Decode Politics: Stalled elections, flurry of arrests, and a Bar association feeling Jammu and Kashmir heat

The Jammu and Kashmir Police arrested a former general secretary of the J-K High Court Bar Association (HCBA) on Wednesday night, making it the fourth such arrest in recent days. The arrests continued a week after the HCBA said it was stopping the process of conducting its elections, which it had announced against the objections of the J&K administration.

Mohammad Ashraf Bhat was picked up from his residence in Srinagar on Wednesday night, booked under the stringent Public Safety Act (PSA) Thursday, and promptly sent to a jail in Jammu.

Earlier, the State Investigation Agency of the police arrested former HCBA president Mian Qayoom, in a case related to the 2020 murder of advocate Babar Qadri, followed by the booking of its ad hoc chairman Nazir Ahmad Ronga and Qayoom’s nephew Mian Muzaffar under the PSA. Under the Act, a detainee can be held without a trial for up to two years.

The notification by the HCBA suspending the elections came soon after the arrest of its chairman Ronga in a midnight raid at his house.

The HCBA is now without an elected body since 2019, or the abrogation of Article 370, with Ronga acting as the in-charge chairman. The HCBA last made a move to conduct its annual elections in 2020, but was prevented by the administration which raised objections to its constitution calling Kashmir a disputed territory.

The HCBA is a representative body of around 3,000 lawyers of the Union territory. It has always been viewed with suspicion by the Centre for its regular reports on the condition of inmates, many of them political prisoners, in J&K during the period before the scrapping of its special status. Many of these reports were picked up by human rights activists, building pressure on the government over the