Nearly six months after the Indian government repealed Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 and imposed months-long internet blackout, the Supreme Court of India passed a landmark judgment under Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India in which it deemed indefinite internet shutdowns "unconstitutional", reinforcing digital rights and press freedom of Indian citizens.
The architect of that legal challenge was Anuradha Bhasin, the editor of The Kashmir Times newspaper, who petitioned to the top court that the shutdown had prevented her Jammu-based newspaper from going to print.
More than five years after the landmark SC judgment, The Kashmir Times has found itself in the centre of a storm again after officials from the J&K State Investigative Agency (SIA), a nodal unit of the National Investigative Agency (NIA), swooped down on the offices of the newspaper in Jammu city on 20 November.
“It looks like part of the vendetta which has been ongoing since 2020,” Bhasin, who was a 2023 John S Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, said.
Accusing the paper of “involvement in criminal conspiracy with secessionist and other anti-national entities operating within and outside Jammu and Kashmir”, the SIA in a statement claimed it retrieved “incriminating arms and ammunition” including a revolver, bullets, and empty cartridges of fired bullets from the office. It isn't clear, however, what prompted the raid against the newspaper that’s been shut for the past four years, or how the weapons reached the premises.
Bhasin terms the allegations "ridiculous".
“We are a newspaper office. We don’t store arms over there. No official communication reached us. No search warrants were presented to us.”Anuradha Bhasin
One of J&K’s Oldest Publications
The Kashmir Times was started in 1954 by Jammu-based veteran journalist Ved Bhasin after his weekly Urdu periodical Naya Samaj was banned by the J&K authorities under the Defence of India Rules. J&K at that time was ruled by the National Conference, led by a dissident faction supported by the Congress at the Centre.
The newspaper had since emerged as a bold voice from the region, with many of the 'who’s who' of the Kashmiri press fraternity burnishing their credentials as reporters inside the newsroom of this 70-year-old publication.
While many Kashmir-based publications faced the heat over their reporting even before 2019, The Kashmir Times had largely escaped the administration’s dragnet. This was mainly because the paper was printed from Jammu, and that it had a legacy associated with its name, with even the former Indian Prime Minister IK Gujral having paid a visit to their office.
“PM Gujral was an old friend of my dad. His brother lived in Jammu. He was a frequent visitor to our home and office. He also attended my wedding."Anuradha Bhasin
However, the trouble for the newspaper appears to have begun after the abrogation of Article 370, especially after Bhasin’s petition led to the landmark January 2020 verdict.
Lauded in the media circles as a progressive, pro-freedom verdict, the judgment endorsed the principle of proportionality for the internet blackouts in the country.
“The first wave of hostility began in 2019 itself immediately after I filed that petition,” Bhasin said. “The government officials openly sent messages to our staffers that they won’t talk to us.”
In October 2020, the Estates Department of the J&K government sealed the premises of the newspaper’s office in Srinagar, along with the computers, printers, flash drives, and other equipment. The government alleged that Ved Bhasin, the newspaper’s original owner in whose name they had issued a stay permit, had passed away, and thus they were well within their rights to evict the new occupants.
The paper gradually grew out of print, and remained alive only in the online space.
The J&K Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) did not respond to requests from The Quint seeking their reaction on The Kashmir Times.
A Voice of Dissent
In 2023, an op-ed in The New York Times authored by Bhasin became a subject of controversy after the then Minister of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur called it “mischievous and fictitious” in a tweet. In the article, she alleged that the Narendra Modi-led government's "repressive media policies" were harming journalism in Kashmir.
In recent times, the coverage of The Kashmir Times has grown increasingly critical, including when the paper launched a series of reports on the claims made in the affidavit by the convicted Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front militant Yasin Malik.
In the said affidavit, Malik highlighted his role as a mediator between different militant factions of J&K, Pakistan, and the Indian government.
Bhasin's book, ‘A Dismantled State : The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370’, which is critical of the Modi government for having annulled the special status of J&K, was among the 25 titles that the J&K administration banned in the Union Territory earlier this year.
Bhasin told The Quint that she wasn’t sure why the government had carried out the raids.
“But we got feedback that it must have something to do with the recent stuff that we published,” she said, without specifying the nature of content.
“Given how the government operates in J&K, we don’t know if there’s any independent media left that operates without fear or any critical voices that are there on the horizon... They want any dissenting opinion to be completely silenced.”Anuradha Bhasin
Bhasin said that their digital operations mostly relied on freelance contributions. “We are doing about 5-6 stories and a few good opinion pieces a month. Most of them are not even critical. Some are about the arts and crafts of Kashmir,” she said.
Choking Press Freedom of J&K
This is not the first time when the J&K authorities have attracted criticism over press freedom.
Earlier this month, the Director of Information of J&K and the district administration in Shopian district rolled out a host of new authentication requirements for journalists in the region. This includes submitting Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, and official identification documents, along with appointment or affiliation letters from the media organisations, and even salary slips of the previous six months.
The new policy generated outrage, with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) denouncing what it called a move that “criminalises legitimate reporting.”
Previously, the J&K DIPR had also unveiled a media policy which required the journalists to undergo background checks before being eligible to receive accreditation from the government.
The 2020 policy assigned the administration the powers to flag “fake news and anti-national content” in the press and empowered it to stop giving advertisements to publications that are involved in such violations. Critics alleged that these provisions amounted to punishing the newspapers for any criticism they might voice through their reporting.
In this backdrop, the allegations against Bhasin have perturbed the Kashmiri journalist community who feel that they have already been driven to the edge.
“After this episode, I have decided against writing a source-based story,” said a 29-year-old independent journalist from Srinagar, who has been freelancing for many national and foreign newspapers.
“My stories are largely about defence and conflict. Plenty of times people in the government speak to me anonymously. What if I am told that what I am writing is fake news and raided simply on that pretext? If someone like Bhasin was targeted, I am literally a nobody. I don’t even have an organisational backing.”An independent journalist in Kashmir
Besides the bureaucratic-level restructuring of policies, the law enforcement authorities have also detained several journalists and media persons on various charges related to militancy.
Among these are Irfan Mehraj, a former staffer at J&K Coalition of Civil Society; Fahad Shah, the editor of Kashmir Walla; Manan Gulzar Dar, a freelance photojournalist; Aasif Sultan, a reporter at the Kashmir Narrator and more. Three of them were later issued bails by the courts.
Bhasin, who is currently on a private visit to the UK, said what's concerning her most was the future of her newspaper.
“We had one junior person handling the editorial, one photographer, one person in accounts, one or two technical guys at the printing press, and one manager. It was a skeletal staff and we weren’t able to pay them properly,” she said.
She told The Quint that her newspaper had already been teetering on the edge of collapse for some time. The latest raids might just be the last blow.
(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist reporting on news and politics from Kashmir.)