On 10 October, Ruwa Shah, the beleaguered daughter of 66-year-old separatist leader tweeted out a Quranic verse, “We belong to the God and to him we shall return.” It was an implicit announcement that her father Altaf Shah who was imprisoned since July 2017 and awaiting trial under charges of funding militancy in Kashmir, had died.
Shah was the son-in-law of the deceased Hurriyat patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who passed away in September last year, putting the entire separatist camp into existential crises of sorts; adrift and rudderless amid a wave of clampdown following the abrogation of article 370 in 2019.
Altaf Shah’s death, however, has echoes similar to the case of Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, suffering from Parkinson’s disease who died last year amid deteriorating health conditions in the prison. And just like in Swamy's case, Shah’s demise in custody has attracted widespread criticism over the kind of treatment meted out to the ailing and infirm undertrials across the jails in India.
Are Prisons Authorised To Deal a Bad Hand?
It also resurrects a crucial debate about prolonged incarceration without trial on which former Chief Justice of India NV Ramana shed light earlier this year when he said that the issue needed “urgent attention.”
Shah was among seven separatist leaders that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had arrested nearly five years ago. NIA alleged that the names of Shah along with Ayaz Akbar, Raja Mehrajuddin, Peer Saifullah, Aftab Shah, Nayeem Khan and Farooq Ahmed Dar had surfaced during an investigation into the case pertaining to the funding of militancy and civil unrest in J&K.
Detainees Ail in Jail Till Death
It is now a common template for most cases involving prolonged detention of separatist leaders in the region.
Shah’s daughter Ruwa, a media professional herself, had first alerted her readers on social media to her father’s condition on 21 September. She said her father was critically ill and battling pneumonia, diabetes and kidney disease. The family, she wrote, had been requesting jail authorities to relocate him to proper hospital instead of keeping him in the Tihar jail’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where he was just on oxygen support.
The following day, Ruwa put out a letter explaining the timeline of the events and said, it was for two weeks that her father had been extremely ill. While jail authorities had taken Shah to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital, Janakpuri, she acknowledged that they had shifted him back to Tihar jail despite the doctors referring him to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital Hospital in Delhi for further treatment on account of his “very critical” condition.
When they were given access to Shah’s medical reports, the family said they were shocked to find that the jail authorities had 'underplayed' his condition, mentioning only about the diabetes and hypertension and not the other critical ailments including kidney malfunction and low haemoglobin.
More worryingly, doctors at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital, where Shah was taken, discovered that his condition has worsened because the renal cancer had metastasised and seeped into other parts of the body.
The Court (not specified in the letter), hearing a plea on the family’s behalf, meanwhile directed NIA to submit Shah’s fresh medical reports on 6 October, citing by when he was supposed to stay under care at RML Hospital where the family says, no further treatment was possible as the necessary PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan, used to map the spread of cancerous cells, was not available.
Last Moments of Altaf Ahmad Shah
As a result, they requested the authorities to allow the family to take him to Apollo Hospital, Delhi where he could be with them at this “critical juncture.” They proposed to have Shah under house arrest till the bail application, pending before the Delhi High Court, was decided upon.
“The police is not letting us see him,” Ruwa tweeted on 2 October. “He needs treatment ASAP.” There was a follow-up tweet the next day. “His lungs are not functioning. They are not moving him to AIIMs,” she wrote, adding that at the RML Hospital, Shah wasn’t being treated for his ailments but only left on vital life support systems. “Delay in treatment is causing harm that is irreversible.”
Two days later, citing a High Court order allowing Shah to be relocated to All India Institute Of Medical Science (AIIMS), Ruwa took to social media again, alleging it was more than 24 hours since the court passed its directions and that her father was yet to be shifted, drawing attention to what she had previously described as 'loss of crucial life-saving hours.'
That was her last public communication regarding her father’s health until Monday's tweet which suggested that Shah passed away.
On Tuesday, while waiting for her father’s body outside the mortuary at AIIMS, Ruwa spoke to The Quint on phone. “We have not been given the body yet. The last time I had spoken to my father was on 29 September,” she said, fighting back tears. “It was only two months ago that I had seen him healthier.” Then she hung up.
It was around 11:23 pm on Tuesday night that she put out one more tweet saying that her father was finally buried in his ancestral graveyard in Srinagar, Kashmir.
Custodial Cruelty Is the New Norm for Political Prisoners
Condolences from across the broad have since poured in and so have the condemnations. Some of the region's top politicians have joined the chorus denouncing his death, which is not the first such case of a political leader dying in custody.
In 2019, 65-year-old Ghulam Mohammad Bhat, an activist from the banned Jamaat-E-Islami group from North Kashmir’s Handwara region had died in a jail in Uttar Pradesh's Prayagraj town due to septic shock and lung infection. He was barely five months into his arrest under the Public Safety Act(PSA), Kashmir’s much-feared preventive detention law.
Last year in May, jailed Hurriyat leader Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai battling multiple illnesses died at the Government Medical College in Jammu. Sehrai, who was 77 years old, was the top leader in the Geelani-led Hurriyat faction. In July 2020, he was detained under the stringent PSA law whose application has been subjected to considerable criticism by the international human rights groups.
A sweeping crackdown continues to be imposed on and off in Kashmir since the Union government repealed Article 370 and dismembered the former state. Raids by the NIA and the State Investigative Agency, its local unit, have been stepped up.
No Account of Arrests in J&K
It’s difficult to establish the precise number of arrests since August 2019. There are around thirteen jails in J&K with the intake capacity of 2700 at the moment. Several reports suggest that the local administration is struggling to find space inside jails in J&K which is why the police have devised the list of prisons located outside the Union Territory (UT) where it is shipping out a large number of prisoners.
At least until April, around 500 people arrested under PSA were being held in jails across the erstwhile state.
In response to a Right To Information (RTI) request filed in December 2020, J&K Prisons Department revealed that around 4,131 prisoners, beyond the carrying capacity of local jails, were being held in different prisons across the UT. Of these prisoners, 3,735 were reportedly undertrials. An estimated 747 were arrested in militancy-related cases and only 1.8 percent of these individuals were actually convicted.
As concomitant to PSA, authorities are also now resorting to Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) which literally guarantees a lengthy pre-trial detention and makes bail impossible. Latest National Crime Records Data (NCRB) suggests J&K accounts for the highest number of UAPA cases filed in India in 2021.
The result of such broad-based clampdown in absence of any meaningful checks on the executive by either the civil society groups all of whom have been practically brought to heel – or by the elected lawmakers, of whom Kashmir has seen none since July 2018 – is that political anger continues to grow further.
(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire.in, Article 14, Caravan, Firstpost, The Times of India, and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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