Kashmiri couple’s arrest by Delhi Police’s Special Cell raises old doubts

On Sunday, March 8 2020, the Delhi Police’s notorious Special Cell arrested a Kashmiri couple from south-east Delhi’s Jamia Nagar locality, accusing them of being members of the CIA-funded Islamic State’s (ISIS) Kashmiri chapter. Jahanzaib Sami and his wife Hina Bashir Beigh, from Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, were arrested in the morning and their personal belongings were confiscated by the Special Cell. Pramod Singh Kushwaha, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell), told the press that the couple was planning to carry out suicide attacks in the city and they have been supporting and funding the large-scale protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s contentious Citizenship (Amendment), Act, 2019 (CAA). 

After the Modi regime’s toady media outlet, ANI, peddled the police version, others too followed the suit without asking the Delhi Police for evidence. The broadcasting of a police story without any verification, the relaying of the government narrative without questioning, without probing, continue to carry forward the dangerous trend that’s mainstreamed by India’s pro-establishment press since years. Islamophobic to the core, these media houses like lambasting the Muslims, especially Kashmiris, whenever they get a chance. The Kashmiri couple’s arrest became a golden opportunity.

What’s the evidence that the Kashmiri couple is involved with the Islamic State’s terror module? The notorious Special Cell, known for its sheer Islamophobia and brahminical bias, informed that it has recovered electronic gadgets — laptop and mobile phones — from the custody of the Kashmiri couple arrested. Kushwaha also claimed that the Cell also got some jihadi literature from Sami. Sheikh is also accused of running a recruitment drive for the ISIS in Kashmir valley. The couple was accused repeatedly of funding and instigating the anti-CAA protests. This sheer lie, to malign and vilify the unprecedented people’s upsurge against the anti-constitutional law enacted by the Modi regime, especially the valorous struggle exhibited by the women of Shaheen Bagh movement, is peddled to amplify the campaigns run by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent body the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) against the protesters.

Sami and Sheikh allegedly came to Delhi’s Jamia Nagar in August 2019, after the Modi regime bifurcated the former Jammu & Kashmir into two union territories abrogating Article 370 and 35A through a Presidential decree. ANI claimed, “due to his activities on cyberspace which revealed his intention to carry out suicide attacks in the country,” Sami was on the radar of the Special Cell; though ANI quoted “informed sources” for this news, it didn’t clarify who can be the informed sources? The policemen? The Delhi Police, which aided the RSS-led feral Hindutva thugs in massacring Muslims and burning down their houses and shops? The same Delhi Police that has brutally tortured Jamia Millia Islamia University students on December 15 2019? 

So far, to aid the RSS’s narrative of an imminent Islamist threat to India, the Delhi Police’s Special Cell has been complicit in randomly arresting Muslims from Delhi’s Muslim ghettos and then charge them of abetting terrorism. Earlier, to aid the BJP sweep the 2019 Lok Sabha election by fuelling paranoia over a purported Islamist threat, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is managed by Modi’s closest aide Amit Shah, the home minister, and Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor (NSA), arrested more than 14 people, alleging them to be a part of Pro-ISIS module Harkat-Ul-Harb-E-Islam. The NIA showed A4 print outs, firecrackers, country-made pistols, etc, as proof of the 10 people it arrested on December 27 2018 from Amroha and Delhi. Even after being ridiculed for such poor plot, neither NSA Doval nor the NIA showed an iota of shame for acting as BJP’s propaganda outlet. The Delhi Special Cell too slapped a false case of ISIS affiliation on Muslim criminals arrested by it in Wazirabad area earlier in January 2020. Sami and Sheikh are now alleged to be linked with Khorasan Module of ISIS, whose difference from the Harkat-Ul-Harb-E-Islam isn’t clearly mentioned by the Special Cell.

Though these arrests will give food to the hysteric Islamophobic Indian mainstream press, and they will use the occasion to malign the Muslim community and its struggle against the citizenship matrix introduced by the BJP, and intensify Islamophobia among the non-Muslims, the lives and careers of innocents suffer the most. False cases of terrorism, which are never proved in the court of law but only in hyper-nationalist television trials, ruin the lives of people and never is the policemen hold accountable. The arrest of the Kashmiri couple is a new addition to the endless list of victims who have suffered the ordeal in the hands of the Special Cell and other such police bodies that frame people following the same template, year after year, to ensure their own existence is justified and paranoia replaces common sense and critical thinking. This systematic persecution must be stopped.