A year in incarceration

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Article 370: A Year On, Kashmiri Man’s Family Despairs His Continued Incarceration Under PSA

Abdul Rashid Mir, who had waited for 57 days and traveled 1,327kilometersto meet his son Fayaz Ahmad, said that his ordeal did not end even after he reached his destination, Bareilly Central Jail in Uttar Pradesh.

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The jail authorities, the 55-year-old Kashmiri said, made him wait for five hours outside the jail, and told him to speak only in Hindi, when he tried speaking to his 29-year-old sonin Kashmiri from behind a plexiglass.

Mir, who has never been to school and knows no other language, was dumbfounded until his 23-year-old daughter Zahida Jan said that she would translate.

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There was an officer in civil clothes who was listening to our conversation and jotting it down in a notepad,” she said in a recent interview with HuffPost India.

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Ahmad was among the more than 7,000 Kashmiris, including politicians, activists, and minors, who were arrested before and immediately after the Narendra Modi government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s (J&K) autonomy, guaranteed under Article 370 of the Constitution, on 5 August, demoted India’s only Muslim majority state to a Union Territory, and imposed a several months long lockdown and communication ban.