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11-10-2023
PARIS/ NEW DELHI: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of Majid “Jimmy” Hyderi, a freelance journalist who has been held arbitrarily for more than three weeks in northern India’s Jammu and Kashmir region under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) following his initial arrest for alleged Penal Code violations.
Majid Hyderi’s detention has brought the number of journalists currently held in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir to six.
After his arrest by local police in the city of Srinagar on 15 September on the basis of a “First Information Report” citing violations of sections 120-B, 177, 386 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code, Hyderi was released on bail the next day but was immediately rearrested under the controversial PSA, which is supposed to address direct threats to the security of the state.
“After Kashmir Walla editor Fahad Shah’s imprisonment, and the closure of his news website, this latest arrest marks the definitive death of independent journalism in Jammu and Kashmir. There is no justification for the police being able to detain a journalist in the same way as a terrorist. The local authorities have once again shown that they tolerate no criticism, not even coming from the most moderate critics. We call on Indian home minister Amit Shah to intervene immediately to order the unconditional release of Majid Hyderi and the other imprisoned journalists.”
The former editor of the Srinagar-based regional daily Greater Kashmir, a contributor to DailyO, an Indian news site aimed at young people, and a frequent political commentator on TV news channels, Hyderi is known for his moderate political views and for criticizing attacks against the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, both the local 
police and the army. But he has also been very critical of corruption within the Kashmiri bureaucracy and New Delhi’s failure to address this problem.
His arrest on 15 September on clearly trumped-up charges of “criminal conspiracy, intimidation, extortion, giving false information [and] defamation” charges on which he could be jailed for up to 14 years showed that the authorities want to silence even slightly critical journalists.
The case took an even more preposterous turn when, on being released on bail on 16 September, he was immediately re-arrested under the Public Safety Act, a 1978 law limited to Jammu and Kashmir region that is highly controversial because it allows the authorities to detain anyone “preventively” without a trial or warrant for up to two years. He is currently held in Kot Bhalwal, an overcrowded prison in Jammu, a Hindu-majority city 300 km south of Srinagar. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
