Indian forces arrest a young Kashmiri on suspicion of links with family members in Pakistan.

Indian forces arrest a young Kashmiri on suspicion of links with family members in Pakistan.

Abdul wahid S/O Syed Iqbal , who worked as a patient co ordinator in a hospital in Srinagar, was accused of having the phone numbers of his cousins who reside in Pakistan, in his phone.
Many innocent civilians
have been arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) .

A Kashmiri young man Adul wahid who is a resident of kachipoorah district has been arrested by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) under “terrorism” charges as New Delhi continues its crackdown on Kashmiri civilians in the Muslim-majority state in the Himalayan region.

Abdul Wahid was arrested and detained on the morning of 21st December.

An “investigation” revealed that Abdul Wahid had the phone numbers of his cousins who migrated to Pakistan decades ago. The authorities refused to give any further details and have denied Wahid’s family to have any excess to him. His phone is switched off and he is taken to some unknown location.
Abdul Wahid who works as a patient co ordinator in a known hospital in Srinagar is missing for the last 48 hours.

India’s Hindu-nationalist government stripped the region’s semi-autonomy in 2019, saying this was aimed at tackling “terrorism”. New Delhi has stationed tens of thousands of its soldiers to quash the decades-long armed rebellion. India has blamed Pakistan for backing the armed groups – a charge Islamabad has denied.
Both India and Pakistan claim the disputed region in its entirety, but govern only parts of it.
Indian forces have been accused of widespread human rights abuses, with the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2018 calling for an international probe into the allegations of rights violations.

India’s Hindu-nationalist government has jailed several innocent civilians as part of its intensifying crackdown on their freedom since 2019.

‘My son is innocent’

Abdul wahid’s mother told the local press ,that her son is an ordinary person working a decent job in Srinagar.His father Syed Iqbal Sheerazi was shot dead by Indian forces decades ago on the same suspicious grounds. He was innocent too. The only problem is we have relatives in Pakistan who migrated years ago due to ongoing conflict in Kashmir and the involvement of Wahid’s Uncle Syed Abdullah Sheerazi in the political struggle towards Kashmir’s freedom from Indian rule. “But my son has got nothing to do with it, ”she added in despair. Only because the phone numbers of his cousins were found saved in his contacts doesn’t prove that he has any links with terrorism.Some of his cousins have already moved to United Kingdom and Canada,but my son is still under threat.The truth is that these arrests are being made to “perpetuate fear”.

“Sometimes you feel everyone is silent and no one will be touched. But then, arrests like these show that things are not normal,” a local journalist said on condition of anonymity.

“No one is writing or speaking or protesting about anything, but still, there is a lot of fear”.

“Young people in Kashmir are arrested, raided, threatened, tortured mentally and physically in order to cut off any ties with any of their relatives who migrated from the valley during previous years.

The authorities must stop this systematic targeting of innocent people in Kashmir, who are trying to live normal decent lives.”

“The repression must stop. Criminalization of legitimate human rights is extremely alarming and the authorities must put an end to this immediately “.