My mother Asiya Andrabi was punished for refusing to accept India’s rule over Kashmiris

A couple of days ago, I sat through a judge sentencing my mother, Asiya Andrabi (64), to three terms of life imprisonment, effectively a death sentence, under different sections of what is known as one of the most draconian pieces of legislation enacted by India. 

This was the first time a Kashmiri woman, jailed for her participation in Kashmir's self-determination movement, was sentenced to life.

Along with my mother, two of her associates, Nahida Nasreen and Sofi Fehmeeda, were sentenced to thirty years of imprisonment. 

The three of them were arrested in 2018, and the trial lasted eight years. 

My mother has spent over fifteen years of her life in various Indian prisons, mostly under the Public Safety Act, another law designed to target dissidence in India-administered Kashmir.

This was not the first time I had lived through this ordeal.

More than two decades ago, in a similar courtroom, as a small child, I had witnessed a judge pronounce a life imprisonment sentence against my father, Qasim Faktoo, under a fictitious case, but in reality, for his involvement in the movement. 

My father, an organic intellectual – as the Italian leftist intellectual Gramsci would put it – has now spent thirty-three years behind bars, written over twenty books from his cell, and earned a doctorate in Islamic Studies from prison. 

My parents are now lodged in two different prisons, hundreds of miles away from their home, their children, and also each other.

The sentence order against my mother ran twenty-eight pages, filled with the usual judicial claptrap - mainly legal sections detailing various crimes allegedly committed by the three.

It is strange, the power they bear over the Kashmiri life, how they steal years from our lives like it means nothing, how they can break our homes, tear apart our families, and then go back to their own, to their families, sleeping in peace. 

We have a room for our father at our home, a home he has never lived a day in. 

But he would send books for me. After decades of his imprisonment, we have a library at our home, a mark of both his presence and absence in our lives. 

In Urdu, one refers to one's spouse as shareek-e-hayaat, meaning the one with whom life is shared. 

My mother, being the woman she is, said that she has now truly become my father's shareek-e-hayaat, as they share the life sentence now.

How India treats activism as a crime 

The sentencing of my mother to life imprisonment reveals the futility of categories such as violent and non-violent, combatant and non-combatant, militant and activist, legal and illegal, in places like India-administered Kashmir.

These distinctions, which the liberal world constructs and polices with great confidence, collapse the moment they are tested against the reality of what colonial states actually do to those who resist them.

My mother never actually picked up a weapon, although one is within one’s rights to do so against an occupation. 

The court acquitted her of waging war, of funding militancy; every charge that carried the implication of ‘violence’ was dropped for want of evidence. 

What remained were her words, her associations, her beliefs. And for those, she received life imprisonment.

This tells you something: the distinction between violent and non-violent resistance, which the liberal world insists upon as the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable, means nothing to a colonial state deciding how to punish those who resist it. 

The sentence my mother received is not lighter than what an armed combatant would receive. It is the same. 

Because the target of the punishment is not the method of resistance, it is the resistance itself. It is the refusal to accept that Kashmir belongs to India. 

It is the act of saying so, out loud, in public, without apology, for decades. The sentencing order is honest about this, in its way. 

It states that treating my mother with leniency would amount to “infusing fresh life and vigour into a spirit that aims at the secession of an integral part of India”.

It is the conviction of these women that unnerves the Indian state. 

For India, my mother and her associates, my father, and the hundreds of Kashmiris who are incarcerated, are not human beings. 

They are lessons. And warnings. To be conveyed to the broader Kashmiri population. 

The message is not spoken, but it does not need to be. If we can sentence a 64-year-old woman, who suffers from multiple serious ailments, to three terms of life imprisonment, what prevents us from doing the same to you? 

Message in the method

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer who was himself imprisoned without charge by a postcolonial state that had learned its methods from the colonial one, understood this with precision.

In his prison memoir, he wrote that detention is not only punitive but also theatrical. Political imprisonment functions as exemplary “ritual symbolism”. 

The state not only wants to remove the resistant body from society. It wants to break it and then display the breaking. 

If it can make such people emerge from prison repentant, apologising for the audacity of their convictions, renouncing the cause that put them there, then the ruling power has accomplished something far beyond mere incarceration. 

It has staged a confession. And a confession, in this calculus, becomes a cleansing ritual: retroactively justifying all the repression that preceded it, and pre-emptively sanctioning all that is yet to come. 

The broken prisoner is then recycled, either as a reformed messenger warning others away from resistance, or, if too damaged even for that, as a cautionary exhibit, a human wreck displayed to all future agitators as proof that no one is made of steel sufficient to endure.

The sentencing order makes this logic visible. The court noted, as one of the primary aggravating factors, that the three Kashmiri women showed no remorse. 

They had told the court they were proud of their struggle and would do it again. 

They said they would always fight for their people. They pointed out that there were cases against them for organising against sexual exploitation of Kashmiri women, and that they would organise against this again, if they had to. 

The court treated this as evidence that they were dangerous and unrepentant, and therefore deserving of the harshest sentence available. 

My mother did not break. The lesson did not land the way it was intended. And so the state gave her the only thing it had left. Three life sentences, in a single lifetime.

The scent of mint is the scent of my mother. If I close my eyes, I can still bring to my mind the image of her tending to the mint plants at home, her hands gentle yet deliberate as she nurtured each leaf. 

The occupation calls my mother an “angel of death” because she resists them with an intensity that never wavers. 

Even after years of incarceration, she holds fast to the struggle in Kashmir. I love her for the fullness of her being, her humanity, fierce and tender all at once. 

She is unyielding in the face of oppression, yet endlessly gentle with her children, her family, her people, and, yes, even her mint plants. 

She would call them affectionately, “my mint”. I hope she can tend to her mint soon, at her home, once again.