Despite prison, torture, this Kashmiri politician won’t give up on India

As Kashmir votes in its first regional elections in a decade, Waheed-ur-Rehman Para battles his own demons, contesting to win and reaffirm his faith in Indian democracy.

Pulwama, Indian-administered Kashmir — For a month in 2020, 33-year-old Waheed-ur-Rehman Para was imprisoned in a dark, underground cell in the Indian capital, where he was beaten with rods, stripped naked, and hung upside down after the country’s premier investigation agency accused him of aiding anti-India rebels.

In the dim light, he would touch the names of other Kashmiris — scratched on the walls — who had been held in the New Delhi cell before him. At his lowest points, Para would close his eyes and recall the summer of 2018 when he stood in front of 3,000 people, next to Rajnath Singh, then India’s home minister, who hailed him as a youth icon of Indian democracy.

“I became suicidal and everything,” Para recalled, walking on a dusty road in Pulwama, his hometown.

The city is part of a district that shares its name and has long been a hotbed of anti-India rebellion in the south of Indian-administered Kashmir. But Para was — and remains — a popular pro-India leader, and is still grappling with the dramatic twists in fate that he has faced in recent years. After a month in the New Delhi cell, he was held in a jail in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city, for nearly two years.

“My whole life felt like a lie,” he said.

“For a month, I did not know whether it was day or night. Being caged, I immediately felt connected to my Kashmiri roots and often returned to my childhood,” explained Para, tall, his voice feeble, hair visibly greyer than it was before his time in prison. “And [I] think, how did this happen.”

Released in May 2022 after what United Nations