On 24 March 2026, a Delhi court sentenced three Kashmiri women to life imprisonment and thirty years each. The court convicted them of conspiracy and membership of a banned organization. It acquitted all three of every charge involving actual violence (paras 73.2, 101.1). The evidence against them consisted entirely of speeches, interviews, and social media posts. This piece argues that the judgment turns political expression into criminal conspiracy, not by identifying acts of violence, but by aggregating political statements until they acquire the character of criminal intent.
Every month, a bag of books arrived at their home, marked, underlined, and folded at the corners. Ahmad would later learn they came from his father, who had written from prison, where he had spent most of his life.
In one of those books, a passage by Edward Said had been carefully marked: domination is sustained not only by force, but by the conditions that make it possible, conditions that resistance inevitably disrupts.
For Ahmad, the son of Dr Muhammad Qasim Faktoo and Asiya Andrabi, both now serving life sentences, that line does not remain confined to the page. It acquires its meaning elsewhere, in the slow accumulation of absence, in the years measured by prison visits and interrupted conversations, in the recognition that what appears as theory in one setting can become the organising condition of a life in another.
It is from within that distance between text and experience that the present judgment must be read.
The Re-description of Dissent
The conviction rests on three categories of charge: conspiracy under Section 18 of India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code, membership of a banned organization under Sections 38 and 39 of the UAPA, and promoting enmity under Sections 153A, 153B, and 505 of the IPC. The court found none of these based on any evidence of violence. It established them through speeches, interviews, tweets, and Facebook posts.
The court’s conspiracy finding enunciates how this works. At paragraph 88, the court identifies the agreement between the accused from two sources: phone records showing connectivity with individuals in Pakistan, and the accused persons’ repeated public statements that Kashmir is not part of India. The court states: “connectivity with each other and with persons located in Pakistan coupled with the fact that the accused consistently maintain that Kashmir is not part of India…shows that all three were in agreement with each other.” Publicly expressed political belief becomes evidence of criminal agreement.
The judgment’s treatment of the advocacy/incitement threshold makes this operation most visible. India’s Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v Union of India established a three-tier framework: discussion and advocacy are protected; only incitement triggers restriction under Article 19(2). The court at paragraph 93 quotes this framework directly. Applied correctly, the framework required the court to identify imminent lawless action causally linked to the statements under scrutiny. The court, at paragraph 94, cites statements Andrabi made in a 2018 interview on Kashmir’s political future and treats them as crossing from advocacy into incitement. It does not identify any person whom the statements incited, any act that followed from them, or any causal link between the statements and violence. The court cites the framework, omits its central requirement, and reaches the opposite conclusion-a direct misapplication of its own cited authority.
The defense counsel argued at paragraph 65.6 that “mere advocacy or discussion is not sedition” and that “speech must have a direct link to violence.” The court rejected this. Its reasoning at paragraph 94 treats the expression of political conviction about Kashmir’s future, made in a published media interview, as itself sufficient to constitute incitement. The court does not distinguish between advocating a cause and directly inciting a specific act of violence. The defence named the correct legal standard. The court dismissed it without explanation.
The evidentiary foundation compounds this. Most of the prosecution’s material came from social media downloads, YouTube videos, and published interviews. The defense raised attribution challenges at paragraph 65.1, arguing that the prosecution had not proven that the accused operated the accounts from which the content was downloaded. The court, at paragraphs 98.9 to 98.18, rejected these challenges, reasoning that the accused had not specifically denied appearing in the videos, and that the person who delivers a speech cannot escape responsibility by arguing that someone else uploaded it. The reasoning is not unreasonable on its face. However, it means the evidentiary standard for the most serious charges, conspiracy and membership of a terrorist organization, rested on open-source downloads authenticated by the court’s absence of denial rather than by positive proof of authorship.
Sentencing Sovereignty and the Structure of Law
The sentencing order makes the judgment’s logic explicit. The court imposed life imprisonment on Asiya Andrabi and thirty years each on Nahida Nasreen and Fehmeeda Sofi. It reached these sentences not by measuring the gravity of any proven act but by assessing the accused themselves, who they are, what they believe, and whether they intend to continue.
At paragraph 12 of the sentencing order, the court identifies the absence of remorse as an aggravating factor. The convicts had stated they were proud of their work and would continue it. The court treated this not as defiance of any specific unlawful act but as confirmation of a continuing political commitment. It then reasoned that leniency “will amount to infusing a fresh lease of life and vigour in the spirit of convicts, which aims at secession of an integral part of India.” The sentence is calibrated to suppress a political position, not to reflect the gravity of proven conduct.
At paragraph 14, the court treats the accused’s educational attainment as an aggravating factor. It states that their education “makes them all the more liable for their acts” because they acted “knowingly and voluntarily.” Education and ideological conviction become indicators of culpability rather than of character. At paragraph 16, the court reasons that the ideas the accused expressed could “evoke the sentiments” of Kashmiris and “lead them to use all kinds of methods, including violence.” The idea in question is that Kashmir is not part of India and has been promised self-determination by the United Nations Security Council. The sentence targets the future reach of that belief, not the past commission of a violent act.
This sentencing rationale has no grounding in established proportionality principles. Courts assess a sentence against the gravity of what was proven. Here, the court assesses the sentence against what the accused might inspire. The defense raised the absence of a demonstrated consequence at paragraph 4.4 of the sentencing arguments. The court dismissed this at paragraph 13, stating that since the conviction was for conspiracy rather than an actual act, the absence of consequence was irrelevant. That reasoning completes the circle: the conviction requires no act, and the sentence requires no consequence.
The case does not stand alone. Since the unilateral abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional status in August 2019, anti-terror legislation has been used against journalists, academics, and civil society actors for their speech and association. Yasin Malik received life imprisonment under the same UAPA framework in 2022. In August 2024, five United Nations Special Procedures mandate holders addressed a formal communication to the Government of India- AL IND 4/2024-identifying the mischaracterisation of political advocacy with unlawful activity as a pattern requiring urgent attention. Independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council raised specific concerns about these three women. The March 2026 sentencing confirms what that communication anticipated.
The sovereignty claim sustains this pattern. The court’s reasoning treats Kashmir’s status as a settled matter of Indian territorial integrity. The long-standing international legal record, including multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions affirming the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination, is not mentioned in the judgment. The court does not rebut these resolutions, nor does it explain their absence. It treats demands for self-determination as threats to sovereignty and processes them accordingly. The court excludes the international legal record from the domestic legal frame.
This case sits within a documented pattern of UAPA prosecutions in which the statutory framework, not its misapplication, produces the outcome. Lawyer Rebecca John, who has represented defendants in multiple UAPA cases, has observed that courts operating under this framework “never test the allegations put forward by the state, they are accepted as gospel truth.” The NIA judgment at paragraphs 93 and 94 illustrates this precisely. The court quoted the Shreya Singhal framework, accepted the state’s characterisation of Andrabi’s statements as incitement, and did not test whether the framework’s requirements were met. Under Section 43D(5), bail is denied if accusations appear true at first glance, a threshold retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur has described as “prima facie guilty until proven innocent.” In this case, the three women spent eight years in pretrial detention in Tihar Jail, hundreds of kilometers from Kashmir, before sentencing. What makes this difficult to contest is not that the law was broken but that it was followed.
For Ahmad, who has watched both his parents sentenced in separate courtrooms decades apart, that change is not abstract. His father has spent most of his life in prison. His mother will spend the rest of her time there. The judgment that placed her there found no act of violence. It found a political position, consistently held, publicly expressed, and refused to be disavowed. The court called that a conspiracy. The sentencing order called the refusal to abandon it an aggravating factor. What the law has done to this family, it has done entirely within its own procedures. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to contest.
