On 20 April, Masrat Zahra, a 26-year-old photojournalist from Kashmir, woke up to learn that the cyber police had booked her under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. A press release by the Cyber Police Station, Kashmir Zone, was doing rounds on social media that morning, which referred to Zahra’s Facebook account, stated, “The facebook user is … believed to be uploading photographs which can provoke the public to disturb law and order.” Zahra questioned why the press release identified her in that manner. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It is like I don’t have an identity as a journalist.”
The press release accused Zahra of “uploading anti national posts with criminal intention to induce the youth and to promote offences against public tranquility.” It continued, “The user is also uploading posts that tantamount to glorify the anti-national activities and dent the image of law enforcing agencies besides causing disaffection against the country.” But according to Zahra, she has only uploaded photos she had taken while reporting from the ground. “I’m just uploading my professional work, that I have covered since years and witnessed in Kashmir,” Zahra said. She added that some of these photos had already been published internationally. “I’m a photojournalist, what else am I supposed to upload?”
Zahra’s timeline on Facebook echoes her words. Many of her photos document the daily excesses committed by the Indian security forces in Kashmir, such as photos of family members who lost their kin or their property during police firing. Several others capture the ongoing resistance in the region. For instance, on 18 April, Zahra uploaded a photo showing a piece of clothing, some documents and loose change. In the caption, she wrote, “Arifa Jan keeps newspaper clippings and the blood-stained notes of her husband, Abdul Qadir Sheikh, was carrying when he was gunned down by Indian army suspected being a militant. ‘I couldn’t come to terms with the agony and pain inflicted on me,’ she said.” Another photo, published on 6 April, showed a woman standing in front of a demolished house and had the caption, “‘Pehlay yeh ghar meray liaye bus ik makaan tha, ab yeh jagah meray liaye eik astaan hai (First, this house was just a home for me. Now, this place is a shrine for me),’ said Madhosh Balhami, the poet who lost his 30-years of poetry when his house was destroyed by armed forces in a gun battle.”
The cyber police booked Zahra under Section 13 of the UAPA, which prescribes a punishment of up to seven years for committing or participating in any unlawful activity. The act defines unlawful activity in generic terms, and includes any activity against the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of India” and that “causes or is intended to cause disaffection against India.” Going by the cyber police’s decision to apply this act and its definition to Zahra’s work, it appears that the division considers the act of journalism to be unlawful.
The press release states that a first information report bearing number “10/2020” and “dated 18-04-2020 stands registered in Cyber Police Station, Kashmir Zone, Srinagar and investigation set into motion.” Zahra told me that she had received a call from the cyber police on 18 April asking her to come to the station for questioning. The police did not tell her at the time that an FIR had been registered against her. Zahra said she informed the police that she would not be able to come because she did not have a curfew pass, but the police officials told her to call them from any check post that prohibited her from moving forward. She then spoke to members of the Kashmir Press Club, or KPC, to inform them about the call, who contacted Kashmir’s inspector general of police and Syed Sehrish Asgar, the director of Jammu and Kashmir’s department of information and public relations.
The cyber police called her again that day to ask her if she had left, and she told them that she would visit the station the next day as her father was not at home. Zahra said the police insisted on her “immediate presence,” but she convinced them that she would come with her father. That evening, Zahra said she received a call from Asgar, who said that she had spoken to the police and that Zahra did not need to go the police station after all. Zahra said that Asgar told her, “I have spoken to them and told them that she is a female, it will not look good if she has to come to the police station alone.” Zahra added, “The matter was sorted out by the director of information and the KPC.”
But it appears that it was not sorted for long. Speaking to me on 20 April, hours after the press release began doing rounds on social media, she told me she saw a tweet that morning about the FIR and “I again forwarded that to the KPC member.” Zahra continued, “At around 11 am, I saw the press release about ‘facebook user’ Masrat Zahra—they are not calling me a journalist, they are calling me a facebook user. Then they called me again at around 12 pm and told me to come tomorrow.”
Zahra has told the police that she will visit the station on 21 April. “I am relying on the press club right now,” she said. Ishfaque Tantry, the general secretary of the Kashmir Press Club, told me that they came to know about the press release late evening on 19 April. He, too, believed that the matter had been resolved on Saturday after Asgar intervened. “Our intervention has not saved anything,” Tantry said. Referring to the police’s actions, he added, “They have shown an unrelenting attitude and gone ahead and pressed with the charge.”
Tantry said that the press club had not contacted Asgar again because “we did not find it proper to call her back.” He added, “We had sought her intervention, it had resulted in some action, and now it has not gone the way we would have liked. If it could be solved, it would have been good, because she”—Zahra—“is a very young journalist and she has many years to go, and we did not want a criminal case against her. But they don’t care about those things.” Tantry repeated with a tone of resignation, “They don’t care about those things.”
“This is a very stringent act that has been invoked against her,” Tantry continued. “She will cooperate and whatever legal remedies she has, she will use. The press club is behind her and all the journalists of Kashmir are behind her. Ultimately it is a fight and she will have to fight.”
Journalism is hardly an easy profession in a conflict region such as Kashmir, and it has been particularly difficult for Zahra, as a woman, to fight the restrictions imposed by the state and patriarchy. She began journalism in 2016, and ever since, she has had to repeatedly go against her family’s wishes to be able to go to the ground to report, only to face hostility from male journalists and security forces present there. Navigating the risks of reporting on clashes between the armed forces and a resurging militancy, while being denied the access that her male counterparts enjoyed, Zahra soon began reporting alone. She covered funerals of militants, where she was prohibited from getting on to the stage where the corpse was kept; stone-pelting clashes, where the police threatened to confiscate her camera even as she showed a press card; and the crackdown that followed the Indian state’s abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status.
Zahra persevered with her journalism without the support of her parents and her brother, who did not want her to pursue the profession. She would often refrain from telling them that she was going to report. In a September 2019 photo essay by Zahra, published by The Caravan, she noted, “They keep saying, ‘You do not know what the society is saying.’ I am not living for society. In my field, if I cannot do justice to myself, how can I do justice to others?” Over the four years since she began, her work has gained recognition in Kashmir, across India, and around the world. She has been published by several Indian and foreign news organisations, and her photographs have been showcased at exhibitions in New York and Delhi.
Now, Zahra faces the scary prospect of being arrested under the UAPA, which allows the state to detain a person for six months at a stretch without producing any evidence against them. On the morning of 20 April, after she learnt about the FIR against her, Zahra decided that she would step out of the house for the first time since the lockdown to combat the coronavirus had been imposed. “I have stayed at home because my parents being in quarantine would be useless if I went out, I did not want to put their lives at risk. I got many requests to cover the pandemic in Kashmir, but I did not work.” But after seeing that she had been booked under the UAPA, Zahra said she felt compelled to go outside to discuss her situation with other journalists.
Zahra said she was only worried about telling her parents about the FIR, and was unable to bring herself to say anything about the UAPA. “I saw my mother and told her that I had to go somewhere, and she asked me if everything was fine because I had not stepped out. She asked me, ‘What happened suddenly?’ I told her that something had happened. She asked what it was, and I just hugged her. She kept asking me what had happened. My brother called me soon after that.” She said her family now knew that there was an FIR against her, but she had not mentioned that it was under the UAPA. Zahra then went to Press Colony in Srinagar, where she said her journalist friends sought to reassure her and expressed their solidarity.
Tantry noted that the police action against journalists had increased during the nationwide lockdown to fight the novel coronavirus, and said that the press club had been receiving “a lot of complaints” from journalists. He referred to two incidents in particular. On 19 April, Tantry said, Peerzada Ashiq, a reporter with The Hindu, was summoned to the same police station in Srinagar where Zahra was called, and asked to explain alleged factual inaccuracies in a report he had written. He was then forced to travel to south Kashmir, over forty kilometres away, to another police station, in Anantnag district. According to a press release from the office of Kashmir’s inspector general of police, an FIR was registered against Ashiq as well. Tantry referred to another incident where a journalist named Mushtaq Ahmed was beaten and arrested by the police in Bandipora district for reporting during the lockdown, and forced to secure bail from the court.
On 16 April, Tahir Ashraf, a superintendent of police who is in charge of the Cyber Police Kashmir, tweeted, “13 FIRs for misuse of Social Media registered in Kashmir Zone so far. Fake news, rumour mongers and handles promoting terrorism are under watch. More action to follow.” His Twitter timeline seems to present a new strategy adopted by the police, which involves calling upon Kashmiris to publicly acknowledge that they are under police surveillance and undertaking to not post any “unlawful content.” On 19 April, a journalist named Kamran Manzoor tweeted, “I am under Surveillance of cyber police station Srinagar Kashmir. But I want to assure them that i will not upload any unlawful content on social media again and I will never misuse of social media now.” Within an hour, Ashraf retweeted the post with a comment, “God bless you, all the best.”
The next day, another Twitter handle posted a similar tweet, and Ashraf again retweeted, this time commenting, “May Almighty bless you.” Soon after, Ashraf retweeted it again with a different comment, saying the Twitter user “is a student and not a journalist. He copy content, edit it under peer pressure and repost which he realised was not good and illegal also. Let us all wish him luck for his further studies.”
This practice of public undertakings appears to have the endorsement of the Kashmir administration. Shahid Choudhary, the district magistrate of Srinagar, replied to Ashraf’s retweet of Manzoor’s post, “Man behind purification of Social Media @Tahir_A . God bless.” Ashraf responded with a “Thank you sir.”
Ashraf told me that the FIR against Zahra was registered because she had posted an old photograph of police beating civilians and because she had posted photos that “correlated terrorists with martyrs,” and which “glorified terrorists as national and international martyrs.” He added, “There are other posts wherein she is glorifying the terrorists and writing a story about the terrorist and how hero he was and glorifying the terrorist.” I asked Ashraf what amounted to “glorification” and how Zahra’s posts, which comprised photos and quotes from her reporting, could warrant the invocation of the UAPA. “You want me to interpret the law. I interpret my law in my case diary … You have a different interpretation.”
On 8 April, Zahra had shared a post by a photographer, comprising two photographs in which police officials could be seen manhandling civilians—one from 2008, taken by the photographer, and another from 2018, taken by her. The other photographer had captioned the post: “Nothing has changed in a decade. A Photojournalist recapitulates it everyday.” I asked Ashraf why posting a photograph of police beating civilians would invoke an FIR. “Because it is fake news, it has not happened.”
“It has never happened?” I asked.
“Jab post kiya tab toh nahi tha”—It had not happened when it was posted, he said. I pointed out that Zahra had not in any way indicated that the post was from the day she shared. “Mujhe na, aap se baat karne ke liye mujhe ek-do ghante chahiye”—I will need one or two hours to speak with you, he said, before adding that he would call me later.
Shortly after our conversation, Ashraf posted a tweet referring to Zahra: “Cyber Police Station Kashmir registered FIR against a social media user for posting incriminating material which attracts the provisions of UA(P)A and IPC. Investigation has been set into motion.” Seemingly as proof, Ashraf uploaded a screenshot of a photograph Zahra had posted to Instagram. In the Instagram post, which is from September 2018, young men can be seen carrying a poster of Burhan Wani, the deceased commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen. The text on the poster describes Wani as “shaheed,” or martyr. Zahra had captioned the photo with this information: “Kashmir Shiite Muslims seen carrying a picture of Hizbul Mujahideen commander shaheed Burhan Wani.”
We spoke again two hours later. I asked him about the tweet, and he said that the poster of Wani and the caption was an example of the “glorification of terrorists.” When I asked him if it was possible that she was simply reproducing the text of the poster, he insisted that “she is writing her own caption.” Ashraf said that the cyber police “registered the FIR against a particular handle, not an individual.” He continued, “The FIR is always the first thing for an investigation. We will investigate whether the handle belongs to her, whether she had posted it with the intention of glorifying the terrorists.” When Ashraf once again claimed that Zahra had posted fake news, I asked him what he was referring to. “She has posted photos about clashes with security forces while the security forces have been busy with containment work for the coronavirus.” I pointed out again that she had not claimed that these posts were from the date on which it was published, and Ashraf responded that they would investigate it.
Ashraf also told me that the public acknowledgments on Twitter were part of a strategy to deal with teenagers who had been spreading fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter. He noted that these posts acted as “a deterrent” and claimed that it had even led to many teenagers approaching the police voluntarily to admit to running fake accounts on Twitter to spread panic. I also contacted Choudhary, the district magistrate who had praised Ashraf. He asked me to send my queries over text message. The report will be updated if and when a response is received.
The cyber police’s press release made no attempt to hide the fact that the FIR against Zahra was a message to everyone. “General public is advised to refrain from misuse of social media platforms and circulation of unauthenticated information through such platforms,” it stated. It is not clear how this statement bore any relation to Masrat’s posts, given that she is not part of the “general public” insofar as she is a journalist, and that her posts were what she had reported and photographed herself, and not “unauthenticated information.” Tantry, too, emphasised that the press release treated her as if she was a “common criminal” and failed to acknowledge that she was a journalist.
“Things are very tough,” Tantry said. “Masrat is a bold journalist. Her work speaks for itself. This is a very dangerous precedent they are setting in Kashmir—booking journalists for posting their work on social media. It is as if they have made journalism a crime in Kashmir. Journalism is not a crime.”