Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Wednesday alleged that the J&K Police was “torturing” the incarcerated PDP youth president Waheed Ur Rehmaan Parra and keeping him in “inhuman conditions”.
“Waheed is being persecuted and tortured to admit the false allegations. Since an admission didn’t happen, he is being kept under inhuman conditions. This investigation has been fraudulent and politically motivated from day one,” Ms. Mufti said, in a tweet.
She said the J&K Police’s CID wing had joined the list of Central agencies “that work to terrorise Kashmiris and falsely implicate them”.
“After failing to substantiate charges against PDP’s Parra, the CID replaced the SIT (Special Investigation Team) head because he refused to be an accomplice in framing invented charges,” she alleged.
Describing the investigation against Mr. Parra as “politically motivated”, Ms. Mufti said, “The institutions [that were] meant to uphold law and order bring disrepute by getting involved in these deceitful investigations. The norm dictating such deceitful investigations is ‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime’,” she added.
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Mr. Parra was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in November, 2019 “to investigate his alleged links with one of the two Hizbul Mujahideen militants arrested”. This year, Mr. Parra, who was granted bail by an NIA court, was re-arrested by the J&K Police’s special wing, Counter-Insurgency Kashmir (CIK), in a case related to “militant-politician nexus”.
‘Solidarity with farmers’
Ms. Mufti said she understood the pain and humiliation inflicted on farmers and stood in solidarity with them.
“The Government of India cannot and mustn’t be allowed to ram bills against the consent of people and ruthlessly run roughshod over those who oppose and protest,” she said.
Drawing a parallel between the concertina wires and trenches dug around farmer protests in Delhi and the “worst siege” in J&K since August 2019, she said the scale of suppression in J&K was unimaginable.
“The maze of wires, nails and trenches is combined with draconian laws, illegal detentions and massive troop deployment. Central agencies hound political leaders and businessmen, FIRs and UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] against journalists are methods adopted to choke dissent,” she added.
