Take a look at these photos of Kashmiri journalist Sajad Gul. The one on the left is from 2021, when he was a fresh-faced, enthusiastic and determined 25-year-old journalism student and freelance reporter. The one on the right is from 2024, his determination – as we found out – intact, but the fresh face and enthusiasm gone.

That will happen if you’ve been in jail for 910 days.

When I chatted with Gul last week, I was struck by his resolve to let the world know what happened to him: how he was taken into custody for merely reporting a story and spent more than two-and-a-half years in four jails, even though two courts granted him bail and quashed his detention under a draconian law that allows the state to lock up someone without charge or trial for two years.

It is not the kind of story that many in his situation are eager to share because Narendra Modi’s “Mother of Democracy” – an oxymoron if there ever was one – does not appreciate defiance or deviation from its one-nation-one-narrative approach.

As Gul said in his interview to us at Article 14 last week, the first since a judge ordered his release in July, he wondered if he would ever get out. "I was locked up for 23 hours a day in a narrow, dark cell, with 30 minutes of walking in the morning and again in the afternoon,” Gul told us. “I had never been in isolation, and every hour seemed like a year."

His main hope of getting out of jail was Fahad Shah, his immensely supportive editor at The Kashmir Walla, Kashmir’s last independent outlet before the government shut it down; and Nazir Ahmed Ronga, his main lawyer. But Shah was himself arrested a month after Gul was and emerged from jail after 21 months exhausted and dispirited.

As in Gul’s case, there was no apparent crime and no wrongdoing, except a refusal to toe the government line that all was well in Jammu and Kashmir and to ask no inconvenient questions. You can read our interview with Shah here.

Ronga and his team eventually managed to get Gul out on July 8. Three days later, Ronga, too, was arrested, under Jammu and Kashmir’s Public Safety Act, the same law that the government used to keep Gul in jail after he got bail.

Credit: Special arrangement, via Article 14.

Shah and Gul are relatively lucky, if you can call it that. They are no longer in jail, but three Kashmiri reporters still are. Another, Aasif Sultan, was incarcerated for more than five years. He was freed on bail on February 28, only to be rearrested a day later on March 1 under the Public Safety Act, before finally getting bail again on May 14. Special judge Sandeep Gandotra said Sultan was “innocent and has not committed any offence” and had been imprisoned “without any reasonable justification”.

The pattern followed in the detention and imprisonment of these reporters is largely the same: improbable accusations (Gul, for instance, faces an attempt-to-murder charge with no violence even alleged); non-existent criminal cases with dubious or no evidence; and bail or imminent bail nixed by the use of laws that make bail difficult or almost impossible, such as the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

Apart from criminal action, many reporters and their families in Kashmir have had their homes raided or been exhausted and intimidated by slow harassment over months, involving repeated calls from different police and security units, summons for interrogation and court hearings. You can read some of our work on these issues here, here and here.

We have found reporting on these issues hard and getting harder. You will note that our interviews with Gul and Shah do not have bylines. In the normal course, in a functioning democracy, journalists would be proud to put their name to these stories. That the reporters concerned requested that their identities be hidden explains the state of the media and democracy in Kashmir. I’ve mentioned this before: other reporters who have written for us in the past have simply stopped covering issues that might cause the government to come after them. Some have left Kashmir or dropped out of journalism.

The latest example of the Jammu and Kashmir government’s shoot-the-messenger approach to stamp out free expression comes from beyond the Kashmir Valley, in the province of Jammu, where officials threatened a local media outlet called The Chenab Times with legal action merely for reporting the detention of Rehmatullah Khan, a local activist, under the Public Safety Act.

What was he protesting? The random dumping of garbage in violation of the law, and the failure of the pollution control board to stop it. The government accused him of being an “overground worker and sympathiser of militants” who posed a “threat to the security of the state”.

The video in question:

Here is a statement from Digipub, of which Article 14 and Scroll are founding members, on the threats issued to The Chenab Times:

Others continue to be the subject of Public Safety Act detentions. At least five more activists were detained in Jammu for protesting the proposed construction of dams in the Chenab Valley. According to the government, they were detained for “activities that could undermine developmental efforts”. As vague as it could be, the allegation was that they were part of a conspiracy to “delay significant projects”.

The Jammu and Kashmir model of criminalising journalism and dissent has since been deployed in the rest of India, although nowhere as heavy handed. The Public Safety Act does not apply outside Jammu and Kashmir, but the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act have proved useful tools. The most egregious misuse against a journalist was evident in the arrest of Kerala reporter Siddique Kappan, who was released last year after 846 days in prison.

Kappan was arrested with four others – including the driver of the taxi – in October 2020 on his way to report a gangrape in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Uttar Pradesh. Not as well known is the fact that Masud Ahmed, a journalism graduate accompanying Kappan, secured bail only in March this year. That all were Muslim – as indeed are all the Kashmiri reporters arrested – makes it easier to hint at terrorist or traitorous activities.

This is the approach used with award-winning journalist Rana Ayyub, who is frequently set upon, abused and threatened by ruling-party trolls online and is the subject of a slow drip of legal action by multiple government agencies.

A columnist with the Washington Post and author of the self-published 2016 book The Gujarat Files, an undercover investigation of government officials who lied before commissions of inquiry after the 2002 Gujarat riots, Ayyub was most recently tailed and harassed by intelligence and police officials during a reporting trip to Manipur in October.

On November 8, @HPhobiaWatch, a right-wing account with a record of abusive behaviour and previously associated with the BJP, put out Ayyub’s phone number online, urging followers to harass her. That night, she was flooded with lewd WhatsApp messages, phone and video calls. “I have lived a nightmare,” she said on X. As I write this, her email password has been leaked on Twitter, sparking a new flurry of abuse and harassment.

Meanwhile, government agencies continue to dog Ayyub.

On November 15, Ayyub appeared in the Bombay High Court in a defamation case filed against her over a story she wrote 15 years ago on the Hindu Sanatan Sanstha, a Hindutva organisation whose members have been accused of murder and violence.

Three days later, Ayyub was to appear in a court in Ghaziabad in a money-laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate, which alleges she misappropriated money raised to assist Covid victims, even as an income-tax case against her continues.

Twice in 2022, the Delhi High Court stopped Enforcement Directorate action against her, but the agency’s pursuit of Ayyub continues in Uttar Pradesh, based on a complaint by a man who called himself the founder of the “Hindu IT Cell”. In February 2023 the Supreme Court dismissed her plea that a special Central Bureau of Investigation court in Ghaziabad had no jurisdiction over the case.

In 2021, when the government started to harass Gul and ramp up its efforts against Ayyub, my colleague Kavitha Iyer wrote this in-depth story: “Inside The War To Silence India’s Free Press”. In 2015-’16 the Modi government called journalists names, pressured owners, had editors fired and established taboo areas. She noted how the offensive had ramped up.

Since 2020, attacks on independent media surged, with arrests, terror and sedition cases, even as a right-wing ecosystem supporting the ruling party issued rape and death threats and discredited any narrative against official interests.

The criminalisation of journalism is congruent with the criminalisation of protest and dissidence in general, (here and here), with the Supreme Court’s defence of constitutional rights sketchy, at best.

Credit: Special arrangement, via Article 14.

In September, we analysed 11 Supreme Court rulings over 10 months, which appeared to be reshaping bail jurisprudence in India, especially with regard to use of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention0 Act and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, which the government often deploys to imprison many without bail for years. Yet, we noted, the Supreme Court has also avoided deciding bail in high-profile cases important to the government. In so doing, it has ignored its own rulings.

Some examples include activists Sharjeel Imam, Gulfisha Fatima and Umar Khalid, all imprisoned for more than four years, accused of terrorist activity for giving speeches against a controversial Indian citizenship law. Khalid’s bail application alone was adjourned 13 times in the Supreme Court before being withdrawn.

In the Bhima-Koregaon case, its origins in a Dalit celebration, it has been four years in jail for singer Jyoti Jagtap, six for activist and researcher Rona Wilson and Adivasi activist Mahesh Raut, whose bail plea the Supreme Court has not heard for a year after staying a high court grant of bail.

The names and cases I have mentioned do not constitute an exhaustive list of journalists and dissidents who have faced the strong arm of the law in Modi’s new India. But it provides you a window to the fading of freedom, the receding tide of justice and the subversion of the Constitution.

There are others forgotten in jail cells, facing dubious or manufactured criminal cases. We do what we can to bring you some of these stories. Every day, there are fewer of us who make the effort. As Gul said, “I became a target because the others chose silence. Had my conscience allowed me to be silent like them, perhaps I would not have gone to jail.”

Samar Halarnkar is the founding editor of Article 14, where a version of this piece was first published