India: Iftikhar Gilani interviewed
Making good use
of his freedom
Iftikhar Gilani - detained last year for holding a copy of a document he
had downloaded from the web - had barely shaken off the dust of his prison
cell before kicking off a new campaign to repeal the antiquated security
law that locked him up for seven months. Bishakha De Sarkar reports from
New Delhi. Last week Iftikhar Gilani was in jail. This week, he is hoping
to keep people out of it. You'd have thought that Gilani - a journalist
from Kashmir now based in New Delhi - would have spent his first few days
out of jail cocooned at home, basking in the luxury of doing just nothing.
Instead, he is everywhere, and doing all those things that journalists do -
running around for a press pass to be able to cover proceedings in the
Indian Parliament, meeting people and filing stories. And when he is not
doing that, he is initiating discussions on an antiquated Indian law that
put him in jail for seven months. "I'll be happy if my imprisonment leads
to a debate on the Official Secrets Act, under which I was held," says
Gilani. "My arrest was a wake-up call to everybody. Let this not happen to
anybody ever again." Gilani was arrested for possessing a document on
Indian troop deployment in Kashmir that he had downloaded from the Internet
at home. His pleas for bail were rejected as the Indian government
continued to hold that the document carried classified information.The New
Delhi chief of bureau of The Kashmir Times, he was picked up on 9 June
2002, hours after his father-in-law, Kashmir separatist leader Syed Ali
Shah Geelani, was arrested in Srinagar for allegedly receiving money from
Pakistan to fund militant activities in Jammu and Kashmir. Geelani is now
lodged in a jail in eastern India. But Gilani is out, thanks to a campaign
by journalists - in India and abroad - that stressed the fact that the
document found in Gilani's computer was available to anybody anytime across
the world. The charges against Gilani were withdrawn on 13 January, after
India's military intelligence finally testified in a Delhi court that the
document did not contain classified information. But that was after he had
spent three seasons in jail - and mostly in despair. There was a time when
the 35-year-old journalist and father of two small children was convinced
that he'd never be out. "I was extremely depressed and there were times
when I cried," Gilani says. "I wanted my children to leave Delhi and go
back to Kashmir because I never thought that I'd be released." He can talk
about his time in jail now that he is out of it. It's a tale of torture and
camaraderie, and of hope and despair. On his first day in Delhi's Tihar
Jail, Gilani was brutally beaten up jail officials and prisoners. "They
stopped only after I started bleeding and fell to the ground," says Gilani.
"That's when I heard someone say: Leave him, or he'll die." One of the men
who attacked him, says Gilani, was later sentenced to 80 years in jail for
murdering three people. "It's strange," Gilani muses, "but Tihar Jail has
its own social order." Murderers are somewhere on the top, but traitors -
and Gilani was seen as one - are at the bottom with rapists. "People would
keep calling me a traitor and I would be picked out for sweeping the
barracks and cleaning the toilets." His first night was in solitary
confinement in a cell for those sentenced to death. "From the bars in my
cell I could see the gallows outside," he says. A noose hung from its
frame, and the journalist in Gilani noticed that the rope was badly frayed.
"They'd better get a new one if they want to use it," he says. "This one is
going to give way." It's difficult to come to terms with Gilani's humour -
occasionally black, but always acerbic. He talks about how surprised he was
to find that one of the most popular visitors in jail was a Catholic
priest. "I used to wonder why everybody would line up to get a copy of the
Bible. Later I realised that it was for its wafer-thin pages, which I was
told made great cigarettes," he says. "I had to keep my dictionary, which
had similar pages, in safe custody throughout my stay there," he says. In
his numerous interactions with other journalists and media bodies since his
release, Gilani has been peppering his narrative with humour, clearly in a
bid to play down his black days in jail. But for most of his colleagues,
Gilani's incarceration is a rude reminder of endangered human rights.
Gilani, many believe, was put behind bars only because the Indian
government wanted to get at Syed Geelani, one of its harshest critics on
Kashmir. And since the government found nothing in the journalist's house
that implicated him, it seized the downloaded document as evidence of
espionage. And worse, there were few - apart from fellow journalists,
friends and family - who were ready to believe him when he professed his
innocence. Soon after he'd been put behind bars, there were news reports
that he had admitted to the police that he was on the payrolls of the
Pakistan intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. "But I never
said that," says Gilani. Gilani was released only after media groups led
delegations to senior government ministers to press home the point that the
document was easily accessible. It was then that the military intelligence
testified in his favour in court. But Gilani is not complaining. "If the
system got me in, it got me out as well," he says. "But the system needs to
overhauled," he adds, and calls for an urgent look at the OSA. The Act of
1923 states that anybody collecting "information which is calculated to be
or might be or is intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an
enemy" can be jailed for up to 14 years. "There is no place for this Act in
India when the government is moving towards greater transparency," he says.
"It can be misused by people in the government to harass honest citizens
for vested interests." The Delhi Union of Journalists and the Press Club of
India - two of the city's leading media bodies - are keen that Gilani be
compensated for wrongful confinement. But all that Gilani's wants is a
debate on the need for a law like the OSA. "That will be my biggest
compensation," he says.
Comment on this article.Links:Frontline magazine article on India's new
Freedom of Information act.
Kashmiri group voices concern for Gilani's father.Committee to Protect
Journalists on Indian media rights.
The 1923 Indian Official Secrets Act.
Information site for lawyers on the Act.
Other Indian security laws in force.
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20030120_india.shtml
