“I felt a big relief and thought that I could be acquitted now,” he says. He remembers the precise words of judge to his lawyer, “tufail sahab, mae inko baree karta hun (Mr Tufail, I am setting him free).” They hugged each other, but Shakeel was still afraid that he might be arrested again. He left Delhi in a hurry the same day. “I latter got the judgment copies from the lawyer,” he says.
Shakeel’s son, who has recently completed his graduation, wanted to go abroad for further studies, but his father’s past came back to haunt him. Although he has applied for a passport in August last year, he is yet to be issued one, despite many CID and police verifications. His father does not want him to study in Delhi. “They came here many times for verifications, asking us why I was in jail,” says Shakeel. “Then I showed them the judgment copy of my acquittal.”
Shakeel has never visited Delhi after his acquittal. “There was no justice. Those who implicated us have not been punished,” he says. When more people are killed here, he says, old wounds are refreshed. He desires to perform Hajj, but since his son is denied a passport he is unsure if he will ever get a passport himself. Having seen many Kashmiris arrested for no reason and imprisoned without trial in Tihar, Shakeel believes his acquittal was “a miracle”.
Kashmiris who have undergone similar experiences came from all age groups. Maqbool Shah was a 17-year-old boy when he was arrested from Bhogal – Delhi in 1996 while he was holidaying in Delhi. He was picked up from the residence of his brothers who were papier-m?ch? artisans.Delhi Police had claimed his involvement in Lajpat Nagar bomb blasts of May 21, 1996 that had left 13 dead and 39 others injured. For more than 14 years Shah was lodged in various cells in Tihar Jail.
“There were 248 witnesses and 24 judges were changed in my case in all these 14 years of my imprisonment,” says Shah, who was facing trial under Sections 302/307 RPC and 3, 4, 5 Explosives Act. “But still it took so long for them to acquit me of all charges.”
The police claimed to have recovered from his room a spare tyre of the Maruti car used in the blast. “Police said that a spare tyre was found at my flat, but the car owner said that wasn’t his, and that he was made to sign a blank paper,” says Shah.
On 8 April 2010, District and Sessions Judge S P Garg declared Shah innocent, and acquitted him of all charges. On his return Shah found that everything had changed at home. He lost his father and sister while he was wrongfully imprisoned in Tihar, unable even to attend to their funerals. On his acquittal in 2010, he first went to their graveyard near his home in Lal Bazar, and wept. The neighbors could not recognize him. He could not recognize his childhood friends.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in a statement promised Shah a job. “But I was not given any job,” says Shah, pulling out the newspaper clippings of a local Urdu daily that carried the statement of the Chief Minister on May 11, 2010.
During his 14 years of detention, shah was imprisoned in various cells in Tihar, including the high security ward. “I was also imprisoned in district jail Rohini for 5 years in small room where I developed problems in my veins,” says Shah. “You can’t see the sun in there and not even a bird came inside,” he recalls.
In Tihar jail Shah maintained a diary, which he hopes to publish someday. Titled “Apni Aap Beeti”, he says it is his most prized possession, the first thing he asked for of his belongings when he was released. He would keep his diary wrapped in the cover of Quran to protect it from the jail authorities. More than 500 pages written in neat Urdu chronicle his ordeal and the ill treatment meted out to other Kashmiris he witnessed for more than a decade inside Tihar and other jails in Delhi. “This is my only property now and I hope some day it gets published so that our future generations know what happened to us,” says Shah.
Shah says he wrote many letters to state ministers, sent one to L K Advani, and even addressed one to the president of India during his long period of detention. There was no response. He wanted to know why he was imprisoned for all those years when he didn’t do anything wrong. “There is no door I did not knock during those painful years,” says Shah. “But no one listened to me.”
For the past two years Shah has been visiting various government offices and filling applications to find some job. But there has been no success so far.
