Bail, not freedom: Kashmir’s two most watched detainees walk out of jail

Khurram Parvez and Irfan Mehraj have left a New Delhi jail, but nobody should mistake that for a clean ending. The two Kashmiri men are out on bail after years behind bars on charges linked to terrorism financing, yet the state’s case against them remains intact and the court has left them under tight restrictions.

Parvez, a human rights activist and programme coordinator for the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, was arrested in 2021 by the National Investigation Agency at his home in Srinagar. Mehraj, a freelance journalist who also worked with the same rights group as a researcher, was arrested in 2023. Both deny the allegations, which include funding terrorism and propagating a separatist agenda under India’s stringent antiterrorism laws.

The sequence is familiar enough to have become grimly routine. A lower court granted bail last week. The agency appealed. On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court refused to suspend the release order, but it did impose tougher limits on the men’s movements and activities while the appeal is heard. According to a court document seen by AFP, they must arrange their own accommodation in the capital, where they face trial, and they cannot travel to Kashmir.

That is the kind of release that satisfies nobody except, perhaps, the people who drafted the paperwork. It keeps the men outside prison while leaving the legal pressure firmly in place.

The case sits inside a broader crackdown on activists, journalists and dissidents in India-administered Kashmir since 2019, when Narendra Modi’s government scrapped the region’s autonomy under the Indian Constitution. Rights groups say the consequences have been severe. Government figures show that more than 3,600 people were arrested in the region under antiterrorism laws from 2019 to 2023, and more than half remain in prison.

The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society has for decades documented alleged abuses by Indian government forces in Kashmir, including torture, unlawful killings and thousands of unmarked graves in border areas believed to contain victims of enforced disappearances. International rights groups, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have repeatedly called for Parvez and Mehraj to be released, arguing that they were jailed for their work. In 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said Parvez’s arrest was an act of reprisal for his human rights work and an attempt to silence him and Kashmiri civil society more broadly.

After the release, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture said the two men had been arrested on trumped-up charges and urged Indian authorities to drop the case, calling the proceedings politically motivated. The National Investigation Agency, for its part, says the JKCCS was used to fund militant-linked activity and promote separatism.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since 1947, and both countries claim it in full. Rebel groups have fought the Indian government since 1989, demanding independence or merger with Pakistan, and the conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians.

For Parvez and Mehraj, bail changes the setting but not the script. The trial continues, the appeal continues, and the restrictions continue. In Kashmir, that distinction matters.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com