(Washington, D.C., 4/1/2026) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, strongly condemns India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-chauvinist government for its relentless persecution of Muslims and its illegal Kashmir annexation and land usurpation after its National Intelligence Agency (NIA) sentenced three leading Kashmiri Muslim women’s rights and human rights activists and political leaders — Aasiya Andrabi, 64, Nahida Nasreen, 61, and Sofi Fahmeeda, 36 – to draconian jail terms on March 24, even after failing to prove they committed or aided any acts of violence or were themselves part of a terrorist group.
The special intelligence court shockingly sentenced Andrabi to three life sentences only because she has risen in the last 40 years to become one of Kashmir’s most prominent political leaders, is an undaunted advocate for the rights of Muslim women, and an outspoken opponent of Indian aggression against Kashmir and Kashmir’s independence.
The Persecution
India’s fascist Hindutva movement has long focused on Andrabi, founder of the women’s religious learning center movement in Srinagar in 1985, which soon became the Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM), or Daughters of the Nation, or the Sacred Way. The group focused on Islamic education, women’s rights, and resistance to the “commodification of Kashmiri women in advertising and entertainment.”
For eight years, Modi has locked Andrabi away in India’s infamous Tihar Jail, one of the country’s worst infested, overcrowded, torture-dens. He has imprisoned her some 250 miles outside of Kashmir, away from her home and family. She has, in fact, spent 15 of the last 30 years in Indian prisons, mostly without charge.
The Indian-chauvinist government seized Andrabi’s husband, Muhammad Qasim, a professor of Islamic Studies, in February 1993, months before outlawing the Jamiatul Mujahideen group, which they claimed he belonged to. Fully 10 years later, in a dubious proceeding, they sentenced him to life in prison. He has remained a political prisoner for more than 33 years.
The couple – though ostensibly guaranteed the right to communicate by phone twice a month – have not spoken in a decade, since 2016, denied by their jailers. Andrabi has barely had the chance to raise her two now-grown sons.
The Legal Mechanism
It is noteworthy that India, like other oppressive governments born out of the racist, colonial riot of British imperial law, employs administrative detention, whereby authorities arrest and hold political prisoners indefinitely without charge. This precisely defines the political biography of Andrabi and her husband, as well as Nasreen and Fahmeeda, the other two women, sentenced to 30 years each, without proof by the Indian intelligence court in the Andrabi case.
The grotesque, Kafkaesque body of “lawless law,” as Amnesty International aptly dubbed it, that India has miscreated and used to jail its activist Muslims, Dalit Untouchables, Christians, and other political prisoners rests on the three-legged stool of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public Safety Act (PSA) – which grants the government uncontestable powers, including detention without trial – and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
The UAPA is India’s primary anti-terror law, and the UN agency Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has unequivocally condemned it in an utterly scathing May 2025 report: India’s Misuse of Counter-Terrorism Law: The Human Rights Impact of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
The UAPA has “evolved into a mechanism of administrative control … used to detain human rights defenders, student activists, and critics of the state, not for acts of violence, but for their speech, assemblies, and affiliations. … Their targeting reflects a broader crackdown on civil society, wherein legitimate political dissent is reframed as terrorism.”
This precisely sums up the legal evolution of the Andrabi, Nasreen, and Fahmeeda case.
The Thought Crimes
The prosecution brought charges against the three Muslim women activists in 2021 (after three years in detention!) for the serious and specific tripartite charges of “waging war against the Government of India (Section 121 IPC), raising funds for terrorist acts (Section 17 UAPA), and being members of a terrorist organization (Section 20 UAPA).”
Yet as whimsical as the bar of proof is for these three charges in India, the court confessed the prosecution could not make a case against the women regarding any of the charges they brought against them. “No violent incidence in particular, pursuant to such endorsement or encouragement, has been brought on record” against Andrabi, Nasreen, and Fahmeeda, the court’s findings noted.
They were acquitted on all three counts.
So the intelligence court aided and abetted the government’s miscarriage of justice: “It shifted the legal basis of its terrorism case to speech, association, and perceived intent,” according to an analysis of court documents by Azad Essa of Middle East Eye.
So much for India’s “largest democracy in the world” motto.
With apparent clairvoyance worthy of the film Minority Report, the intelligence court judges cited a “PreCrime” law not cited in the original complaint, Section 18 of the UAPA: a law that permits the prosecution of people for acts of violence – not that they have committed – but for acts the court perceives they committed in their hearts.
There was no need for the prosecution to establish any actual violation of law by Andrabi, Nasreen, and Fahmeeda. The judges perceived the acts of violence of the women’s thoughts – acts of violence that they never planned to commit, never prepared to commit, never tried to commit, and never did commit.
What the judges “perceived” in Andrabi’s mind was this: thoughts of criminal conspiracy (Section 120-B IPC), promoting enmity (Section 153A), statements undermining national unity (Section 153B), public mischief (Section 505), membership and support of a terrorist organization (Sections 38 and 39 UAPA), conspiracy to wage war (Section 121A IPC), and preparation for a terrorist act (Section 18 UAPA).
The intelligence court did cite a reason for its completely inhuman and excessive cruelty in sentencing this grandmother to life imprisonment for her speech. Andrabi refused to “show remorse” for her beliefs, the judges said.
The judges also explained why they did not show the three accused lenity in their punishment. Had they been “uneducated” women (yes, the judges actually said this!), leniency might then have been appropriate.
This betrays the Modi government’s especially deep outrage for Andrabi and her colleagues’ thought crimes.
“The [foundational] political goal of Dokhtaran” – the organization Andrabi founded in 1985 and named two years later, writes Inshah Malik, professor of politics and international relations in Tiblisi, Georgia, in her 2019 book Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir – “is to create a pious political woman who can question and critique the political order. Women can change their situation of oppression if they know their rights in Islam.”
Andrabi combines all the traits India’s ruling Hindutva chauvinist movement and fascist government most hates: faithful belief in God’s oneness and denial of false gods and idols; scrutinizing the political order and calling it to account for the people; and learned women who speak out publicly with a forthright word.
The Call
- The US Council of Muslim Organizations endorses the appeal of the World Kashmir Awareness Forum (WKAF) to Dr. Volker Turk (Austria), UN High Commissioner on Human Rights; Ms. Ganna Yudkivska (Ukrainian Judge), Chair of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; Professor Mary Lawlor (Ireland), UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of the Human Rights Defenders; and Dr. Alice Jill Edwards (Australia), UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to intervene and persuade the Modi government of India to immediately and unconditionally release all three Kashmiri human rights defenders Aasiya Andrabi, Nahida Nasreen, and Sofi Fahmeeda.
- The Council urgently requests the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation to call a hearing on the rampant abuses of the government of India in Kashmir and specifically to press India for the immediate release of these Kashmiri woman, Aasiya Andrabi, Nahida Nasreen, and Sofi Fahmeeda, who have been wrongfully arrested, jailed for years without charges, and now unfairly tried and unjustly imprisoned in India because they are human rights defenders, including women’s rights, and political advocates for Kashmiri independence.
- We urge President Trump and his administration to institute a full U.S. sanctions regime against India for its longstanding, widespread, and growing human rights abuses against Kashmiris and Indian Muslims, Christians, Dalit Untouchables, and other politically persecuted groups. And we urge President Trump to directly communicate with Prime Minister Modi on these issues, including the wrongful imprisonment of Aasiya Andrabi, Nahida Nasreen, and Sofi Fahmeeda.
- We ask American Muslims and all Americans of good conscience to contact your congressperson immediately to inform them of the dire violation of the human rights of Aasiya Andrabi, Nahida Nasreen, and Sofi Fahmeeda, and to urgently seek their immediate, unconditional release.
We pray for the wellbeing and freedom of Aasiya Andrabi, Nahida Nasreen, and Sofi Fahmeeda, and we ask God to help them, aid them, comfort them, and relieve them of their great suffering and that of their families, and to free them, free Kashmir, and free all its oppressed.
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