J&K-based journalists on 'Pakistan's payroll' to be tried for sedition

'Two arrested journalists had been spreading the anti-India narrative by exploiting digital platforms'.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

The Jammu-based special court of National Investigation Agency (NIA) framed charges on Thursday against two Jammu and Kashmir-based journalists who have been accused of using the media to propagate an “anti-India narrative” while allegedly taking money from what security agencies have described “hostile foreign agencies and proscribed terrorist organisations”.

The court allowed the charges to be framed after getting convinced of the investigation report that it was presented with by the investigative agencies. The two accused in the case—Peerzada Fahad Shah, the Editor-in-Chief cum Director of “The Kashmir Walla”, and Aala Fazili, who wrote an article titled, “The Shackles of Slavery Will Break”—were informed by the court on Thursday of the allegations that the state will try to prove against them.

Fazili, 40, who is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Kashmir University, was arrested in April last year for writing the article that was published in November 2011 in the ‘Kashmir Walla”. Shah, 34, was first arrested in February 2022 for an article on a police encounter. After the court granted him bail, he was immediately arrested again on the basis of a separate FIR and then booked under the Public Safety Act in March.

The two are in the custody of State Investigation Agency (SIA), which was constituted in November 2021 as a specialised, nodal agency for “coordinating with NIA and other central agencies”.