 505B (fear or alarm to the public) of the Indian Pe-nal Code.
The local court had directed police to release him against a bond of Rs 3,0000 if he was not in-volved in any other crime. He was not released and police have claimed that his name has surfaced in another FIR registered earlier this month (number 2/2022) under sections 153B (imputations, asser-tions prejudicial to national-integration), 147 (riot-ing), 148 (rioting, armed with deadly weapon), 149 ( every member of unlawful assembly guilty of of-fence committed in prosecution of common object) and 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
The PSA is a preventive detention law under which a person is taken into custody to prevent them from acting harmfully against “the security of the state or the maintenance of the public order” in Jammu and Kashmir. Under the PSA, a person can be detained for a period of three to six months with-out trial.
Speaking to The Wire, Umair N. Ronga, legal counsel for Gul, alleged that the police could not make a case against him and consequently decided to book him under this law. “These are all baseless cases. They can’t keep him behind bars only for frivolous cases. The only power they have is to level the PSA against him. They are taking advantage and misusing this power. Otherwise they would not have come up with another FIR,” he said.
Ronga believes that Gul would have secured bailed in the fresh FIR as well if police would have allowed another trial, even though the FIR cites offences under section 307. “These are false and frivolous cases and they know that they will not stand. Police’s only motive is to keep him behind bars,” he said.
“In the past, they have come up with three dif-ferent cases and all are baseless,” Ronga told The Wire. The lawyer has started preparations to file an application in the high court to quash the FIR. A family in distress On January 16, at Gul’s mother had cooked special dishes for him thinking that he would be brought back to home by his elder brother who was at Hajin police station waiting for his release.
They had made all preparations for the celebra-tion. “We were happy since morning that he will be released but we had no idea that they would slap him with a PSA and continue to detain him,” Gul’s elder brother Zahoor Ahmed told The Wire.
Ahmed had not seen Gul for four days. Since their father’s death in 2008, Ahmed has looked after Gul. “He is like my son,” he said.
When the family reached the police station with his bail application, no one replied to them, Ahmed said, adding that he was left following policemen from one room to another while they ignored him.
“They (the police) treat you like street dogs. They kept us waiting until a police officer told me that he will not be released today and asked me to leave the place,” he said.
He was told that one more FIR has been filed against Gul but not given details. “When I eventu-ally saw him, he was not looking well. He has lost weight and it was difficult to see him in that condi-tion,” he said, voice cracking.
“They bundled him in a police van and took him somewhere. Later, we came to know he has been sent to Kot Bhalwal in Jammu.”
The family heard about his PSA charge in the news at around 11 pm. Since then, they have been extremely worried. “He was our only hope and we had dreamed that he would do something good for the family. But police shattered them all,” Ahmed said.
Despite financial stress following their father’s death, Ahmed had ensured that Gul receive an edu-cation.
“He was a blooming flower and had recently started doing well in his profession, but they spoiled it all,” Ahmed told The Wire.
A Kashmiri woman feeds pigeons at a street during restrictions after the scrapping of the special constitutional status for Kashmir by the government, in Srinagar, August 11, 2019. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
Earlier charges On January 8, J&K Police in a statement said that they have arrested Gul for alleg-edly provoking people to “resort to violence and disturb public peace”.
They said that Gul “uploaded the objectionable videos with anti-national slogans raised by some women folk on the day when most wanted terrorist Saleem Parray was eliminated in Shalimar Srina-gar”.
“…the said person under the garb of journalist [sic] is habitual of spreading disinformation/false narratives through different social media platforms in order to create ill will against the government by provoking general masses to resort to violence and disturb public peace and tranquility,” the statement read.
In The Wire’s previous report about Gul’s ar-rest, Senior Superintendent of Police of Bandipora district said that Gul had posted tweets that could have created law and order problems in the region and police won’t allow anybody to disrupt normal peace and tranquility.
The Wire has attempted to contact the Inspector General of Police for his comments on Gul’s case but he did not respond. The story will be updated if and when he does.
Press freedom In the past three years, there has been a rapid surge in harassment, threats and arrests of journalists in Kashmir.
After New Delhi read down Article 370 of the constitution in 2019, journalists have repeatedly urged the government to allow them to report freely. They have faced physical attacks, threats and sum-mons from the police which journalists in Kashmir believe are aimed at muzzling the press.—Courtesy The Wire
