Sahil Maqbool winces through his tender smile with the kind of vulnerability typically seen in people who have endured either great public humiliation or private tragedy. In his case it’s been a heavy dosage of both. The 44-year-old Kashmiri journalist and poet says he was deceived by men he trusted, thrown in jail, and, according to him, brutally tortured after his arrest on Sept. 16, 2004. Mr. Maqbool had been making his living as an investigative journalist in India’s troubled region of Kashmir. “I lost everything,” Mr. Maqbool says from the lobby of a houseboat in Srinagar, the morning sun beating down on Dal Lake behind him. “I lost my sources, my contacts. You can appreciate the importance of such things. I even lost my family home that I had been maintaining for years. My camera. Laptop. Passport. Everything. Gone.”
Mr. Maqbool joins a list of Indian journalists and editorialists who claim they have been jailed simply for doing their jobs. The arrest of political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi earlier this year, created a national debate about free speech, but cases like that of Mr. Maqbool’s have received significantly less publicity.
The lush, mountainous region of Kashmir straddles India and Pakistan and is claimed in its entirety by both countries. Tensions between law enforcement authorities and Kashmiris seeking their region’s independence from Indian rule occasionally flare up into violence. The years around Mr. Maqbool’s arrest, were a particularly tumultuous time in Srinagar, the main city in Kashmir.
A devout Muslim, Mr. Maqbool says he was detained one afternoon after Friday prayers, outside of an office of the Indian Army in Badami Bagh, a cantonment town in Srinagar heavily populated by military bases. Mr. Maqbool says that an army public relations officer he knew from his work at the Urdu newspaper “Chattan,” invited him into the offices under the pretense of the army placing an ad in the paper. Chattan is a paper with a small staff, and uses employees to fulfill multiple roles.
An Indian army spokesman denied any knowledge of Mr. Maqbool’s claims. The public relations officer implicated by Mr. Maqbool could not be reached for comment.
After an hour of waiting in the offices and sipping chai, Mr. Maqbool says he was eventually dismissed. As he left the entrance of the cantonment at an area known as Rajendera Singh Gate, he says he was tossed into a jeep by five men in civilian clothing and blindfolded. Mr. Maqbool claims that he was able to recognize them as army personnel from his time working as an investigative journalist in the region.
Mr. Maqbool says he was then taken to Hari Niwas. Once the residence of the local maharaja, and located in a picturesque spot beside Dal Lake, human rights activists like Khurram Parvez, program coordinator of the human rights group Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, say this place became an interrogation center for the army between 1997 and 2007, a time when militancy was at its peak in Kashmir. The army declined to comment on allegations Hari Nawas was used by the army to interrogate suspects during that time.
The army denies any knowledge of Mr. Maqbool’s interrogation. An army spokesman said interrogation cells in Srinagar are no longer in use due to an overall decrease in military operations throughout the region. “These are things from the past that are being phased out now as Kashmir enters a more peaceful time,” he said, when asked about allegations of torture in these chambers.
The army’s account of interrogation cells differs from that of human rights groups who claim that such places are still active throughout Srinagar, and regularly moved to new locations in order to maintain discretion. Mr. Parvez and his organization, for example, are currently putting together a report alleging torture in Jammu Kashmir that includes first-hand accounts and medical records.
Mr. Maqbool said in an interview that he had visited Hari Nawas as a journalist and says he immediately recognized the peeling, white interiors. He claims he was held approximately 15 days under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a law that protects soldiers operating in conflicted areas from prosecution for alleged human rights abuses, before espionage-related charges were formally filed against him.
Mr. Maqbool was accused by the army of working in collusion with Pakistan’s intelligence agency during a visit to that country in 2001. Mr. Maqbool denies this, saying the purpose of his visit was to interview migrants who had left the Indian side of Kashmir for Pakistan. An army spokesman declined to comment on allegations Mr. Maqbool visited Pakistan for the stated purpose of conducting the interviews he described.
Mr. Gilani was charged nine days after his arrest on charges of espionage on behalf of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
During his preliminary interrogation, before he was charged and sent to the central jail in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, Mr. Maqbool alleges that he was beaten, suspended by his arms from the ceiling, and had the muscles in his legs mauled by rollers. According to Mr. Maqbool, the officers who conducted the interrogation were army officers he recognized from his time working as an investigative reporter. He claims that by the time he reached prison he had lost the ability to walk on his own strength.
The army spokesman claimed that harsh interrogation practices were “not common” in today’s Kashmiri prisons. “I cannot comment on specific cases,” the officer said, “but such an incident would only occur with a dangerous terrorist.”
No medical records could be produced to verify Mr. Maqbool’s story. His account is similar to cases of prison abuse reported by local and international human rights groups in the region. For instance, in the report “Alleged Perpetrators: Stories of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir,” conducted by two local human rights groups – the International People’s Tribunal for Human Rights and Justice in Indian Kashmir and the Association of Parents and Disappeared Persons – many of the 214 cases of alleged abduction, torture, and judicial killings it listed occurred not in prisons but in temporary holding stations or interrogation cells.
After being transferred to Jammu and Kashmir’s Central Jail, Mr. Maqbool remained in prison for another three years and four months before ultimately being let out on bail. Eight years after his arrest, he is still awaiting trial.
Mr. Maqbool believes that the sensitive nature of his reporting was why he was detained. “I was reporting on corruption, custodial killings, encounters, things of that nature,” Mr. Maqbool says. “I had been focusing on human rights abuses, specifically, performed by the army,” he adds. The work to which Mr. Maqbool refers had been published in the daily Urdu language papers of Chattan.
When asked about allegations that the army targets journalists, including on the specific claims made by Mr. Maqbool, an army spokesman responded by saying that ties with the local press are “very strong.” He did not elaborate.
Mr. Maqbool is not the only Kashmiri journalists who has spent time in prison on similar accusations.
Iftikar Gilani, 45, is the author of “My Days in Prison,” a memoir that recounts his own experience of going from being a respected journalist to an alleged spy in Tihar Jail.
Mr. Gilani, who today reports for the newspaper Daily News and Analysis, was arrested in 2002 while writing for the Kashmir Times, a local paper.
Mr. Gilani, like Mr. Maqbool, had been covering military operations in Kashmir for many years.
“When they realized I was a journalist and they figured what I was writing about they came down hard on me,” he said. The military declined to comment on questions about the arrest of and detention of Mr. Gilani.
Mr. Gilani, a resident of Delhi, was ultimately taken to the city’s Tihar Jail where he claims he was beaten, tortured, and forced to clean excrement with a shirt that he was later made to wear for three consecutive days, instances he describes in his memoir.
“Don’t believe that nonsense about reforms,” he says, “Tihar is the worst jail in the entire world.”
Sunil Gupta, a spokesperson for Tihar Jail, told me during my visit there that while individual cases could not be addressed, torture is strictly forbidden in the facility.
But unlike Mr. Maqbool, Mr. Gilani was out of prison within a matter of eight months, after charges were dropped. He attributes this to the active support of the Kashmir Times, which lobbied for his release. Anurata Bhasin, the paper’s executive editor confirmed Mr. Gilani’s statement, saying that the Kashmir Times did “everything it possibly could” to support Mr. Gilani’s cause for freedom.
Mr. Maqbool could not count on the same support from his organization, Chattan. “I was unlucky,” Mr. Maqbool recalls, with reference to Chattan, “under pressure of the army, they kept silent.”
Tahir Mohidin, a senior editor at Chattan, spoke with sadness and resignation about Mr. Maqbool’s plight. “There were allegations against him but they have never been proven,” says Mr. Mohidin who contends that the paper did as much as they could to help Mr. Maqbool at the time of his arrest.
“We contacted different officials and argued on his behalf,” he says.
The Director General of Prisons for Jammu and Kashmir, Navin Agarwal, 51, says that, while tragic if true, Mr. Maqbool’s case cannot be proven. “The alleged instances of torture did not occur either of the region’s two main jails,” he said. Mr. Agarwal is responsible only for the imprisonment that occurs after a suspect has been formally charged, and is either awaiting trial or serving a sentence after conviction.
Mr. Maqbool wrote about his time in prison in a memoir, “The Darkness Inside,” which was written in Urdu. Once inside Jammu and Kashmir’s Central Jail, where regulations against torture are strictly supervised, Mr. Maqbool claims to have grown almost fond of his time in prison, focusing on writing and prayer.
“I turned prison into a library,” he says proudly.
Mr. Maqbool is now back to working as a journalist for the weekly Urdu paper Pukaar. He also hosts a show for a local radio and television station. But the healing process for Mr. Maqbool has been slow, and he is still waiting to clear his name.
Tomorrow we look at what prison reform experts say should be done to improve the country’s prison and custody system.
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