Srinagar
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Tuesday called for the immediate release of Kamran Yousuf, a Kashmiri photojournalist who has been held for the past six months and is due to appear before a New Delhi court tomorrow for a decision on his bail application, reports claimed.
“Kamran Yousuf was arrested on September 5 for allegedly participating in a demonstration in Kashmir, the 23-year-old Kamran Yousuf is facing a possible death sentence on spurious charges for trying to cover one of the world’s most secret conflicts,” Reporters Without Borders reported.
A charge sheet produced last week by the National Investigation Agency, India’s counter-terrorism agency, claims that Yousuf is not a “real journalist/stringer by profession” because he only covered “anti-national” activities and never performed his “moral duty” as a journalist to cover “developmental activity” or the “inauguration of [a] hospital or school building.”
RSF quoted the Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk saying that “It is not up to the Indian interior ministry to decide what a journalist is supposed to cover, the contradictory nature of the charges clearly shows that Kamran Yousuf is being used as a scapegoat in order to intimidate journalists who try to document the situation in Kashmir.”
“The authorities must free him at once and, above all, they need to understand that it is not the job of journalists to relay their propaganda. As a result of the constraints on press freedom, the state of Jammu and Kashmir is in the process of becoming a new Tibet, a black hole for news and information,” reported RSF.
A quick look at Yousuf’s Instagram page suffices to show that this photojournalist has covered all sorts of news in a region that, without independent press photographers, would be completely cut off from the world.
Stringing for such media as the Greater Kashmir newspaper and the Gulistan News TV channel from his base in Pulwama, a town 40 km south of Srinagar, he has covered both police activities and attacks by rebel groups. Recognized by his colleagues for his professionalism, he was listed among Kashmir’s nine most promising photographers two weeks before his arrest.
Arrested by the state police on the pretext that he participated in a protest in which stones were thrown at the security forces, he was formally charged on January 18 with “sedition, criminal conspiracy and attempting to wage war against India.” The last of these charges carry a possible death sentence.
Partly as a result of the repeated violations of the freedom to inform in the Kashmir Valley, India is ran Kashmir Journalists have rallied to Yousuf’s cause, claiming that the charges have been cooked up and that he is being punished simply for what he covered: explosive anti-government protests and militant activity, two real forces that have been haunting Kashmir for years, reported New York Times.
