A quiet Sunday broken by a single phone call. A chance meeting at a club. And the account of a KAS officer that shows how a profession built on trust can be bent into a tool for extortion, and why holding the line still matters.
I. Ahmad Wani
It was a Sunday like so many others these past few years. Somewhere along the way I made a small promise to myself: on Sundays, the mobile data stays off. We live now with the constant ping of notifications humming under everything we do, and those few silent hours have become the closest thing I have to a sanctuary. No emails. No breaking news alerts. No urgent calls from sources or colleagues. Just the rare gift of sitting with my family, with my own thoughts, or with nothing at all but the slow, ordinary rhythm of a day in the Valley.
That Sunday started the same as any other. Morning light came softly through the curtains of my home in Srinagar. I had just sat down with a cup of noon chai when the familiar ting ting of WhatsApp began pushing against the quiet. My data was off, as always. But something, call it instinct or maybe just the small nagging fear that I was missing something important, made me switch it on.
The messages poured in all at once. Buried among them was a missed call from an old friend. I called him back on WhatsApp. There was an edge to his voice I did not recognise. He talked for a long time, and I listened, letting him say all of it without cutting in. But the longer he spoke, the heavier my chest grew. What he wanted from me was something I simply could not do and still look at myself in the mirror. I said no. Gently at first, then more firmly. The call ended with disappointment on his side and a strange, settled certainty on mine. I set the whole thing aside, told myself it was just the usual pressure that finds its way even into a peaceful day, and went back to my Sunday.
Weeks went by. The whole episode sank quietly into the back of my mind, buried under the endless churn of a journalist’s life in these times of change and rebuilding: deadlines, meetings, field visits, and the hundred small duties that fill every day.
Then one afternoon I was at a club in Srinagar, sharing a table with a senior IAS officer, a good friend whose company has always meant something to me. We never sit and trade gossip. Our talk turns to governance, to society, to the long list of things Jammu and Kashmir is still working through as it finds its footing. That day, as we spoke, another officer, a KAS colleague, pulled up a chair. My friend introduced us warmly.
The moment this officer heard the word “journalist,” something in his face changed. A shadow passed over it. “I have had bitter experiences with journalists from the Valley,” he said. His voice was steady, but there was real hurt in it, and a tiredness too.
The words landed harder than I expected. And there was a flicker in his eyes, as though a face or a name from somewhere recent had just risen to the surface. I could not place it, not yet, but a quiet pressure started building at the edge of my memory. Then it dropped into place all at once. He was the officer my friend had called me about on that far off Sunday.
I got his number quietly and asked if we could meet whenever suited him. The very next day, over the lunch break, we sat together in his private office. The door was shut. What he told me came out slowly, the way a hard thing does, and it turned out to be far more than one man’s bad experience. It was a window into something rotting at the heart of the work I love.
He started with what had begun as an ordinary administrative matter and had twisted, over weeks, into something exhausting and mean.
One day, official documents landed on his WhatsApp from a number he did not know. As he tends to do with strangers, he left them sitting there for a couple of days. Then the phone rang. The voice on the other end was not asking. “Check what I have sent you,” it said, like a man giving an instruction.
Reluctantly, he opened the files. On his screen was a draft order, still being worked on, nowhere near final. His stenographer had already gone through it and flagged several mistakes in the margins. But the officer was in the middle of an important video meeting, the file was stamped urgent, and time was short. Trusting the process and pressed on every side, he signed it without the careful reading he would normally have insisted on.
When the meeting ended, he called his stenographer straight away and asked for the physical copy so he could look it over again. What he found put a knot in his stomach. These were not small typing slips. They were real errors, the kind that, left alone, would have drained a serious and completely avoidable amount of money from the state exchequer.
He moved fast, and to his credit. He pulled all the concerned staff into a meeting. Cancellation orders were written up and sent out at once. But an administrative machine, once it starts turning, does not stop clean just because you tell it to. The original order had already left the building, travelling down the channels to subordinate offices spread across several districts.
In one district, an eager officer, maybe hoping to look quick and capable, acted with impressive speed. A purchase order went out to a vendor almost immediately. Goods were bought, loaded, moved, and stacked in the office corridors before the cancellation order could even catch up. Then that district officer went on leave. By the time he came back and opened the cancellation email, the vendor was already standing there, goods neatly piled, waiting for a receipt so he could raise the bill and get paid.
Told the order had been cancelled from above, the vendor refused to take the goods back. He was angry and would not budge. And it was right here, at this raw and fragile moment, that the journalist walked into the story.
Holding what looked like a copy of that original, flawed order, the journalist came to the KAS officer. There was no question asked in the public’s name. No real effort to understand the situation or the steps the officer had already taken to fix it. There were only demands. Hinted at first, then said plainly. Money, in return for silence, for the story never running. The officer refused flat out, without a second’s hesitation.
When the money never came, the pressure changed shape and dug in for the long haul. A stream of Right to Information applications started arriving at the department. Some asked for records going back twenty years, requests so vast and impossible to fulfil that they could only be read as harassment dressed up as transparency. Complaints piled up through the grievance cell of the Lieutenant Governor’s office. For close to two months, the officer and his staff were worn down by this steady campaign of pressure and noise.
Then one day his Personal Assistant, worn thin by the siege and only wanting to protect his boss from more of it, quietly handed the journalist ten thousand rupees. The pressure eased. The applications went quiet. But the damage to the officer’s trust, and to whatever faith he still held in the profession, stayed with him, deep and unhealed.
As he finished, the last pieces of my own puzzle slid into place. Later, I went back to the friend who had called me that Sunday. And there it was, the connection I had not wanted to see. He was the vendor. He was the one who had supplied the goods and refused to take them back when the order fell through. He had been hoping that a journalist with a name and a voice in the Valley would make that call, would lend some weight to the pressure, would tip the whole thing toward an outcome that suited him.
I had said no that day without knowing any of this. Now I understood why my conscience had spoken so plainly, without a flicker of doubt, on that quiet Sunday morning.
This is where journalism can go so badly wrong.
The work I have given my life to is not a job, and it is not a way to pay the bills. It is a trust the public places in us. In a place like ours, one that has carried decades of conflict and loss, and that is now feeling its way through a delicate, hopeful season of rebuilding, the press is not an ornament. It is a foundation. We are the eyes and ears of the people. We are the space where the governed and those who govern can actually meet. We keep the record of both the old wounds and the new beginnings. We are meant to comfort the ones who are hurting and unsettle the ones grown too comfortable, but only when that power is held with a steady hand.
The moment the pen stops serving truth and starts serving a grudge, a payday, or somebody’s private plan, it betrays not just the calling but the very people it swears to protect.
The journalist in this account was not exposing wrongdoing for anyone’s good. He took a bureaucratic slip, one the officer had already caught and moved fast to correct, and turned it into a lever for himself. The RTI, that hard won gift of a transparent democracy, became in his hands a cudgel: a way to pester, to threaten, to squeeze. The fear of a bad headline became a thing to be priced and sold.
I am not writing this to sit in judgment of any one person. Names, titles, and identifying details have been left out on purpose and with care, because I have no wish to shame anyone or to turn a painful story into a spectacle. And I would never, not for a second, want to dishearten the many journalists across the Valley, so many of them working with little support and under real strain, who still do this work with honesty, with courage, and with a genuine sense of duty to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Think of this instead as a mirror, held up to our profession at a moment when we cannot afford to look away.
We owe ourselves some hard questions. When does chasing a story hard cross over into hounding someone? When does a fair use of RTI curdle into abuse? How do we make sure we are not being used, whether we notice it or not, by people who care nothing for truth or fairness or the ordinary citizen caught in the middle?
The answers are rarely clean or comfortable. But they start with going back to the basics: check everything before you publish a word or threaten to. Get the full picture before you condemn anyone. Let the public interest, and nothing else, be the needle on your compass.
There are lessons on the other side of the desk too. Tighter rules for how official documents are handled and passed around, faster and more open ways to correct an honest mistake without leaving it open to abuse, and fair, working systems for real public grievances would all narrow the space where this kind of pressure grows.
And above all, this whole episode has put its finger on something I have carried for a long time. The real strength of a journalist is not the power to wound or to extract. It is the courage to hold back from wounding when doing so would be easy, or useful, or profitable. That Sunday, when I chose to end the call rather than become part of something that felt wrong, I was not being stubborn or unhelpful. I was keeping a quiet promise I made the day I first picked up a pen: a promise to truth, to fairness, and to the people I serve with my words.
Kashmir is rebuilding. Its institutions are finding their strength. The ordinary citizen is beginning, carefully, hopefully, to imagine a future not darkened by the fears of the past. In a moment like this one, journalism holds both a rare chance and a heavy responsibility: to be a partner in the rebuilding, a guardian of accountability, a light rather than a wall or a fresh source of cynicism.
Let the bitter experience of officers like the one who sat across from me in that closed room stand not as a charge against a whole honourable profession, but as an urgent reminder that watchfulness, over our own conduct just as much as over anyone else’s, is the price of a press that stays free, credible, and decent.
The pen is still mightier than the sword. But it keeps that power only when truth guides it, wisdom and kindness temper it, and it is held, always, with integrity.
