Khurram Parvez has spent four years in an Indian prison without standing trial for a single day.

A veteran Kashmiri human rights activist and coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, he was arrested in November 2021 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act on charges of “terror-funding” and “conspiracy.” He has not been convicted. He has not been tried. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally declared his imprisonment arbitrary in 2023 and demanded his immediate release. India did not respond. Parvez remains in his cell.

Irfan Mehraj, a journalist who reported on human rights abuses in Kashmir, has been in detention since March 2023, charged under the same law, accused of the same vague offences. Three years later, his case keeps being postponed. No trial date is in sight. His mother told reporters her son is innocent and that she believes justice will come. That belief is being tested by a legal system that has been deliberately engineered to make justice structurally impossible.These are not isolated cases. They are a system.

India’s counter-terrorism legal framework in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir operates on a logic that inverts every principle of democratic justice. The Public Safety Act permits administrative detention for up to two years without charge or trial. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act goes further still, enabling indefinite detention, making bail a near impossibility under Section 43D(5), which requires courts to deny bail if there exist “reasonable grounds” for the charges. Since the prosecution defines what constitutes reasonable grounds, the provision is in practice an automatic denial mechanism. As the International Federation of Journalists observed, in Kashmir the legal process itself has become the punishment.

The numbers confirm what the individual cases illustrate. Since 2019, over 2,300 people in Kashmir have been arrested under the UAPA alone, with almost half remaining in custody on extended pre-trial detention. After the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, UN human rights experts documented approximately 2,800 further arrests across the territory, explicitly naming Parvez and Mehraj among those arbitrarily held for years under these statutes. Many detainees were denied access to lawyers and held incommunicado. Credible reports of torture have been raised formally with Indian authorities. India has not investigated a single one.

Even India’s own judiciary has periodically recoiled from these excesses. A Jammu and Kashmir High Court recently quashed one Kashmiri man’s PSA detention, describing it as based on “vague and conjectured assumptions” with “no application of mind” by the officials who ordered it. Yet for Parvez and Mehraj, no such relief has come. The courts have occasionally spoken. The detention machinery has not paused.

Press freedom watchdogs document a Kashmir where police summons, office raids and defamation campaigns have created, in the words of one journalist, an environment where “every journalist is silent” through fear. In January 2026, Reuters reported that police in Indian Occupied Kashmir ordered journalists to sign pledges committing not to “disturb peace,” a demand that redefines the act of reporting inconvenient facts as a threat to public order. Parvez’s wife described Indian troops’ raiding their home and office, confiscating computers and phones, rendering daily life traumatic for their children. The message to every other activist and journalist in Kashmir is transparent: document our conduct and this will happen to you too.This is not counter-terrorism. It is the systematic elimination of witnesses.

India presents itself to the world as the largest democracy, a responsible stakeholder in the international order, a nation governed by constitutional values and the rule of law. The case of Khurram Parvez alone is sufficient to test that self-description. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled his imprisonment unlawful. Amnesty International and Front-Line Defenders have demanded his release. A joint UN expert statement in late 2025 called for the immediate and unconditional release of both Parvez and Mehraj. India has, in the words of a 2026 rights consortium report, “continuously failed to respond” to concerns raised by UN experts and has made no move to amend the laws responsible.

India’s democratic credentials cannot survive indefinite contact with what is happening in Kashmir. Every year that Khurram Parvez spends in a cell without trial is another year in which the distance between India’s self-description and its conduct grows wider and more difficult to ignore.

The pen, it turns out, is not mightier than the sword when the sword belongs to a state willing to call the pen a weapon of terror.

[The author is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad.]

© Pakistan Observer