A sentence for belief: How an Indian court jailed Asiya Andrabi for life — and what the order reveals

NEW DELHI (MNTV) — On March 24, 2026, Additional Sessions Judge Chander Jit Singh of the Karkardooma Courts in Delhi sentenced Kashmiri pro-freedom activist Asiya Andrabi to life imprisonment on two counts — under Section 18 of the UAPA and Section 120-B of the IPC — along with concurrent sentences of ten years each under Sections 38 and 39 UAPA, five years each under Sections 153-A, 153-B, and 505 IPC, and a further life term under Section 121-A IPC.

Her associates, Nahida Nasreen and Sofi Fehmeeda, received thirty years each on the primary counts, with concurrent sentences across the remaining charges.

All sentences were ordered to run concurrently. The court also granted the benefit of Section 428 CrPC, meaning the nearly eight years already served will be set off against the sentence.

The order is twenty-eight pages long. Read carefully, it is a document that tells us as much about the limits of the court’s reasoning as it does about the women it has sentenced.

The court’s own concession — and what it did with it

The sentencing order opens with a philosophically generous introduction. The court acknowledges, citing Supreme Court precedent, that punishment should not be an end in itself, that rehabilitation matters, that the humane approach is built into sentencing jurisprudence, and that the maximum sentence is reserved only for the gravest cases of a given kind. The Delhi High Court Rules are quoted to the effect that the maximum punishment “is rarely necessary in practice.”

These are the right principles. The problem is what the court does with them, or rather, what it does not do with them.

Having set out a framework that demands individualized, proportionate, humane sentencing, the court then proceeds to impose life imprisonment on a 64-year-old woman with multiple chronic illnesses, on the basis of convictions for conspiracy and speech, with no act of violence proven against her, and with the court’s own judgment on guilt recording that the prosecution failed to demonstrate any actual consequence of her actions.

The gap between the principles the court articulates and the sentence it delivers is the story of this order.

The “no remorse” problem

The most revealing passage in the sentencing order is paragraph 12, where the court draws an analogy between Asiya Andrabi and Ajmal Kasab — the Pakistani gunman convicted for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed over 160 people — on the grounds that neither showed remorse.

The court notes that the women declared themselves proud of their struggle and committed to continuing it, and treats this as an aggravating factor warranting severe punishment.

This reasoning deserves scrutiny. The women’s refusal to express remorse was not the refusal of someone caught committing a crime they knew to be wrong.

It was the declaration of people who believe — and have consistently believed — that advocating for Kashmiri self-determination is not a crime at all.

They said they were proud of their struggle and would do it again.

It is pertinent to note that during the final arguments, Andrabi had argued that her struggle was about safeguarding Kashmiri women from “all forms of oppression and social ills,” and that she would continue this struggle.

The court reads this as evidence of incorrigibility.

It could equally be read as evidence of political conviction — the same conviction that drives any activist who refuses to recant under pressure.

To compare this to Kasab’s lack of remorse for mass murder is not merely disproportionate. It conflates political belief with violence in exactly the way the prosecution’s evidence failed to establish.

The court acquitted these women of waging war. It acquitted them of terror funding.

It acquitted them of terrorist membership.

And then, at the sentencing stage, it effectively punished them as if those acquittals had not happened — because they remained unrepentant about the politics that gave rise to the charges.

Education as aggravation

Paragraph 14.1 of the order contains another passage that warrants close reading.

The court states that the fact that the convicts are educated women “aggravates the liability for consequences of their actions rather than mitigating it,” because educated persons are presumed to have acted with full knowledge and voluntarily.

This is a remarkable inversion. The defense had placed the women’s educational backgrounds before the court as evidence of their orientation toward intellectual and social engagement — women who built schools, ran de-addiction centres, campaigned for girls’ education.

The court turns this entirely on its head: their education, in the court’s framing, makes them more culpable, not less.

By this logic, an educated political activist who acts on deeply held convictions is more deserving of punishment than an illiterate person who commits the same act without understanding it.

It is a principle that, if applied consistently, would punish knowledge itself.

It would deter precisely the kind of thoughtful, principled civic engagement that democratic societies claim to value.

The absent consequence

Paragraph 13 of the order addresses the defense’s most powerful argument — that the prosecution demonstrated no actual consequence or harm flowing from the women’s actions.

The court acknowledges this, but dismisses it on the grounds that the convictions are for conspiracy, which by its nature does not require a completed act.

This is legally correct as far as it goes. Conspiracy charges do not require the underlying crime to have been carried out. But the absence of any consequence is not merely a technical point — it is a profoundly relevant consideration in determining how severe a sentence should be.

A conspiracy that results in mass death is categorically different from a conspiracy that results in nothing.

The court’s own introductory principles acknowledge that proportionality demands attention to “actual consequences arising from” the offence. Having established that there were no such consequences, the court then declines to give this fact any meaningful weight in the sentence.

The logical coherence of this position is questionable.

What the court did not say

The sentencing order does not engage with the eight years these women spent in Tihar Jail before conviction.

It notes the Section 428 benefit will apply, but does not reflect on what it means to have imprisoned three women for nearly a decade, in a jail hundreds of kilometers from their homes, in conditions that included solitary confinement, before they were found guilty of anything.

It does not engage seriously with their deteriorating health — Andrabi’s diabetes, asthma, and arthritis; Fehmeeda’s denied spinal surgery; Nasreen’s inadequate medical care.

The order notes these health conditions exist, observes that no complaint about jail treatment was raised, and moves on.

It does not engage with the defense’s point that many of the pending cases cited against the women as evidence of habitual offending remain pending precisely because the state has prevented the women from appearing before the courts concerned.

It does not engage with the fact that in the NIA’s own separate case involving Hafiz Saeed, Andrabi was discharged of terror funding allegations — a discharge the prosecution did not challenge.

And it does not engage with the question that hangs over the entire proceeding: whether the UAPA, as applied in this case, is being used not to prevent terrorism but to criminalize a political position — the demand for Kashmiri self-determination — that has been articulated in United Nations resolutions and is held by millions of people.

What comes next

An appeal to the Delhi High Court is expected. The grounds will likely include the proportionality of the sentence, the court’s treatment of lack of remorse as an aggravating factor, its use of religious concepts as evidence, and the broader constitutional question of whether convictions resting entirely on speech and association — with no proven act of violence and no demonstrated consequence — can justify life imprisonment.

None of these women broke. And the sentencing order — read carefully, in its own words — does not quite manage to explain, beyond the language of deterrence and the threat of secession, why three women who built schools, ran de-addiction centers, and advocated for a political cause shared by millions, and who were acquitted of every charge of actual violence, deserve to die in an Indian prison.