Srinagar: When it comes to travel, residents of Jammu and Kashmir undergo a process unlike many others across the country.Former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti’s 80-year-old mother Gulshan Nazir recently got her passport released, but only after the Jammu and Kashmir high court intervened.In its order on February 11, 2023, the court asked the passport officer to re-issue Nazir’s passport afresh. It also criticised the delay.“The Passport Officer has not to act as the mouthpiece of the CID. When an authority is vested with the power, the same is to be exercised judiciously and not arbitrarily as has been done in the instant case,” Justice M. A. Chowdhary said. The court stated that Nazir cannot be denied her fundamental right under Article 21 to travel outside of India as an Indian citizen, in the absence of any unfavourable security report.Now, however, Mufti’s daughter Iltija has claimed that her and her’s mother Mehbooba’s passport requests have been denied to them by the Jammu and Kashmir administration since June 2022 and March 2020 respectively.Mehbooba, the chief of the People’s Democratic Party, had applied for a new passport in March 2020 after her old one had expired.“Earlier, the authorities had said in the honourable court that issuing passports to the Mufti family is a threat to national security. My mother has nothing to do with politics. She is in her 80s and her passport was also denied. Only after the court’s intervention was her passport released. How could my mother be a threat to national security, ” Mehbooba told The Wire. On July 31, 2021, J&K authorities had issued a circular asking to withhold security clearance to individuals involved in “anti-national activities and other related crimes.” Amod Ashok Nagpure, Senior Superintendent of J&K Police, CID, gave the Special Branch (SB) field units in Kashmir the go-ahead to “specifically” investigate “law and order,” “stone pelting,” and other charges before granting clearance to subjects who have applied for government employment or a passport, the circular says. A field unit for the SB, attached to every police station in J&K and which works under the CID, is tasked with examining applicants’ backgrounds for jobs, government programmes and contracts, and passports.Mehbooba’s daughter Iltija has moved J&K high court, saying that she needs a passport to get a Masters degree in sustainable development from abroad.Iltija cites the Supreme Court’s ruling that the right to travel abroad is part of the fundamental right to personal liberty.“On the one hand, the government of India claims people of J&K have equal rights but the truth is that even passports are being impounded arbitrarily. It is obvious that withholding our passports is pure vendetta. Otherwise, how do you explain the CID’s adverse report rejecting my 80-year-old grandmother’s passport because she is a threat to national security? If a former CM and her mother are considered a threat then imagine how concerned authorities must be discriminating with full impunity against ordinary Kashmiris. My passport also has been confiscated since June 2022 despite repeated requests,” Iltija told The Wire.Iltija added that most ordinary residents of J&K would not have the ability to litigate against the administration and that it is necessary for her to speak up for them.Her mother Mehbooba Mufti has also written to external affairs minister S. Jaishankar to expedite the clearance of her passport. In her letter, too, she says that in J&K “it has become the norm to arbitrarily reject passport applications of thousands including journalists, students and others by misusing national interest as a pretext.”To The Wire, Mehbooba Mufti spoke of other journalists who have been stopped from travelling outside.“See, they have stopped journalist Sana Irshad Mattoo from receiving the Pulitzer Prize, it’s not only Mehbooba Mufti who is being denied a passport. Journalists missed important fellowships here. The authorities tell us to approach the Passport Authority of India. I repeatedly did so but did not get any positive feedback from the officials, ” she said. “People say BJP wants to create Hindu Rashtra, but I would say they want to create BJP Rashtra. But the Constitution has no place for their scheme of things, ” Mehbooba added. Also read: Kashmiri Student Activist Waiting for a Passport Ten Months After ApplicationSrinagar based freelance journalist, Bilal Ahmed Bhat, who contributes to foreign publications, told The Wire that he has been facing a virtual travel ban since 2019. “After the reading down of Article 370, I planned to go to Malaysia to attend a conference. I was deboarded by authorities at the Delhi airport. After Gowhar Geelani, I was the third journalist who was stopped from flying to Malaysia,” Bilal told The Wire. Bilal says that he has been stopped twice so far. “‘You can’t do international travel,’ the authorities told me. In 2021, I was again stopped, this time with another excuse. They told me that I had an expired RT-PCR test. I did a fresh RT-PCR, and showed them. I was stopped nonetheless,” Bilal said. Bilal was not told why he was barred from travelling outside Kashmir. In 2019, bureaucrat Shah Faesal (then a politician) was taken into custody at the Delhi airport while on his way to Harvard University and taken to Srinagar, where he was detained under the Public Safety Act.Reacting to the travel bans on journalists and others in India, Amnesty International had said in 2022 that they have increasingly become “the principal tactic of the Indian authorities to silence independent and critical voices in the country.”Irshad Hussain is an independent journalist based in Srinagar, Kashmir. He tweets @Irshad55husssin.
