SRINAGAR: Kashmiri Journalist Asif Sultan, hailing from Srinagar city, was released on Tuesday from Ambedkar Nagar district jail in Uttar Pradesh, after spending more than five years in detention.
The Newslaundry has reported that around 78 days after the Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed the detention order against Asif Sultan under the Public Safety Act, he finally walked out of the Ambedkar Nagar district jail in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday.
Asif was released after more than five years of incarceration – first in a case under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Ranbir Penal Code, and then under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act.
The High Court quashed the journalist’s detention on December 11 last year, saying the detaining authorities “did not follow the procedural requirements in letter and spirit”. But he continued to remain in jail awaiting “clearance letters” from Kashmir’s home department and Srinagar district magistrate.
Speaking to Newslaundry, Girija Shankar Yadav, jailor at Ambedkar Nagar prison, said despite the bail granted by the court, they “have to follow some procedure to release Kashmiri prisoners.”
He said the procedure allegedly includes getting clearance letters from Kashmir’s home department and district magistrate, adding that Asif’s family members brought the clearance letter to the jail authorities. “The clearance letter from the district magistrate was brought to us by his family, after which he was released immediately.”
Some reports suggested that about 50 Kashmiri prisoners are lodged at the Ambedkar Nagar jail in Uttar Pradesh at present.
As per the 2018 amendments to the J&K PSA, those booked under the law can be lodged in prisons outside Jammu and Kashmir and need additional “clearances” for release from jail.
In September 2018, Asif, then a reporter with a Srinagar-based weekly magazine, Kashmir Narrator, was arrested under the UAPA for allegedly providing logistical support to a banned militant group on the basis of a case registered against him a month earlier.
Four years on, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court granted him bail on April 5, 2022, on the grounds that the investigation agencies failed to establish his links with any militant group. But four days later, the Srinagar district magistrate detained him under the PSA. The High Court had also observed that there was lack of evidence linking him to any militant group.
Asif’s lawyer Adil Pandit said the journalist’s release was a “huge relief for him and his family.”
On May 31, 2021, Aasif Sultan completed 1,000 days in prison since his arrest in August 2018 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or UAPA, a stringent anti-terror law.
His father Mohammad Sultan said Asif’s daughter was “six months old when he was arrested, and now she is six years old. And she doesn’t recognise her father, but used to ask us everyday when she would get to see him. We would always say ‘tomorrow’”.
Sultan, 34, who worked as an assistant editor for a Srinagar-based English magazine, was accused of “harbouring known militants”, an allegation he denies. He has also been charged with murder, attempt to murder and other crimes.
But Sultan’s family and the editor of Kashmir Narrator, the magazine he worked for, denied the accusations, saying he was arrested for his journalistic work, particularly for a story titled The Rise of Burhan, which he wrote for the magazine in July 2018.
In the 4,000-word story on the killing of Kashmiri rebel commander Burhan Wani in 2016 by Indian security forces, Sultan wrote why the 22-year-old rebel had proved to be “more dangerous” for India “in his grave than in his living room”.
In his story, Sultan wrote that after Wani’s killing, “more and more young boys are disappearing into the forests to follow Burhan’s path.”
Wani’s killing on July 8, 2016 made global headlines and triggered a wave of anti-India protests across the Kashmir Valley till December 2016, in which nearly 100 people were killed as Indian police and troopers swooped down on the protests with live bullets and pellet guns.
For his story, Sultan had managed to get exclusive photographs and details about Burhan Wani, including interviews with so-called overground workers (OGW), a term used in Kashmir to describe non-combatant members of rebel groups, who are usually given logistical tasks.
“The story in question angered the police apparatus in Kashmir. Unfortunately, such bold and honest reportage seldom appears in local media, which explains why the police establishment here didn’t take it in stride.”
Police added Sultan’s name to a First Information Report (FIR) filed about a gunfight with the militants in Srinagar’s Batamaloo area on August 12, 2018. One policeman was killed in the operation while at least three suspected militants managed to escape.
During a midnight raid on Sultan’s house following the incident, police claimed to have found “incriminating material” in his possession. His laptop and mobile phone were seized as evidence.
“In the charge sheet, they [police] claim to have found incriminating material from his home, an iPhone and his MacBook. The police said they have sent them for forensic analysis to Chandigarh. But two-and-a-half years have passed since then but that forensic report hasn’t come yet. Why is it so?” Motta asked.
Sultan’s lawyer Adil Abdullah Pandit says his client was not present at the site of the gunfight, a fact “admitted by the prosecution” and describes the police case as “purely fabricated”.
“Then how can charges of 302 [murder], 307 [attempt to murder] and 326 [voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons] be invoked against my client? These three offences cannot be made out against Sultan,” Pandit told Al Jazeera in May 2021.
Under the UAPA, Pandit said Sultan was accused of “harbouring terrorists” and conspiracy against the state by giving assistance to rebels.
“There is no evidence on record which could prove that Aasif Sultan has provided any assistance or logistic support to the militants or he harboured any militant,” Pandit added.
GV Sundeep Chakravarthi, the senior superintendent of police in the frontier Kupwara district in 2021, was posted in Srinagar when the gunfight happened in 2018. He was the investigating officer in Sultan’s case.
Days after Sultan’s arrest, Chakravarthi told Indian news website Scroll.in that the journalist was “writing against uniformed forces”.
But the police officer refused to speak to Al Jazeera about the case.
Sajjad Shah, current superintendent of police for Srinagar City (South), said he had nothing to say since the matter is before a court of law.
“I don’t have anything on it,” Shah told Al Jazeera. “Whatever evidence would be there, that must have already been submitted in the court.”
But Sultan’s parents believe their son is behind bars because of the story he had written on rebel commander Wani.
“My son has nothing to do with militants. He is innocent and has been put in jail for only one reason, the story he wrote on Burhan Wani,” Sultan’s father Mohammad Sultan told Al Jazeera.
Motta said arresting Sultan was “simply an act to muzzle the voice of an independent media house” in the disputed region.
In a statement on May 23, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a United States-based non-profit committed to promote press freedom and defend the rights of journalists, demanded an immediate release of Sultan from jail.
“Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan has been in prison for the last 1,000 days. He has repeatedly been denied bail. Aasif was arrested after publishing a story on militant Burhan Wani in August 2018,” CPJ wrote on Twitter in May 2021.
CPJ said Sultan’s trial began in June 2019 and has been “moving slowly”.
“CPJ along with 400 journalists and civil society members have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding his immediate release,” wrote the non-profit.
In 2019, Sultan was awarded the annual John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award by the US National Press Club. Last year, he also featured in TIME magazine’s “10 Most Urgent” cases of threats to press freedom around the world.
Sultan’s is not an isolated case in Jammu and Kashmir.
In 2017, Kamran Yusuf, a photojournalist from the region, was arrested by India’s National Investigating Agency (NIA) under the UAPA.
The NIA accused Yusuf of being involved in stone-throwing incidents and organising groups of youth to do so at the government forces in the region.
Yusuf spent more than six months in a New Delhi jail before he was released on bail in March 2018, apparently for lack of evidence.
Since August 2019, when India abrogated the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir and turned it into a Union Territory, many journalists have been summoned by police and cases filed against them.
In some cases, Kashmiri journalists were asked to reveal the sources of their stories and explain their reports.
In a first-hand account published in October 2020, Fahad Shah, editor of news website The Kashmir Walla, wrote that he along with a colleague was detained by the police at gunpoint on a highway and “treated like a criminal” during a four-hour interrogation.
He told Al Jazeera that in the past two years, he has been summoned to police stations at least six times and has two cases filed against him after his website published stories “that the state didn’t like”.
“It’s more like a message to other journalists that if you do something like this or if you go to an extent where the state doesn’t like you, you can be booked in a case or two and you will be thrown into jail like Aasif,” Shah told Al Jazeera.
“Reporting has been criminalised and censorship institutionalised in the region.”
Fahad Shah was released in November 2023 after spending 658 days in detention after the court quashed his detention and ordered his released from a Jammu jail. His website continues to remained blocked since early 2023.
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