Mohammad Ashraf Bhat, a Kashmiri lawyer who served as the general secretary of the Kashmir chapter of the J&K High Court Bar Association (JKHCBA), was arrested by the J&K Police on Tuesday night.ย
โMr. Bhat was arrested from his Srinagar residence during a night raid. We fear Mr. Bhat too has been shifted to a jail outside the Kashmir Valley,โ a colleague of Mr. Bhat toldย The Hindu.ย
Mr. Bhat has become the fourth lawyerย of the erstwhile Bar to be arrested in 23 days. Earlier, ex-Bar chief Mian Qayoom, acting Bar chairman Nazir Ahmad Ronga, andย Mr. Qayoomโs nephew advocate Mian Muzaffar were arrested by the police and shifted to jails in the Jammu province, which is around 300 km away from Srinagar.ย
Mr. Ronga and Mr. Muzaffar have been booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a law dealing with preventive detention that allows two years of detention without trial. However, Mr. Qayoom was arrested in a case related to the killing of a lawyer, Babar Qadri, in 2020 in Srinagar. All these arrests came immediately after the Bar announced it would hold internal elections to elect a new body. Sources said the Bar has decided to โshun the idea of holding any elections.โย ย
The 3,000-member erstwhile Bar has been denied permission by the Lieutenant Governorโs government to hold internal elections for the past five years and is accused of โpro-secessionist ideology.โย The Bar also remains aย non-recognised body, even after dropping a paragraph from its earlier constitution, that read โseeking a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute.โ
The J&K and Ladakh High Court, earlier this month, recognised a new lawyersโ body in Kashmir, the Kashmir Advocates Association (KAA), by exercising powers under Section 58 of the Bar Council, which was extended to J&K after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.ย
Meanwhile, the Kashmir chapter of erstwhile JKHBA was not mentioned by Justice N Kotiswar Singh, Chief Justice, who has been appointed as Judge of the Supreme Court of India, in his farewell speech on July 16.
