At least four reporters working for major national publications have been summoned by police in Jammu and Kashmir, Scroll has learned.
One of them is a senior journalist with The Indian Express, Bashaarat Masood, a person familiar with the development told Scroll.
Masood had recently reported on a controversial police drive to collect information on mosques and mosque officials in Kashmir. He was asked to sign a bond, stating that he would not do anything to disturb peace in the union territory, the person said.
The police action is not based on a formal first information report, but is being carried out under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the person said.
The provision allows an executive magistrate to pre-…
At least four reporters working for major national publications have been summoned by police in Jammu and Kashmir, Scroll has learned.
One of them is a senior journalist with The Indian Express, Bashaarat Masood, a person familiar with the development told Scroll.
Masood had recently reported on a controversial police drive to collect information on mosques and mosque officials in Kashmir. He was asked to sign a bond, stating that he would not do anything to disturb peace in the union territory, the person said.
The police action is not based on a formal first information report, but is being carried out under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the person said.
The provision allows an executive magistrate to pre-emptively seek bonds from people “likely to commit a breach of peace”. Government officials can invoke this section merely on the basis of information they have received about individuals.
An Indian Express spokesperson confirmed that Masood had been called to the police station. “Bashaarat Masood, Assistant Editor, and a member of the Srinagar bureau of The Indian Express since 2006, was called on four days **to the Cyber Police Station, Srinagar, and asked to sign a bond which he has not signed,” the spokesperson said. “The Indian Express is committed to doing what is necessary to uphold and protect the rights and dignity of its journalists.”
Scroll contacted the senior superintendent of Srinagar police, asking about the reasons for summoning journalists and asking them to sign the bonds. The official did not respond to our calls and messages. This story will be updated if he responds.
The summons
On the evening of January 14, Masood received a phone call from the cyber police in Srinagar, asking him to come to the police station the next afternoon, according to the person familiar with the events that followed.
When he got there, he was made to wait for nearly three hours after which a police officer asked him to come back the following day. The officer assured Masood that he would only have to spend half an hour at the police station the next time he came.
However, the journalist ended up spending the whole of Friday and Saturday running from one government office to another.
First, he was sent to the deputy commissioner’s office from the police station, where he was asked to sign a Section 126 bond. The police officials were unwilling to provide reasons for their demand, said the person. When Masood refused to comply, a police official told him that he would then have to go to Srinagar central jail.
From the deputy commissioner’s office, the journalist was sent back to the police station. There, one of the officers told him that he was being asked to sign the bond because of a story he had written on the political reaction to the police drive in mosques in Kashmir.
On Monday afternoon, he was called in again, the fourth day he had been forced to turn up at the police station. This time, though, the police did not keep him at the station for very long.
The three other journalists got similar summons. One of them was out of Srinagar when he got a call from a police official, asking him to come in. None of the other journalists have, as of yet, reported to the police station.
‘Serious erosion of press freedom’
The four journalists summoned had reported on the political reaction to the Jammu and Kashmir police’s drive to collect information on mosques, which has been the subject of much controversy over the past week in Kashmir.
Police officials are reportedly distributing copies of a four-page form to mosques in the Muslim-majority region. The form seeks extensive information pertaining to the family background and financial details of those involved in the upkeep of the places of worship.
The exercise has drawn fire from Kashmiri politicians cutting across party lines as well as prominent religious organisations, who argue that this goes beyond looking into the legal status of mosques.
On Monday, veteran journalist Nirupama Subramanian wrote a social media post about reporters being asked to sign bonds in Kashmir, leading to criticism from public figures in Kashmir.
“Forcing reporters into affidavits, undertakings and bonds at police stations is condemnable,” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, seen by many as the chief preacher of Kashmir, wrote on X. “Religious spaces are not surveillance targets, nor reporting facts a crime.”
The Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, the principal Opposition party in the valley, also put out a statement criticising the police. “If reporters from national newspapers can be summoned, harassed, and pressured over routine reporting, it marks a serious erosion of press freedom,” it said.
MLAs from other smaller parties, such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Conference, also spoke up in support of the journalists.
‘What is the future of journalism?’
This is not the first time that reporters in Kashmir find themselves at the receiving end of police scrutiny. Since the abrogation of Article 370, there has been a sharp uptick in coercive state action against journalists in the region. In some cases, even their passports have been suspended.
In November, the police raided the defunct office of the Jammu newspaper, Kashmir Times, and claimed that it had discovered “incriminating arms and ammunition”.
However, this is perhaps the first time that multiple reporters working for reputed national publications have been subjected to such treatment by the police.
“There is a pattern,” noted a journalist in Srinagar, requesting not to be named. “They [police] have more or less silenced the Kashmiri press. The attempt now is to silence the national press too.” Freelancers working for the foreign press, too, avoid writing about Kashmir out of fear, he added.
What troubled this journalist the most was the “routine” nature of the story that led to the summons from the police. That, in his view, showed how tightly the Centre seeks to control press coverage of the Union Territory. “If there is no tolerance for even this kind of journalism, then what is the future of journalism here?”
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