THE first time they arrested Aasiya Andrabi, her baby was kept away from her for a year. He was left to play with a stone, banging it on the door the whole day. “That stone was his toy,” she remembered. But that was a long time ago. More recently, she has been sentenced to life by an Indian special court. Three life sentences. This is not because of anything Ms Andrabi, a 64-year-old grandmother, has done. This is because she is Kashmiri, and because she refuses to accept the terms of her oppression.

Ms Andrabi has spent more time in Indian prison than outside it. Her latest sentence, she says, proves her a true soulmate to her husband, Dr Muhammad Qasim Faktoo, occupied Kashmir’s longest-serving political prisoner — himself bereft of his liberty for 33 years. His shareek-i-hayat, meanwhile, has won laurels of her own: she is the first Kashmiri woman to have her struggle for self-determination met with a life sentence.

Resistance has come easy to Ms Andrabi, even in the face of local tradition: she refused to wed within caste (“We demand freedom from Indian rule. But Kashmiris are slaves of their own bogus customs.”) Instead, she married someone likeminded; years of peril followed. She had a similar Damascus moment........

© Dawn