India: Top Kashmiri leaders arrested under controversial law

SRINAGAR: Indian authorities have extended the detention of two former Kashmir chief ministers, held for the past six months under a security clampdown, using a law allowing for them to be locked up for two years without charge, police said Friday.

Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, despite having long supported Kashmir being part of India, were detained in August when New Delhi rescinded the region’s autonomy and imposed a vice-like security and communications lockdown.

Facing international unease, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the move was to bring peace to a region where tens of thousands have died in a three decade old uprising against Indian rule.

Insurgents have been fighting some 500,000 Indian forces in the territory, demanding independence or to join Pakistan, which also administers part of the Himalayan region.

Mufti and Abdullah’s provisional detention expired on Thursday and they were immediately booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a police source in Kashmir told AFP.

The legislation was used against a third former chief minister Farooq Abdullah, the father of Omar Abdullah, in September to keep the 82-year-old under house arrest.

The PSA was introduced in the 1970s to prevent timber smuggling in Kashmir but since the uprising erupted in 1989 it has been used to detain thousands of people, activists say.

The UN human rights office in 2018 criticised special laws in Kashmir including the PSA saying they “impede accountability and jeopardise the right to remedy for victims of human rights violations”.

Dozens of other politicians and others including lawyers, trade unionists and activists also detained in August, some of them in prisons all over India, have been released gradually in recent weeks.

Restricted internet access was allowed in late January after a blackout lasting almost six months that Modi’s government had said was imposed for security reasons, but which has hit hard the economy, health care and education.

However Kashmir’s more than seven million inhabitants can still only access a “whitelist” of 301 government-approved websites that do not include social media. Cell phone data is only possible on slower second-generation (2G) connections.

Mufti’s daughter Iltija Mufti slammed use of “the draconian PSA” by the government. “Question is how much longer will we act as bystanders as they desecrate what this nation stands for?” she said on Twitter.

Iltija has revealed how she and her mother exchanged letters post abrogation of Article 370 with restrictions placed on them.

In a long tweet, Iltija has written about the difficulties her family has had to face after Mehbooba was detained following the abrogation of Article 370.

She also mentioned how she would exchange letters with her mother concealed in the tiffin box and ‘chapatis’.

“On a personal level, words escape me to describe the past six months since reading down of Article 370 followed by my mother’s detention. In particular, I’ll never forget the week that she was arrested and jailed. I spent the next few days riddled with anxiety until I received a crumpled and tersely worded note, the first of many furtively exchanged letters. I found it in a tiffin box that contained home cooked food sent for her,” Iltija wrote.

“They have taken an undertaking that I won’t be using social media to communicate. In case someone else does it, he’ll be booked on charges of impersonation. Love you and miss you a lot.” Mehbooba wrote to her.

Iltija said the dilemma of dispatching a reply arose after she got the note from her mother. She said her grandmother found an ingenious solution.

“The letter I wrote was folded into a tiny square and carefully sealed, rolled and locked inside the middle of a chapati” she said.

Iltija said she doesn’t regret a word of what she said or did in these past six months. “But certainly owe a debt of gratitude to people who gave me strength and guidance during this turbulent period. As a child, I have memories of my mother going from pillar to post to free boys wrongfully detained by security forces. Today I fight for her freedom … life has come a full circle. We live to fight another day.”