The Foreign Office has rightly called the sentences handed to prominent Kashmiri leader Asiya Andrabi and her associates, Fehmeeda Sofi and Nahida Nasreen, a grave miscarriage of justice, raising concerns about the “due process, judicial independence, and adherence to international human rights obligations.” It should now go further and argue the case for what it is: evidence of a made-to-please order in occupied Jammu and Kashmir that has moved well into the business of crushing political life itself. Andrabi was sentenced to life imprisonment by a special court in Delhi, while Sofi and Nasreen were each given 30-year jail terms after years in custody since 2018 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
The verdict matters because it fits a pattern. India’s own official data has shown thousands of UAPA cases over the past decade and a conviction rate that remains strikingly low compared to the volume of arrests. The law’s force lies not only in the final judgment, but in the years it can take from a life before guilt is firmly established. In Kashmir, where political space has been steadily narrowed since August 2019, that delay becomes punishment in its own right.
There is a second dimension that ought to disturb anyone still tempted to treat such cases as routine counterterrorism. Andrabi and her associates are women from a region where women have already carried a brutal share of the conflict’s human cost. Reporting on Kashmiri women has kept alive the memory of Kunan-Poshpora, the unresolved agony of thousands of half-widows whose husbands disappeared and were never returned, and the grinding social wreckage that follows militarisation across generations.
Of course, the atrocities are not confined to defendants in courtrooms. Journalists, too, have faced a sustained squeeze. More than 200 journalists in Kashmir have been summoned by police since 2019 amid an atmosphere of intimidation and constant surveillance. The region has endured repeated internet shutdowns, including the August 2019 blackout that lasted months and formed part of over 500 documented shutdowns in Jammu and Kashmir since 2012. Information itself has been turned into a controlled commodity. That should concern every government that still claims to care about civil liberty in the region.
Pakistan’s response must therefore be more serious than another cycle of condemnation. Islamabad has enough material to build a sharper case at the UN and other forums.
Henceforth, the question before the world is not whether rights are under assault in occupied Kashmir, for the evidence is already thick on the ground. The question is how much longer major powers intend to treat that assault as a manageable fact of life. *