Two minor daughters of Kashmiri separatist leader Shahid-ul-Islam have requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to facilitate the release of the ‘ailing’ moderate separatist leader lodged in Delhi Tihar Jail for a year now.
Srinagar’s Suzanne Shah and Sundas Shah, after visiting Shahid at the prison in the national capital, wrote a letter to the PM, bemoaning that their father was languishing in an ill-lit cell without basic facilities amid peak summer across the northern Indian plains.
Shahid, who was the media advisor to the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (Moderate) faction, was brought to Delhi in July last year by the National Investigation Agency as part of a probe on terror-funding. The Hurriyat had termed the arrest as “revengeful, arbitrary and illegal”.
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Shahid’s daughters, who study in Presentation Convent in Srinagar’s Rajbagh area, said in their letter to the PM that their recent visit to Tihar “reminded us of the union of Kulbhushan Jadhav with his aged mother and wife” in a Pakistan prison, where the 48-year-old Maharashtrian has been detained on charges of spying for India’s intelligence agency RAW.
The letter noted that the siblings “were shocked to see him in a very bad shape and worn out as he stood on the other side of a thick glass wall in between.” As the wall was “too thick to let our words reach him”, an “intercom in the poorly-ventilated room was the only means to converse.”
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The girls “could barely recognise” Shahid, who is a “diabetic with hypertension, arthritis”—and had gone “frail and pale-looking”, having “already lost 15 kg of weight” and sporting “sunken eyes”. That has been “because of denial of medical care, we were told.”
The daughters said they “could only feel his helplessness as he could not plant a kiss on our foreheads, his usual expression of love for us. We too felt very bad…. During the 30 minutes telephonic interaction, we came to know that during this scorching heat of around 45 degrees C, he sleeps on the hard floor with mere two blankets provided by the jail authorities. Exposed to insect bites, as marks were visible on his face, he doesn’t even have a pillow to get proper sleep.”
The daughters say their father, a lawyer, has been confined to an 8x6 feet cell of the jail’s high-risk ward that is inhabited by criminals and drug addicts, “which exposes him to obvious threat to his life”. Their conversation with the father was “still to finish” when the “phone line snapped and the lights went off.”
The daughters note that their father as having been known for his pro-dialogue stance aimed at peaceful settlement of Kashmir, for which he was attacked twice by unknown gunmen. “We never expected that peace-loving and moderate voices like him will be treated so shabbily in the world’s largest democracy…even criminals and their families have right to be treated humanely.”
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In the country where the PM’s ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ slogan has rekindled hope among the disadvantaged girl child, “we are unable to attend to our studies,” the siblings said. “For us, our home is like a prison, while daddy has been jailed for months, with none of the allegations levelled against him having been proved. We look forward to an immediate personal intervention by your good self.”
