By Md. Zeyaul Haque

NEW DELHI, September 10 (IslamOnline) - Journalists in India and outside have shown serious concern over police charges sheet against Kashmir Times New Delhi bureau chief Iftikhar Geelani, who is also the correspondent of Pakistani daily The News in New Delhi.

Reflecting widespread concern over Geelani’ s arrest and the circumstances surrounding it, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) denounced “formal accusation of ‘military spying’ against journalist Iftikhar Geelani” Monday, September 9.

RSF’s Secretary-General Robert Ménard said in a letter to Indian Central Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani saying, “The charge of spying for foreign power is a big favorite of governments trying to silence or intimidate journalists who criticize.”

“This charge is not based on anything concrete,” Ménard said, demanding that Geelani be freed immediately and charges against him dropped. The police have charged him with spying for Pakistan.

Iftikhar Geelani, who has been in jail for three months, is also the son-in-law of prominent Kashmiri leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The elder Geelani was arrested the same day as Iftikhar.

Journalists are worried that Iftikhar could have been penalized for being a politician’s son-in-law. The elder Geelani is a hard-line Kashmiri separatist. At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was beaten by other detainees, while jail authorities remained inactive.

Geelani who was also refused access to the prison library, told RSF he was deeply depressed that he was being persecuted despite his innocence. Police claimed Geelani had “ confessed” he had been sending “ documents” found in his apartment to Pakistan.

Police said they had found in his computer a document downloaded from an Internet site about fighting in Kashmir. Sources told IslamOnline that this “sensitive” document is commonly available to any Internet user.

When this fact was pointed out to the chief metropolitan magistrate handling this case Sangeeta Dhingra Sehgal, she said she “did not have time to check this out.”

The charges sheet against Geelani was filed two days before the 90-day limit for Geelani to be held without charges was to end on September 9.

After his arrest 400 journalists took out a protest march in Delhi and congregated at the Press Club of India where the doyen of Indian journalists Kuldip Nayar addressed them, saying the freedom of expression in India was once again under attack from the government. The first time such an attack came in the 1970s when the late Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister. For her anti-press attacks she lost election.

Senior Indian journalists like Ajit Bhattacharjee and Dilip Padgaonkar expressed concern over the developments. Some of the more famous cases of governmental attacks in recent months are persecution of news portal tehelka.com journalists and hounding of Time magazine’ s Alex Perry. Cases of persecution of less high-profile journalists working in small towns and rural areas have also come to notice.

Delhi Union of Working Journalists’ Permanand Pandey presented a memorandum to home minister Advani on the persecution of Geelani in the early days of his arrest. He had promised to look into it. However, there was no follow-up on that.

Police took a lot of time deciding for what offence to book Geelani. They began with spying. Failing to have much on that score, they tried to book him for pornography. When that did not work, he was sought to be booked under Income Tax laws. After 88 days of arrest they ultimately charged him for espionage, basing their argument on his possession of a document freely accessible on the Net.