Giving a voice to families of all ‘detained without charges’

If you talk casually to Nikhat Perween or text her, she might come across as any 22-year-old management graduate, who means "fine" when she texts "F9". Those who have known Nikhat, however, are conscious of her sudden graduation to adulthood.

From a cheerful BBA student confident of working her way to an MBA and then the IAS ("my father, being with the Bihar administration, had even bought IAS prelim books for me to study"), she is now on a somewhat unplanned study programme of the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Penal Code, and not because she intends appearing for the IAS this time.

News items, scraps of information volunteered by a few friendly diplomats or helpful contacts, and Supreme Court proceedings on a habeus corpus petition, now dismissed, are what preoccupy her. The travails of her engineer husband Fasih Mehmood, 28, have changed her life. They had been married eight months when Fasih was detained on charges of being involved in terror cases while on a job in Saudi Arabia this May. The chargesheet is yet to be filed and he is currently in a Saudi Arabian prison, awaiting deportation to India.

She quietly observed her first wedding anniversary on September 7. Nikhat is carrying a child, who is due in December. Her mornings — mostly in Patna, her parents' home — start with a leap towards "the Net" for any fresh update on her husband. An indifferent breakfast and she is off to various "seminars, panels and talks" where she speaks on terror, and on behalf of all those who she says have been detained, not quite charged formally, but pushed into a grey zone that is actually a dark end, from where very few can actually make a blemish-free comeback.

"Look at Amir, acquitted after so many years, and the prisoner from where my sasural is, Barh Samalia, killed in prison."

... contd.

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