India seeks life imprisonment for Kashmiri leader Asiya Andrabi, invokes “collective conscience” doctrine

NEW DELHI (MNTV) — The National Investigation Agency on Monday urged a special court in Delhi to impose the maximum possible sentences — including life imprisonment — on Kashmiri women’s leader Asiya Andrabi and her two associates, in a move that experts are likely to find staggering given that the same court acquitted the three women of the gravest charges they faced, including actually waging war against India.

Arguments on the quantum of sentence were heard before Judge Chander Jit Singh, weeks after the court convicted Andrabi (64), Nahida Nasreen (61), and Sofi Fehmeeda (38) — all leaders of the women’s organization Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM) — on multiple counts under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the Indian Penal Code.

DeM, one of Kashmir’s largest women’s organizations, has for decades combined advocacy for Kashmir’s right to self-determination with Islamic activism and women’s religious education.

Maximum on every count

The NIA argued for the harshest possible sentences across every single convicted charge, grounding its position in two doctrines: deterrence and prevention.

The sentences being sought are severe. Under Section 18 of the UAPA — conspiracy to commit a terrorist act — the punishment can extend to life imprisonment. Under Sections 38 and 39 of the UAPA — association with and support to a terrorist organization — the maximum is ten years each.

Under Section 121A IPC — conspiracy to wage war against India — the maximum is again life imprisonment. Section 120B IPC, criminal conspiracy, carries life imprisonment where the underlying conspiracy involves a capital or life offence.

Sections 153A and 153B IPC, promoting enmity between groups and assertions prejudicial to national integration, carry a maximum of three years each. Section 505 IPC, statements conducing to public mischief, also carries a maximum of three years.

The NIA is seeking the ceiling on all of them.

Acquitted of violence, facing life

What makes the demand particularly striking is what the court chose not to convict the women of. In January, the court acquitted all three on Section 121 IPC — the charge of actually waging war against India — as well as on charges of funding terrorism and membership in a terrorist organization.

The court, in other words, found no evidence of violence, no evidence of raising funds for terror, and no evidence of terrorist membership.

What remains are convictions for conspiracy, association, and speech — for what these women said, wrote, and advocated.

That the NIA is now seeking life imprisonment on that basis, invoking the collective conscience of society, is a prosecutorial position that sits uneasily with the court’s own findings.

Eight years down, waiting again

Andrabi has been one of the most prominent voices in the Kashmiri self-determination movement — a position that has cost her dearly.

She has already spent over fifteen years in prison intermittently, detained repeatedly under the Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law that permits imprisonment without charge or trial for up to two years at a stretch.

The state of the three women lends the NIA’s demand a particularly grim dimension. Andrabi, 64, suffers from diabetes, asthma, arthritis, and bronchospasm.

Fehmeeda, 38, requires spinal surgery she has been denied throughout her incarceration. Nasreen, 61, has been refused adequate medical care.

All three have been held in Tihar Jail — over 800 kilometers from their homes and families in Kashmir — since April 2018, not as convicts but as undertrials, for nearly eight years before a verdict was even pronounced.

The court did not proceed to sentencing on Monday. The defense sought additional time to present its arguments, and the next hearing has been set for Wednesday, March 11.

The defense is expected to argue that the nearly eight years already served must be counted against any sentence under Section 428 CrPC, which mandates that pre-trial detention be set off against a final sentence.

An appeal to the Delhi High Court is widely anticipated regardless of outcome.

For now, three women — elderly, unwell, and far from home — wait once again.