SRINAGAR: Police in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) have asked at least three journalists working in the disputed region to sign a pledge vowing not to “disturb peace” in the region, two of them told Reuters on Wednesday.
A third journalist, an assistant editor with the Indian Express newspaper, was summoned to a police station in Srinagar, but did not sign the pledge, the newspaper said in a report published on Wednesday.
India has imposed several restrictions in the disputed Himalayan region after revoking its constitutional autonomy in 2019, laying out rules for how the insurgency in the region is covered and reported.
A spokesperson for Srinagar police did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
The Indian Express, one of India’s most respected dailies, said its journalist was summoned four times between January 15 and 19 and asked to sign the pledge on January 16.
“He has not signed the bond as asked by the police. The Indian Express is committed to doing what is necessary to uphold and protect the rights and dignity of its journalists,” the paper’s chief editor, Raj Kamal Jha, said in the report.
Two other journalists Reuters spoke to said they had also been summoned, but one of them was travelling, and the other did not go to the police station. They declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue.
The journalists and the Indian Express said the summons were issued after they reported that police in the occupied valley were seeking information from mosques about their funding, management and budgets.
The Press Club of Kashmir, an association of journalists in the region, said in a statement dated Tuesday that several of its members had been either summoned or advised by police to stop covering stories on the profiling of religious institutions.
“Using police powers to summon journalists over their legitimate reporting is part of a pattern of intimidation against the media in Jammu and Kashmir,” Kunal Majumder, coordinator for the CPJ Asia-Pacific Programme, a non-profit that works for press freedom, said.
