“Jamsheed Zahoor Paul had very little hope left in him,” his lawyer recalled on a phone call with me. Arrested at the age of nineteen under the Arms Act, 1959 and subsequently under terrorism-related provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, Paul, the son of a former Jammu and Kashmir police officer, would often tell his lawyers Ahmad Ibrahim and Tamanna Pankaj, “Everyone in my family was in the service; I cannot even dream of doing such a thing.”

On Thursday (March 19), a Delhi court cited “a great deal of doubt” in the case against him and acquitted Paul and his co-accused Parvaiz Rashid. At the time of their release, the duo had already spent over seven years in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

“In 2018, when these two boys (nineteen and twenty-four years old) were picked up, news outlets continuously ran stories like ‘two highly radicalised ISIS terrorists arrested near Red Fort’,” Advocate Ahmad recalled. “If you look this up, you will find out how much they were hounded back then.”

And he is right. Nothing is ever truly lost on the internet, and with the help of a brief social media search, I pulled up multiple news reports from 2018 that ascribed unsubstantiated labels on Paul and Rashid.

‘ISIS men’, ‘terrorists’ and more

“2 ISIS men held in Delhi with arms (sic),” a September 8, 2018 India Today headline read, without adding “alleged”, “purported”, “claimed”, or even a Delhi Police attribution.

Innocent until proven guilty is, perhaps, the most frequently forgotten piece of common knowledge. However, the first rule I learned as a news-desk trainee, at around the same time as Paul’s arrest (so this isn’t some niche, new journalistic convention), was to use “alleged” until someone’s guilt was established by a court of law – until the trial had concluded and a court, after wading through all the evidence, passed a legal order of conviction.

In Paul and Rashid’s case, it would be several years until a court concluded this matter, but India Today, based only on their arrest, seemingly pronounced Paul and Rashid’s guilt two days after their arrest. And the lede it published after the headline?........

© The Wire