“He Became the Person I Looked Up To”: Ahmed Bin Qasim on His Father’s Three Decades Behind Bars

The first thing you notice about Ahmed Bin Qasim is how he speaks about his father — not with bitterness, though he has every right to it, but with a quiet, measured reverence that seems to have been forged through decades of absence.

Ahmed is the son of Dr. Ashiq Faktoo, also known as Dr. Qasim, one of Kashmir’s longest-serving political prisoners, who has now spent over three decades incarcerated in Indian prisons. He is also the son of Asiya Andrabi, the Kashmiri resistance figure recently sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. Ahmed has never known what it means to have both parents home at the same time. He has, in many ways, never known what it means to have either of them home at all.

“There is a room for my father in our house,” Ahmed tells me. “A room he has never lived a single day in. The paint has started peeling off the walls. That peeling paint is the only proof that time is actually passing in there.”

His father was first arrested in 1993, at the Srinagar airport, alongside Ahmed’s mother and his infant elder brother.

“They moved him from one detention centre to another. They tortured him — electrocution, sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty. An Intelligence Bureau officer once offered him a way out: work for them, enter electoral politics, and the case disappears. My father refused. And so the imprisonment continued.”

In 2001, a court acquitted Dr. Faktoo, formally noting that the prosecution had completely failed to establish its case. The government appealed. In 2003, the acquittal was overturned by the Supreme Court — without new evidence, without a witness. He was sentenced to life.

“That is when I understood,” Ahmed says, “that the courts were not designed to deliver justice to us. They were designed to sustain the occupation.”

When Ahmed speaks of how he grew up, it is with a strange kind of tenderness toward a childhood he knows was stolen. He describes being a sentimental boy, struggling to make sense of why his father chose conviction over compromise. “I selfishly wished he had given in,” he admits. “He could have played cricket with me. He could have come to my school. But then he would not have become the person he became.”

What his father sent instead of himself were books. After completing each one in his cell, Dr. Faktoo would send it home. Over the years, those books accumulated into a library of over a thousand volumes — a library Ahmed still reads from, looking for things his father could never say in person.

One book arrived with something that stopped Ahmed cold. It was Edward Said, one of the many authors his father had read and passed on from his cell. Inside, his father had drawn a line under a single sentence: “Domination is sustained not only by force, but by the conditions that make it possible, conditions that resistance inevitably disrupts.”

His father has also authored more than twenty books himself from prison, and completed a doctorate behind bars. Ahmed speaks of this not as remarkable, but as inevitable, as the only form of agency available to a man the state had decided to bury alive.

Ahmed describes their meetings as brief, weighted encounters. “Our hugs are always longer than our conversations,” he says. “We try to fill the void in whatever moments we have. I look at him and I wonder if he is more afraid of living like this or of dying like this.”

What haunts Ahmed most is not the injustice alone, but its completeness. There is no court left to appeal to. No mechanism left to trust. His father remains imprisoned, his mother has now joined him in that fate, and Ahmed sits at the intersection of both losses, carrying the weight of a family the Indian state has methodically taken apart, piece by piece, year by year, cell by cell.