‘Laws Too Have Been Communalised’: Mufti Condemns Kashmiri Journo’s Arrest

Gul, a trainee reporter at The Kashmir Walla and a journalism student has been charged with criminal conspiracy.

Kashmiri journalist Sajad Gul.

(Photo: Twitter/@SajadGUL_)

Kashmiri journalist Sajad Gul has been arrested and booked under criminal conspiracy and other charges days after he posted a video of a family shouting anti-India slogans after their kin was killed in a gunfight in Srinagar, The Kashmir Walla reported on Friday, 7 January.

Gul, a trainee reporter at the The Kashmir Walla and a journalism student has been charged under 120B (party to criminal conspiracy), 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration), and 505B (fear or alarm to the public) Sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

In the video, the family members can be seen protesting against the killing of alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Salim Parray. He was gunned down on Monday, 3 January, in Harwan area on the outskirts of Srinagar.

Two days after the gunfight, Gul was detained by the army and later handed over to the police, as per his brother, The Kashmir Walla reported.

While there has been some outrage over the police action against Gul, this is not the first time he is being investigated for his journalistic work.

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said in a tweet on Saturday, “There is a different set of laws applicable to J&K vis a vis rest of India. Radicalised groups openly calling for the genocide of Muslims are roaming free while Kashmiri journalists shining a light on state-sponsored human rights violations are jailed. Laws too have been communalised.”

Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that it was “deeply disturbed by reports that Kashmiri journalist Sajad Gul was arrested days after posting a video of a protest on social media”.

Linking an article to previous investigation on journalists, CPJ demanded that the “authorities must immediately release Gul and drop their investigations related to his journalistic work”.

(With inputs from The Kashmir Walla.)