SRINAGAR: A Jammu court has granted bail to Kashmiri scholar Aala Fazili, nearly three years after his arrest by the JK Police’s State Investigation Agency (SIA) for allegedly writing a ‘seditious’ article in 2011, The Wire reported.
Fazili, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Kashmir, was arrested on April 17, 2022, over an article titled “The Shackles of Slavery Will Break”, published in The Kashmir Walla. The prosecution alleged the write-up incited unrest and glorified militancy. However, the court ruled that weak evidence linked Fazili to the article and noted that continued incarceration would violate his constitutional rights.
Following the order, Fazili was released from Kot Bhalwal jail and returned home on Tuesday. His bail comes over 15 months after The Kashmir Walla editor Fahad Shah, arrested in the same case, was granted bail by the JK High Court.
The court observed that out of 44 witnesses, 10 have been examined so far and none testified that Fazili authored the article. It also noted that authorities took no action against the publication for over a decade before filing the case in 2022.
Referring to a judgement of JK high court which had granted bail to The Kashmir Walla editor Fahad Shah in the case dubbed as ‘narrative terrorism’ by JK police, the court observed that the controversial article has “neither affected the law and order nor aggravated the militancy related incidents” in Jammu and Kashmir, The wire report further reads.
The court added: “His co-accused (Fahad Shah) has already been admitted to bail who has allegedly published the said article and his role is not less than the role of the applicant because had the article not been published it was of no effect if it remained in the diary of the applicant,” the court ruled.
“There is no evidence on record. The entire charge sheet (filed by the SIA in the case) is silent with respect to this fact that somebody has chosen the path of violence, merely because the ‘Article’ was provocative in nature. The charges levelled …. are based on assumptions (and) without any legal foundation,” the high court had observed.
