On 29 February 2024, Aasif Sultan’s six-year-old daughter Areeba saw her father as a free man when he reached home in Srinagar, Kashmir, after 2,010 days of incarceration in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh.

Areeba saw him behind bars or in handcuffs from behind a netted wall in the Srinagar central jail before he was moved to Ambedkar Nagar district jail in UP and Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu.

“It felt as if she was seeing him for the first time,” said Muhammed Sultan Sayed, Aasif’s 67-year-old father, speaking of the day Sultan returned after five and half years.

Any hope for Sultan and his daughter to pick up the pieces and make up for lost years was shattered when J&K police arrested him in a five-year-old case later that day.

“On the day he was arrested again, she asked me, ‘He just returned. Where did he go now?’” Sayed, who retired from a clerical job in a government office a few years ago, said. “I told her he had only finished half of the Quran, and now he’s gone to finish the rest. What else could I have told a six-year-old? I just hope he returns home for Eid.”

Eid has come and gone, but Sultan is jailed in a case Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), 1967, related to the incident of rioting inside Srinagar central jail on 4 April 2019.

The J&K police arrested Sultan the same day he returned home. He had secured bail in the UAPA case from August 2018 in April 2022, and a detention order under the Public Safety Act from August 2019 was quashed on 7 December 2023.

The jail authorities in UP took 78 days, more than two and half months, to release Sultan. TK shows the home secretary sanctioned the case against him on 15 February 2024, two weeks before he was released for a day.



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