New Delhi, 5 March 2024: The Indian Journalists Union (IJU) joins its affiliate, the J&K Media Guild in expressing serious concern over the rearrest of Kashmiri journalist Asif Sultan by Srinagar police on Thursday, 48 hours after he had been released from an Uttar Pradesh prison. Sultan had been languishing in jail for over five years and his rearrest smacks of concerted harassment by the authorities who are also making a mockery of the judicial system. The Union demands he be released immediately.
According to his family as reported, Sultan was brought back home in Srinagar’s Batamaloo area on early Wednesday morning after his release from UP’s Ambedkar Nagar district jail, but later during the day was summoned to Srinagar’s Rainawari Police Station and subsequently re-arrested in a 2019 case regarding violence inside the central jail in Srinagar under the UAPA. The family is trying to get him bail.
Recall, Sultan continued to remain in UP’s jail for over two months despite the Jammu and Kashmir High Court ordering his release in December due to procedural lapses. The court said that though the authorities had the case against him under anti-terror law, they detained him under the Public Safety Act. Worse, Sultan was neither supplied copies of the FIR, nor the statements recorded under CrPc Section 161, making his detention ‘illegal and unsustainable.’ Also, Sultan was detained earlier in April 2022, days after a court granted him bail in another case, in which he was imprisoned under UAPA since August 2018, for allegedly harbouring militants.
In a statement, President and former member of Press Council of India Geetartha Pathak and Secretary General and Vice President of International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Sabina Inderjit said that Sultan’s rearrest reveals the authorities’ clear intent of silencing critical voices and clamping down on independent journalism in the Valley. Arresting journalists for their reportage and other journalistic activities and keeping them indefinitely in jail without trial under draconian law is nothing but frontal attack on freedom of press and IJU demands he be granted bail and that the trumped-up charges against him be withdrawn.
