Indian authorities have released prominent Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez and journalist Irfan Mehraj on bail after years in prison on “terrorism” financing charges although both remain under tight court-imposed restrictions.
The two men walked free from a New Delhi jail late on Wednesday, their relatives said, as India’s National Investigation Agency seeks to overturn their bail – the latest chapter in what rights groups call New Delhi’s sweeping crackdown on activists, journalists and dissidents in India-administered Kashmir since 2019 when it scrapped the region’s autonomy, granted under the Indian Constitution.
Parvez, programme coordinator for the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), was arrested in 2021 by the National Investigation Agency at his home in Srinagar.
Mehraj, a freelance journalist who worked with the same rights group as a researcher, was arrested in 2023.
Both face charges of “funding terrorism” and “propagation of secessionist agenda” under India’s stringent “antiterrorism” laws, which in effect allow authorities to hold people without trial indefinitely.
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