\n<\/p>\n
Activists and legal experts have condemned an Indian court\u2019s verdict that handed down three life sentences to prominent Kashmiri separatist Aasiya Andrabi, saying the harsh sentencing of a 64-year-old woman \u201cfits a broader pattern\u201d of India\u2019s policy with dissenting voices in the disputed region.<\/p>\n
Andrabi, the founder of Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM), a banned all-women\u2019s organisation, was sentenced on March 24 by a special National Investigative Agency (NIA) court in New Delhi. Two of her associates, Sofi Fehmeeda, a wheelchair-bound 36-year-old, and 61-year-old Nahida Nasreen, were also given 30 years in jail.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n The three women were arrested by the NIA in 2018 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a draconian anti-terror law, and various sections of the Indian Penal Code.<\/p>\n The UAPA, first introduced in 2008 by the centrist Congress party, was given more teeth by Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s right-wing government, which allowed authorities to declare individuals \u2013 not just organisations \u2013 as \u201cterrorists\u201d among the several amendments made in 2019.<\/p>\n Andrabi was accused by the NIA of waging war against the Indian government, raising funds for terrorist acts, and being a member of a terrorist group.<\/p>\n In his 290-page judgement, however, Judge Chander Jit Singh found no evidence related to these charges, yet convicted her on a series of less serious allegations, such as provoking hostility between communities, undermining national integration, and instigating public disorder. Two major charges dropped by the court include financing terrorist acts and instigating or taking part in an armed rebellion.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are evidences [sic] in the form of videos or interviews or posts where stone pelting or use of gun [sic] towards secessionist approach of Kashmir has been approved or endorsed and encouraged, but no violent incidence in particular, pursuant to such endorsement or encouragement, has been brought on record,\u201d the court noted in its judgement, seen by Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThe acts of the convict brought on record may not apparently be the direct cause of inciting violence but infusing the minds of Kashmiries especially the youngsters with the idea that Kashmir is not part of India and India has occupied the Kashmir illegally and in a hostile manner can evoke the sentiments of the people of Kashmir as well as it may lead them to use all kind of method including violence to seek the supposed liberation, the idea of which is wrongly seeded in their minds.\u201d<\/p>\n But legal experts say Aasiya Andrabi\u2019s conviction is mainly based on offensive speech-making, a move that raises questions about India\u2019s tolerance of dissenting voices.<\/p>\n \u201cIdeology is not punishable by law; only actions are. But the UAPA\u2019s scope has been widened significantly through several amendments, especially in 2019, to criminalise a range of activities, including a person\u2019s ideology,\u201d a Kashmir-based legal researcher told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the Indian government for criticising its actions in the disputed region.<\/p>\n \u201cShe [Andrabi] is also charged with sedition, threatening national integration and separatism. Freedom of speech in India does not protect against speech or civil action made in favour of separatism. The law has been deliberately designed to perform this precise task.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrabi\u2019s son, Ahmed bin Qasim, described the conviction as \u201ceffectively a death sentence\u201d as her mother was already above 60 and had spent more than 10 years of her life in various Indian jails since her first imprisonment in 1993.<\/p>\n Her husband, Ashiq Hussain Faktoo, a former rebel leader, has also remained imprisoned since 1992. In 2003, he was further convicted for the murder of H N Wanchoo, a Kashmiri human rights activist.<\/p>\n In his verdict against Andrabi, the judge also argued that since the convicted members of the outfit have displayed no remorse during the trial, the courts were not obliged to show compassion as that \u201chas a potential to send a message to others with similar ideas that they can get away with such acts through incarceration for some years and may promote the ideas of causing secession of part of India\u201d.<\/p>\n Kashmir Times, one of Kashmir\u2019s leading independent voices, criticised the verdict in an editorial on March 25, calling the court\u2019s remarks over the supposed lack of repentance on the part of Aasiya and her associates as \u201cdeeply problematic\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cRemorse is inherently subjective. It is an internal state that cannot be easily measured or verified,\u201d the editorial said. \u201cElevating it to a central consideration risks penalising an accused for what they believe or choose not to express, rather than for what has been proven in law.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in 1962\u00a0in Indian-administered Kashmir\u2019s main city of Srinagar, Andrabi grew up in a turbulent Kashmir \u2013 a Himalayan territory divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both the nuclear powers, with China also controlling a sliver of its land. Most Kashmiris on the Indian side support an independent land or merger with Muslim-majority Pakistan.<\/p>\n After India reneged on its promise to the United Nations to hold a referendum to allow the Kashmiris self-determination of their political future and consolidated its grip over the region with a heavy military presence, a violent rebellion broke out in the 1980s, which has since killed tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians.<\/p>\n In 2019, India unilaterally scrapped Kashmir\u2019s historical special status, which had, among many things, guaranteed it partial autonomy and safeguarded its lands and jobs for the residents. The abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution was followed by the division of the territory into two territories to be directly governed by New Delhi, and a months-long security clampdown on the valley, which saw its political leaders and activists arrested and an unprecedented operation to clear the region of its rebels and other dissenters.<\/p>\n In 1987, when anti-India sentiments were at a peak in Kashmir, Andrabi, an undergraduate in biochemistry and a master\u2019s in Arabic, formally named her group of female activists as Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM), an organisation that focused on education and women\u2019s rights as prescribed in Islam.<\/p>\n Its members, clad in head-to-toe burqas, would be seen lashing out at Kashmiri women for not observing purdah. DeM also railed against what it described as the intrusion of Western mores into the cultural fabric of Kashmir, as it demanded an imposition of strict Islamic cultural norms in Kashmir and the closure of liquor stalls and beauty salons.<\/p>\n Triggered by New Delhi allegedly rigging the [198\u2026] election to allow pro-India parties to win against the region\u2019s separatist groups, Andrabi turned into a political hardliner and became one of the most staunch advocates of Kashmir\u2019s merger with Pakistan. In a 2018 interview with the now-defunct Kashmir Ink magazine, Andrabi had termed the act of taking part in the elections under the Indian constitution as \u201charam\u201d or forbidden in Islam.<\/p>\n A Kashmir-based member of Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told Al Jazeera that Andrabi\u2019s DeM was declared a terrorist organisation by the Indian government in 2004.<\/p>\n \u201cThe association with a proscribed group played a huge role in securing their conviction. So how can one say that the terrorism angle doesn\u2019t figure?\u201d he said on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised by his party to talk to the media on the matter.<\/p>\n \u201cBesides, she [Andrabi] had been openly canvassing support for Kashmir\u2019s secession and encouraging terrorism by supporting ideas of martyrdom. The conviction was, in fact, long overdue. They should have happened long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n However, most Indian media reports and commentaries on Andrabi\u2019s conviction largely focused on the DeM\u2019s alleged acts of moral policing and enforcement of conservative cultural norms among Kashmiri women as the reasons for the unusually harsh sentencing for a 64-year-old grandmother.<\/p>\n But experts have questioned why those allegations \u2013 if at all they were legally tenable \u2013 did not feature during the trial. \u201cThese are two separate questions that should not be collapsed,\u201d Ather Zia, a United States-based Kashmiri academic, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cOne can strongly disagree or critique Dukhtaran-e-Millat\u2019s coercive social interventions around dress and morality, which many Kashmiri women did challenge at the time, and still oppose the criminalisation of political speech and dissent.\u201d<\/p>\n Zia said the state cannot selectively invoke women\u2019s rights or what she described as \u201cliberal feminism\u201d as a pretext to stifle dissent. She said the court dropped terrorism allegations and punished Andrabi \u201cfor her words\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThat should concern anyone committed to civil liberties and political freedoms,\u201d she added. \u201cIn Kashmir, this fits a broader pattern in which all forms of political resistance are disciplined, while complex women political actors are flattened into caricatures of being either victim or zealot.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Activists and legal experts have condemned an Indian court\u2019s verdict that handed down three life sentences to prominent Kashmiri separatist Aasiya Andrabi, saying the harsh sentencing of a 64-year-old woman \u201cfits a broader pattern\u201d of India\u2019s policy with dissenting voices in the disputed region. Andrabi, the founder of Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM), a banned all-women\u2019s organisation, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
\u2018Deeply problematic\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Flattened into caricatures\u2019<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"