Kashmir Stories
The Human cost of surveillance:Mohammad Iqbal Wani Case
For many civilians in Kashmir, the arrival of the Amarnath Yatra brings more than pilgrims and religious activity. It can also mean intensi ed checkpoints, surveillance, identity checks and restrictions on movement. What is presented as security can become an intrusive presence in the everyday lives of peopleliving around pilgrimage routes.
On 12 July 2026, heightened security arrangements were in place near the Nunwan base camp in Anantnag. Among pilgrims, police personnel, vehicles and local residents, an automated Facial Recognition System (FRS) reportedly raised an alert. Within minutes, Mohd Iqbal Wani, a resident of Hajin in Bandipora, was stopped and taken into custody.
Authorities subsequently associated him with allegations under security-related laws, including the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). For the authorities, the incident could be presented as surveillance identifying a security concern. For Wani and his family, however, it meant something far more frightening: a familiar face suddenly becoming a suspect and an ordinary journey turning into detention.
The use of facial recognition raises an important question: what happens when a technological alert becomes the basis for treating a civilian as a threat
before guilt has been established? A machine can identify a face, but it cannot determine guilt. It cannot understand a person’s circumstances, hear their explanation or see the fear that follows when someone is taken away. When allegations under broad security legislation are treated as established facts before a judicial determination, suspicion can begin to replace due process.
There is little public information about what happened to Wani after his detention. For his family, however, the uncertainty is not technological. It is deeply human. It is a mother waiting for her son, a wife watching a silent phone, or children asking why their father has not returned. Security is necessary to protect civilians and pilgrims. But security cannot become a justi cation for harassment, arbitrary detention or the presumption of guilt. Measures designed to prevent threats must also
protect the dignity and rights of ordinary people.
The Amarnath Yatra should not mean that civilians living along its routes must experience their own roads, neighbourhoods and daily routines as spaces of constant suspicion. When the language of security becomes broad enough to justify stopping, detaining and accusing people without transparent evidence, security itself can
become a source of fear. For Mohd Iqbal Wani’s family, the question is no longer what a camera saw. It is whether anyone will see the human being behind the face.
A half-widow is not simply a woman whose husband is missing. She is a woman trapped between two lives. She is expected to move forward, yet she is never given the certainty that would allow her to do so. She cannot fully mourn because there is no confrmed death and she cannot fully hope because there is no proof that her husband is alive. In Kashmir, this uncertainty has become a lived reality for families of men who disappeared during decades of confict. Farida Shabnum has lived with that uncertainty since 7 July 1997. That day, her husband, Abdul Rashid, was reportedly taken from Rawalpora, Srinagar, by personnel of the 2/8 Gorkha Ri es along with his neighbour, Farooq Ahmad Bhat, who was later released. Abdul Rashid never returned home.
Farida searched, asked questions and sought legal intervention. She led a habeas corpus petition, hoping that the law could provide an answer. But the years passed and the answer never came. Her sons, Junaid and Arsalan, grew up with the same painful question: was their father alive somewhere, waiting to return, or had he died years ago? That is the particular cruelty of enforced disappearance. Death, however painful, provides an
ending. Disappearance does not. It leaves families suspended between hope and grief.
The term “half-widow” captures this uncertainty, but it also exposes the social and legal consequences of disappearance. A woman may remain married in one sense and widowed in another, while being denied the certainty needed to rebuild her life. She may have children to raise, bills to pay and decisions to make, yet the absence of a death certi cate can leave her trapped in legal uncertainty. Farida’s story reached another painful point in April 2026, when a Srinagar court legally declared Abdul
Rashid dead and ordered the issuance of a death certifcate. His name returned to the news nearly three decades after his disappearance. But legal death is not the same as closure. There was no body to bury, no nal goodbye and no moment when Farida could say with certainty that her husband was gone. A document can establish a legal status, but it cannot return the years lost or erase the memories of a family waiting at the door.
The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons has documented cases of missing persons in Kashmir for decades. Behind every case is a family living with unanswered questions. Every birthday, festival and family gathering carries the same absence. Every knock on the door can brie y revive hope. The issue of half-widows is therefore not simply about missing husbands. It is about the denial of certainty, dignity and the right to grieve. A woman should never have to spend decades being
neither fully a wife nor fully a widow. Until the disappeared are accounted for, Kashmir’s half-widows will remain trapped between hope and mourning.
The evening mist settled over the orchards of Pulwama, but inside two nearby homes, a familiar silence descended. In both houses, families watched as the state took away their loved ones, leaving behind questions, uncertainty and the painful absence of answers. In Nigeenpora Reshipora, officers arrived at the home of Suhail Farooq Lone and presented an order under the Public Safety Act (PSA). Authorities alleged that Suhail had provided “logistical support” to local groups. Without a conventional criminal trial, he was detained and transferred to District Jail Bhadarwah, far from his aging mother and home.
A short distance away in Kadlabal, Pampore, a similar scene unfolded at the home of Manzoor Ahmad Mir. He was taken into custody under the UAPA and transferred to Central Jail Kot Bhalwal in Jammu, hundreds of kilometres away from his family, leaving his loved ones behind in uncertainty. The authorities may describe such detentions as lawful measures to protect public order. But a legal order does not automatically make detention non-arbitrary. The central question is whether liberty has been restricted through a process that is necessary, proportionate, transparent and subject to meaningful judicial oversight.
Arbitrary detention becomes a serious human rights concern when a person can be removed from his home, separated from his family and deprived of liberty without first being convicted by a court. When broad allegations are enough to justify prolonged detention, the distinction between suspicion and established guilt becomes dangerously blurred. The consequences extend beyond the detainee. Families may travel hundreds of kilometres for prison visits, struggle to access legal representation and live without emotional and financial support. Children grow up without parents, while elderly family members wait for answers.
Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects individuals against arbitrary arrest and detention and requires legal safeguards. Article 14 protects fair-trial guarantees. Across Kashmir, concerns over broad security laws raise a fundamental question: can detention become a tool of control rather than an exceptional security measure? Security cannot be meaningful when justice is absent. And detention cannot become legitimate simply because an order is written on paper.
The door opened and for a moment, I could not believe what I was seeing. He was standing there, right in front of me. I wanted to run to him, to hold him, to make sure he was real. But fear kept me still. I was afraid that if I moved, the moment would disappear, just like he had disappeared from my life before. Then I stepped forward and held my husband, Ajaz Ahmed Wani, in my arms. In that embrace, after months of uncertainty, I understood something simple: sometimes, home is not a place. Home is the person you have spent 426 days waiting to come back. Ajaz Ahmed Wani was not a man without a complicated past. His name appeared in FIR No. 120/2020, which included charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
He was also named in FIR Nos. 133/2018 and 135/2018, involving allegations including rioting, attempted murder, property damage and offences under the Arms Act. He was not convicted in these cases. So when of/f_icers came for him on May 2, 2025, his detention was not entirely unexpected. Still, his wife was not prepared to watch her husband being taken away and lodged in Central Jail Kot Bhalwal, Jammu. “I do not remember when my knees gave way,” she recalls. She found herself on the /f_loor, crying and replaying the expression on Ajaz’s face as he was taken away. He looked shocked, almost as if his eyes were saying, “I did not do anything.” Her heart wanted to believe him. Her mind questioned everything. If he had done nothing, she wondered, why had they come for him? Yet the uncertainty became another form of suffering.
On May 14, 2025, she submitted a representation challenging his detention. On May 16, she /f_iled a habeas corpus petition before the High Court. On June 5, the government con/f_irmed his detention for an initial six months. On October 30, his detention was extended further. After that, she stopped counting time normally. Perhaps it was 426 days of waiting. Fourteen months of wondering how she would face the next morning. 10,224 hours of asking whether her husband was safe. 613,440 minutes of returning to one question: What did he do? The government continued to hold Ajaz on grounds of national security. But national security cannot replace transparency, judicial scrutiny and due process. Behind every detention order is a human being.Behind every detainee is a family. And behind every family is someone waiting.
For Ajaz’s wife, that wait has one simple demand: tell me why they took my husband, tell me that he is safe and tell me when he will come home. 426 Days of Waiting: A Wife’ s Struggle Against Arbitrary Detention Ajaz Ahmed Wani was taken into detention, while his wife was left behind with fear, uncertainty and one unanswered question: What did he do?
A person who dedicated his life to documenting truth eventually found himself detained by the very institutions that claimed to protect it. On March 20, 2023, journalist Irfan Mehraj received a phone call from investigators asking him to come to their Srinagar office for five minutes of questioning. Those five minutes never ended. A simple request for questioning became years behind bars. Mehraj, a journalist and researcher who chose to remain in Kashmir rather than leave in pursuit of a career abroad, paid a heavy price for documenting stories that others preferred to remain unseen.
For his father, Mehraj-ud-Din Bhat, those years became a life measured in prison visits, court hearings and unanswered questions. An ailing father, he continued visiting government offices and legal proceedings, carrying the hope that his son would one day walk freely under the open sky. His worn shoes and unfinished cups of tea became small reminders of a much larger grief. “My son is innocent. His work speaks for him loudly. I have full faith that truth will prevail and he will get justice,” he has said. Mehraj was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in a case involving allegations of terror funding under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). His work had focused on politics, human rights and the experiences of people in Kashmir. For him, documenting violence was not simply recording statistics. Every death had a name, every disappearance had a family and every allegation required a record.
His arrest transformed the journalist into the subject of the story he had spent years documenting. By March 2026, Mehraj had completed three years in custody. He remained an accused, not a convicted person. The prolonged proceedings and repeated hearings meant that his freedom remained suspended while the case continued. Then, in July 2026, the story changed. On July 18, a Delhi court granted Mehraj bail in the 2020 NIA case. The NIA challenged the order, but on July 21 the Delhi High Court refused to stay his release. Mehraj was released from prison on July 22 after more than three years in custody.
But freedom did not return without conditions. He was required to remain in New Delhi, report to the NIA twice a week and refrain from activities or associations connected to the allegations against him. His case remains pending, meaning the legal struggle continues even outside the prison walls. His release is therefore both a relief and a reminder. A journalist who spent years behind bars is free, but under restrictions that continue to shape where he can go, whom he can meet and what he can do. Irfan Mehraj’s story leaves a difficult question behind: if documenting the suffering of others can cost a journalist his freedom, who will remain to document the next story? When truth becomes evidence against the person who records it, silence is no longer simply the absence of reporting. It becomes the result of fear.
For decades, Kashmiris have experienced confict, hardship and political repression. Now, the struggle is increasingly reaching the bookshelves. A library is more than a collection of pages. It is an archive of competing experiences: histories of conict, accounts of displacement, political struggles, cultural identities and voices that may challenge dominant narratives. In Jammu and Kashmir, however, books are increasingly becoming part of a wider struggle over history, identity and freedom of expression.
In July 2026, authorities in Indian-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) began auditing books in school, college and public libraries to identify material considered “objectionable” or harmful to India’s sovereignty, integrity and national security. The drive followed controversy over Personalities and Legends of Jammu & Kashmir, a book procured for educational libraries under the Samagra Shiksha programme. The book described Maqbool Bhat, whom Indian authorities regard as a separatist, as a “martyr”.
Following objections from BJP leader and Jammu and Kashmir Assembly Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma, the authorities withdrew the books and ordered an inquiry into their approval. Maqbool Bhat, an author and leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, remains a deeply contested gure in Kashmir’s political memory. He was executed in Tihar Jail in 1984. While Indian authorities associate him with separatism and militancy, many Kashmiris remember him as a symbol of resistance and sacrice.
The dispute over a single word, “martyr”, therefore raises a much larger question: who has the authority to dene historical memory? The scrutiny of books did not begin in 2026. In February 2025, police raided bookstores in Srinagar and sought the withdrawal of 668 books, many authored by Islamic scholar Abul A’la Maududi and associated with the banned Jamaat-e-Islami. Authorities described the action as based on intelligence concerning the distribution of literature linked to the organization. In August 2025, authorities also conscated 25 Kashmir-related books, including works by Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani, Sumantra Bose and Christopher Snedden. Ofcials argued that the books promoted secessionist sentiments, false narratives or threatened India’s sovereignty and integrity. The decision was challenged in court, raising concerns over censorship, academic freedom and access to alternative historical perspectives.
Anthropologist Mohamad Junaid has described the broader process as “memoricide”, reecting fears that controlling what people can read can eventually influence what they remember. The issue is therefore larger than any single book. Libraries preserve competing memories. Removing a book may not erase the history it contains, but it can determine which histories remain visible to the next generation. The question is no longer simply what belongs on a library shelf. It is who decides which memories are allowed to remain there.
Religious freedom is more than the right to pray. It includes the right to gather, observe religious occasions, hear religious leaders, express faith publicly and preserve religious traditions without arbitrary interference. In Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), these freedoms have increasingly come under restrictions, affecting both religious institutions and the communities that depend on them.
The experience of Muharram in Srinagar offers a recent example. A planned religious gathering at Imam Bara Bemina was expected to bring worshippers together to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain (RA) and his companions at Karbala. Yet the gathering took place without Kashmir’s chief cleric, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who had been invited to address the congregation. Authorities placed him under house arrest and prevented him from attending, reportedly citing security concerns.
His absence was not simply the absence of a speaker. Religious gatherings are spaces where communities mourn, pray, reflect and pass traditions from one generation to another. When access to such gatherings or religious leadership is restricted, the impact reaches far beyond the individual who is prevented from attending. The incident also reflects a longer pattern of restrictions surrounding religious expression in IIOJK. Religious leaders have faced limitations on movement and public appearances, while religious gatherings have at times been subjected to heightened security controls. Such measures, when repeatedly imposed, can transform ordinary acts of worship into activities requiring state approval.
The concern is not whether authorities can take legitimate security measures. They can. The concern is whether restrictions are necessary, proportionate and applied without discrimination. Security cannot become a blanket justification for limiting religious expression. The issue becomes particularly significant in a region where religious identity is deeply connected to community life and cultural heritage.
Restricting public religious expression can gradually narrow the spaces in which communities are able to preserve and express that identity. International human rights standards recognize freedom of religion or belief as including the freedom to manifest religion through worship, observance, practice and teaching. These protections are not limited to private belief. They also cover collective religious life.
When these ordinary acts become subject to repeated restrictions, the issue moves beyond security management. It becomes a question of religious freedom. The empty space at a religious gathering may last only for a few hours. But when public religious expression is repeatedly restricted, the space for religious freedom can become smaller with every passing year.