Mukhtar Baba has lived life dangerously. As a young man in the early 1990s, he became a militant who fought for Kashmiri separatism. But he gave up the gun, and as the Kashmiris say, was “mainstreamed”. In the two decades that followed, he had a second life as a journalist working with local and national media organisations. That changed earlier this month when he was dubbed a “terrorist”.
The accusation came in a purported “intelligence dossier” prepared in the wake of threats issued to Kashmiri journalists a few weeks ago. On November 13 and 14, a blacklisted blog called Kashmir Fight put out a list of over 40 journalists in the valley, many of them associated with the dailies Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir and the news channel ANN, and called them “traitors”, “stooges” and “chameleon actors of media” whose “fate is sealed”.
