In jail for 3 years, Kashmir scholar, arrested for 2011 online article, gets bail

A court in Jammu and Kashmir has granted bail to a PhD scholar who was arrested in 2022 for a “seditious” article he allegedly wrote in 2011.

Abdul Aala Fazili was arrested from his house in Srinagar. The State Investigation Agency (SIA) then said Fazili had been arrested for an article, ‘Shackles of Slavery Will Break’ published in ‘The Kashmir Walla’, an online magazine, whose editor Fahad Shah was also arrested.

An order by Additional Sessions Judge in Jammu last week, while granting him bail, said the applicant had been behind bars for the past about three years and “there is very weak evidence which connects the applicant with the authorship of the article”.

"If the applicant due to weak evidence is acquitted at the end of the trial, his period of incarceration would not be compensable by any means," the court said. "This is a deserving case in which the accused should be released on bail."

Sources said Fazili, who was lodged in Jammu region, had been released and is back home in the Valley.

The SIA then had said Fazili’s article was “highly provocative, seditious and intended to create unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, and was written with the purpose of abetting the youth to take the path of violence by glorifying terrorism”.