NEW DELHI: A fresh wave of fear and tension has gripped journalists in Indian-administered Kashmir after a prominent editor was arrested last week amid a widening crackdown on the press in the disputed region.
Fahad Shah, a prominent journalist and editor in chief of the local news portal Kashmir Walla, was arrested on Friday after being summoned for questioning in the southern district of Pulwama over coverage of a police raid in late January that left four people dead.
Though the portal reported both the police and civilian version of the story, police said in a statement Shah was arrested for uploading “anti-national content” and had “criminal intention" to create fear among the public. Authorities also said the content amounted to "glorifying the terrorist activities.”
Shah’s arrest comes a month after Sajad Gul, a Kashmir Walla contributor, was arrested over social media posts.
Fahad Shah, right, editor-in-chief of Kashmir Walla, works on his computer inside the newsroom at his office in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir, on January 21, 2022. (AP/File)
India has deployed tens of thousands of police and soldiers to keep the peace in the disputed Muslim-majority region after revoking its constitutional autonomy in 2019 to weld the region more tightly to the country. Journalists have since been caught in the crossfire between the Indian government and militant groups fighting for India-administered Kashmir’s independence, as both have battled to control the flow of information.
“Journalists in the valley are in fear,” Srinagar-based Altaf Hussain, a former BBC journalist, told Arab News. “This fear in journalists has always been there in the valley ever since armed conflict broke out in Kashmir in the 1990s, but now the government has become more brazen.”
Indeed, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi said arrests such as Shah’s should be expected by reporters who produced “anti-national” content.
"Gone are the old days,” Srinagar-based BJP spokesperson Manzoor Bhat told Arab News. “Today you have to follow a line and there is a price to be paid for doing anti national reporting,”
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, with both countries claiming the territory in full and ruling it in part. The two nuclear-armed neighbors have fought two wars over the territory. More than 50,000 people have died in a revolt that erupted in 1989, government figures show. Human rights and separatists put the toll at double.
The media has always been tightly controlled in Indian-administered Kashmir but its predicament has worsened since 2019. In the past two years alone, journalists in the scenic Himalayan valley have been threatened by militants, blinded by pellet guns fired by security forces, and murdered by unknown assailants. Many reporters say that self-censorship is now the only option to keep working safely in the region.
Sanjay Kapoor, a Delhi-based journalist and secretary of the Editors Guild of India, said the government was using national security as a pretext to crack down on press freedom.
“Many journalists are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law for doing their job of asking questions from the authorities or critiquing the work of the government,” Kapoor told Arab News. “It’s seen as an anti-national act that undermines the security of the country.”
“They don’t want the journalists to bring out uncomfortable truth or criticism of what is happening to the people,” Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of Kashmir Times. “To do journalism is becoming more and more difficult.”
