Tag: kashmir lockdown

Meeting Shahid, With Love

A biography of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali locates his life in his poetry and his many adventures.

Some students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, had on February 9, 2016, organised an event to mark the third anniversary of the execution of the 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. The event was disrupted by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and student leaders Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, and several others were accused of shouting “anti-national” slogans and later faced charges of sedition.

The name of the event was ‘The Country Without a Post Office’, after the seminal poem by Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, prompting Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader M. Venkaiah Naidu (then Union minister and current vice-president of India) to ask: “The heading of the poster says: ‘A country without a post office’. Is India without a post office?” A parliamentary debate and a Right to Information application seeking the number of post offices in India followed.

A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali
Manan Kapoor
Penguin (June 2021)

The heated conversations about the JNU event revealed the power of poetry to inspire and provoke that is often dismissed with glib quotes such as. “Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making”. As the political and social situation in Indian Kashmir has deteriorated since 2016, Ali’s poetry has become more and more poignant and appealing to Kashmiris and others trying to make sense of the violence and disruptions.

Now, a biography of the poet — A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Penguin, 2021) — tries to locate Ali’s poetry in his incredible life. The writer of this sleek biography is Manan Kapoor, whose novel The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2017.

In the Introduction to the book under review, Kapoor writes: “Throughout my bachelor’s degree, I was working on a novel set in Srinagar in the ’90s. Although I read numerous accounts of writers and journalists, I fell back, naturally, on Shahid’s collection The Country Without a Post Office, only to realise that no one—absolutely no one—was a match for him.”

This statement sets the tone for the rest of the book. Kapoor is an unrepentant Shahid fan and this shines through. It is perhaps nowhere more evident than his engagement with Ali’s poetry. Take for instance, his interpretation of Ali’s poem ‘After Seeing Kozintsev’s King Lear in Delhi’: “In the poem, Shahid makes a conscious choice as he turns from King Lear and looks at Zafar [Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ II, the last Mughal ruler] turning away from fiction towards fact, from the stories of the colonisers to the histories of the colonised. This turn marks an important moment in Shahid’s poetry, and it is from here that his poems and sensibility come to be defined by a certain post-colonial outlook.”

Kapoor goes on to explain how Ali shed the influence of the British and American poets he studied at Hindu College in the 1960s and subscribed to the syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture in India. (Early in the book we learn that Ali’s mother used to dress him as Krishna when he was a child for Janmashtami.) “Shahid often said… that he was able to bring certain flavours to English poetry in India for the first time,” adds Kapoor.

Another instance of this deep engagement with Ali’s poetry is evident in Kapoor’s interpretation of ‘Snow on the Desert’, where the poet combines his singular experience of driving past a fog-covered desert in Tucson, Arizona, and listening to Begum Akhtar sing in New Delhi:

In New Delhi one night
as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.

It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
Perhaps there were sirens,

air-raid warnings.
But the audience hushed did not stir.

Kapoor writes: “as he [Ali] drove past the fog-covered desert that divided the city very neatly, he realised that he was passing through a unique moment. He tried to find a comparable moment, but there was none. He realised that it was a moment ‘which refers only to itself’… One such unique moment occurred at a Begum Akhtar concert in New Delhi around the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, where there was a power cut at the venue.”

Ali’s poem continues:

The microphone was dead, but she went on
singing, and her voice
was coming from far
away, as if she had already died.

And just before the lights did flood her
again, melting the frost
of her diamond
into rays, it was, this turning dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can be heard, a time
to recollect
every shadow, everything the earth was losing.

The density of interpretation is the result of expansive, even tenacious, research. Kapoor reveals how research can face challenges of international politics: “After interviewing more than forty people and taking more than a dozen flights, I finally decided that the only place left to scour was the Agha Shahid Ali archives at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. However, there was a strange turn of events: I was denied a visa by the American embassy. Those were the years of the Trump administration, whose signature issue was immigration policy.”

Also read: The Portrait of a Poet

Kapoor traces the influence of different people in Ali’s life, such as his educationist, secular, cosmopolitan parents, Begum Akhtar, James Merrill, Faiz Ahmad Faiz; he interviews Shahid’s students, colleagues, and friends such as Patricia O’Neill, Amitav Ghosh, Izhar Patkin, or Kamila Shamsie; he traces various aspects of Ali’s growth as a poet and a person from Kashmir to Delhi to the US, while making no excuses for him. Kapoor gives us a glimpse into Ali’s rather practical career decisions by quoting a letter he wrote to his father: “I want to be in America for a few more years, and make some money. As you know, one cannot really make money in India—not as a professor. …the thing is: if I were in India, I would not be able to lead a swanky enough lifestyle… But given the international economy and the importance of the dollar, I could, whenever I visit India, be lavish.”

This desire for a lavish lifestyle might seem contradictory to the persona of a poet, but it shows Ali as a man of the world and makes his portrait in this biography more nuanced. It also relates to Ali’s lifelong attempt to separate his personality (such as his homosexuality) from his poetry, something he might have picked up from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent”, suggests Kapoor.

Kapoor arranges his research in neat, short chapters, each dealing with one aspect of Ali’s life. For instance, his relation to Begum Akhtar (‘Akhtari’), his translations of Faiz and intervention in the English ghazal (‘The Cry of the Gazelle’), his engagement with Kashmiri politics (‘Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere’) or his academic career (‘Shahid, the Teacher’). However, the pleasures of reading this book are somewhat marred by, to borrow a term from tennis, “unforced errors” of fact-checking.

For example, Kapoor writes that India was under colonial rule for “300 years” — whereas British colonial rule in India lasted only 190 years (1757-1947). Similarly, in another place, Kapoor, describing the Battle of Karbala, writes: “he [Ali] elucidates the importance of the battle, and how, years later, at the site of Karbala, Jesus wept.” Jesus, who predates Mohammed and Hussain by a few centuries, could never have wept at Karbala “years later”. This error is stranger because immediately after this, Kapoor quotes the correct historical sequence from Ali’s poem “From Amherst to Kashmir”: “At this site the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) will one day be killed.”

Such errors often make readers start thinking, if this is wrong, what else might be incorrect? Another issue with this book is the lack of a bibliography. While there are detailed endnotes and an index, the absence of a bibliography is intriguing.

Despite these, Kapoor’s book breaks new ground and will be essential reading for Agha Shahid Ali scholars in the future. It is also important for our times, especially for anyone interested in Indian poetry or Kashmir. On August 5, 2019, the government of India revoked Kashmir’s special status and brought it under the direct control of New Delhi. A brutal telecommunications lockdown followed and the Valley did literally turn into a place without any post office (or telephone and internet). Ali’s poetry was evoked repeatedly by Kashmiri — and other — writers protesting this move. Readers of this book will be able to better understand the contexts that inspired Ali. It might also serve as inspiration for a newer generation of poets and researchers.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published last year; he teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. Das Gupta writes a fortnightly column on poetry, ‘Verse Affairs’, for The Wire.

With Lockdown After Lockdown, J&K’s Already Marginalised Transgender Community is in Dire Straits

Unable to earn their livelihoods since August 2019 and dependent on overworked NGOs for survival, life for most trans people in the union territory is a kind of hell.

Srinagar: Three weeks ago, 31-year-old Mir Junaid was told about a transgender woman in downtown Srinagar who had suffered a minor heart attack and had no one to take care of her. His heart broke.

“I cannot explain how bad I felt as a human being at that time. She was left completely on her own,” said Junaid.

Junaid had been told of the trans woman’s plight by Khushi, a frontline worker and a trans woman herself. He has been touch with Khushi for the past one year when he and his friends began providing the highly marginalised transgender community in Jammu and Kashmir with rations.

Between the months-long military lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government in August 2019 when Article 370 was read down and the nationwide lockdown for the pandemic that was imposed almost immediately after, Kashmir’s economy has been severely crippled, pushing the trans community nearly to the edge of existence.

The four volunteers in Junaid’s small citizens’ collective, Haris, Ather, Uzair and Junaid himself, distribute food kits among the poor and needy of the transgender community.

“We distribute a ration kit including 25 kilos of rice, five litres of cooking oil, spices, tea, sugar and salt. Each kit costs us about Rs 2,500,” said Junaid.

His initiative is backed by the Delhi-based NGO Human Solidarity Foundation, which has helped by providing stock for the kits.

Years of discrimination

Junaid put together his small citizens’ collective when, one morning as he was on his way to work, his cousin phoned to say that he had heard that many trans people were running short of basic necessities.

Curious to know if the community had had aid during the various lockdowns that had ended their livelihoods, Junaid learned that most NGOs were too pressured already to be able to take care of any one particular community. That meant, Junaid thought, that he needed to provide an alternative.

Guided by Khushi, Junaid learned of about 400 trans people in Jammu and Kashmir in dire need of help. So far he and the other volunteers have managed to provide ration kits for about a hundred people. “The 300 others are on our list,” said Junaid.

Khushi, who lives on the outskirts of Srinagar city, is a makeup artist whose work has been drastically affected since Article 370 was read down in 2019. Before August 2019, Khushi routinely earned up to Rs 30,000 for one makeup session. Since Article 370 was read down, however, she hasn’t earned even a paisa.

Also read: Eviction Fear Heightens as Lockdown Signals Loss of Livelihood for Transgender People

“I used to help my family with my earnings. They were dependent on me,” said Khushi. “But right now it is the opposite.”

In Kashmir, the transgender community has been facing discrimination for years. Many trans people have been rejected by their families and live in terrible conditions, sidelined by both society and the government.

“We received mixed responses from the people around us when we started helping the trans community,” said Junaid. “Some people appreciate what we are doing but some also shame us.”

The four volunteers, however, do not care what people think of them. “Our religion says that we have to look after every human being, so it doesn’t matter how people look at us,” Junaid said.

Processes of pain

The trans community in Kashmir has limited options for work. Some sing at wedding ceremonies, some work as matchmakers and a few work as makeup artists.

A trans woman who requested anonymity said that she had earlier worked as a matchmaker, but her business has been severely affected since August 2019.

“We don’t get work now because we cannot move from one place to another or reach out to families,” she said.

In May 2020, a decision was taken by the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Council, headed by the then Lieutenant Governor Girish Chandra Murmu, to grant the transgender community a monthly pension under an integrated social security scheme.

The scheme would have enabled trans people to receive monthly financial assistance of Rs 1,000, the same amount provided to the homeless, the elderly, widows, divorcees, orphans and disabled individuals who have minimal to no income.

But according to Aijaz Bund, an activist with the Sonzal Welfare Trust which works with Jammu and Kashmir’s LGBTQIA+ community, most trans people have not been able to avail of the scheme.

“The process is lengthy,” Bund explained. “They have to submit a certificate as proof of their transgender status to avail of the facility and most of them do not have it.”

Even the recently announced government scheme of free rations during the pandemic for those who live below the poverty line and those who hold Antyodaya Anna Yojana cards has not helped.

Most trans people live in rented accommodation and don’t even have a ration card, explained Bund.

Living on the edge

On June 2, 2021, Bund filed a Public Interest Litigation in court asking for exclusive vaccination rights for the trans community.

“Every day, the administration releases statistics of men and women affected by COVID-19, but there is no mention of trans people, as if they do not exist,” said Bund.

The administration has also not conducted a specific awareness campaign for the people of the trans community that would inform them of the vaccination process.

“We recently did a survey and found out that only 60 to 70 trans people have come forward for vaccinations. The others have apprehensions,” he said.

The lockdowns have also increased violence among the trans community of Jammu and Kashmir, said Bund. Those trans people who live with their families have been making SOS calls to the Sonzal Welfare Trust, complaining of domestic violence and mental abuse.

“There has been a steep rise in these cases since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Bund.

Srinagar: Journalists Allege Manhandling by Police Amidst Clashes at Jamia Masjid

The police also summoned Fahad Shah, the editor of Kashmir Walla, in connection with a video story and a news item that appeared on the outlet’s Twitter handle.

Srinagar: Two journalists in Srinagar were allegedly manhandled by the Jammu and Kashmir police on Friday when an incident of stone-pelting broke out outside the Jamia Masjid.

The 619-year-old mosque in the city has been a political citadel of Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, who was expected to be released from his 19-month long house detention on March 5, before authorities decided against the move, prompting an outcry from his supporters.

Shafat Farooq, a multimedia journalist at BBC Urdu, said doctors at Bone and Joint Hospital Srinagar diagnosed him with a “soft injury” on his back and gave him medication. The Wire has seen a copy of his hospital card confirming the injury. According to Farooq, he was caught on the wrong side of the clashes between police and protesters and was assaulted. “I joined my fellow journalists when the police came towards us and started chasing us,” he said. “While they ran away, I pulled up near a police van near a safer area and that’s when I felt something heavy ramming against my back. It was butt of a gun that a cop was holding. I immediately fled,” he said.

Saqib Majeed, a photojournalist whose work has been featured in several international publications, alleged that a police officer held him violently to point of “choking”. The police, however, strongly denied the claim and said they only intended to stop journalists from entering the premises of the mosque.

“There was already a ruckus inside the mosque because worshippers were probably angry when they realised that Mirwaiz was not arriving,” Majeed said. “Then we heard a commotion and went outside. I put myself on the side of the police. That’s what we always do. When police began chasing the protesters, I also raced down the street leading to the mosque for a better angle. That’s when an officer wrapped an arm around my neck,” he said.

A group of journalists later confronted the police over the assault. The confrontation was filmed and put on social media showing cops engaging in a heated verbal exchange with the reporters and camerapersons.

Also read: Srinagar: Kashmir Press Club Condemns Assault of 2 Photojournalists by Police

Farooq said he then returned to editing at the Kashmir Press Club office in Srinagar. “Later, my back began to hurt. My colleagues insisted I visit the hospital where doctors did an X-ray. For a full night, I was in pain but in the morning I began feeling better.”

Both Farooq and Majeed acknowledged that police apologised for the behaviour.

A political-religious pulpit

On Saturday, an eerie silence enveloped the area of Nowhatta where the Jamia Masjid is located. Store-owners and rickshaw drivers around the mosque said that they were not present at the scene at the time of clashes. Inside the mosque’s premises, the litter left in the wake of Friday’s clashes was being cleaned. Teenagers and tourists were posing for photographs at the fountain located at the centre of the mosque.

Jamia Masjid rose to prominence as a political-religious pulpit in the late 19th century and the hereditary title of Mirwaiz has been in vogue since 1901 starting with Moulvi Rasul Shah.

Mridu Rai, a professor of history at Presidency University Kolkata, writes that the “The dastarbandi (tying of turban) ceremonies in 1931 of the new Mirwaiz, Maulvi Atiqullah, who succeeded Maulvi Ahmadullah on his death, showed how closely the Anjuman-i-Nusrat-ul-Islam – the office of Mirwaiz and elite Kashmiri Muslims associated with him – founded by Rasul Shah in 1899, had come to be tied to the Dogra maharaja of Kashmir.”

Later in the mid-1960s, Mirwaiz threw in his lot with the Holy Relic Restoration Movement leading the effort under the banner of the Action Committee — a name it continues to use to this day, often interchangeably with the All Party Hurriyat Conference.

The Jamia Masjid mosque in Srinagar. Photo: Shakir Mir

In his first press interview since the scrapping of Article 370, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq said that the police had arrived at his house on Thursday evening to inform him that he was still under detention in spite of reports appearing in the media that the J&K government was expected to end his house arrest. “I am surprised that India’s home minister told parliament that no one was under house arrest in J&K but here I am cooped inside my house from the last 19th months,” he told BBC Urdu.

The announcement of his release was being interpreted as the Indian government’s attempt to relax the political and security stranglehold over the region put in place since August 2019. Recently, India signed two back-to-back peace agreements with China and Pakistan laying down directions to secure a ceasefire along the Line of Control (LoC) and a de-escalation of tensions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Speculations also abound that the agreements had been facilitated by third parties including the US and UAE.

Deteriorating press freedom

The incident has renewed concerns over the decline in press freedom in the erstwhile state, which has been subject to several restrictions that critics believe severely undermine the ability of journalists to report without fear.

The police also summoned Fahad Shah, the editor of Kashmir Walla, an English language weekly in connection with a video story and a news item that appeared on the outlet’s Twitter handle and the website.

Also read: Why Journalists Are Worried About the New Media Policy in Jammu and Kashmir

When his colleagues put out tweets and raised alarm over his summoning to the Safa Kadal police station in Srinagar, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based watchdog, took notice of the matter and urged authorities to release Shah immediately. “Srinagar police summoned Fahad Shah, the editor of The Kashmir Walla, today at 6:30 pm in relation to a news story published by the outlet, according to his colleague Yashraj Sharma,” it said in a tweet. “Shah is yet to come out of the police station, Sharma added. CPJ demands his immediate release.”

At 10:02 pm, Fahad tweeted out the confirmation of his release. “They had called me in connection with an FIR filed on May 19 when the police objected to our coverage of the gun-battle that had taken place in Nawa Kadal,” he told The Wire. “Police said I was exaggerating the incidents”

Shah described his conversation with police officials as polite and civil. “They eventually allowed me to go.”

Fahad was thrice summoned by the police last year in connection with his news reports. He said his repeated appearances before the police have brought about a sense of fear amongst his family members who have urged him to leave India. “I already have several offers to work abroad. But I chose to stay here and commit myself to honest and no-holds-barred journalism.”

Shah is an alumnus of SOAS University of London where he was enrolled as a Felix scholar in 2013. He has also edited an anthology, Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir, published by Tranquebar Press. He is currently working on two books. He is also a correspondent at the Christian Science Monitor, an American newspaper and has been featured in publications like Time Magazine, Atlantic, Guardian and Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. “I can simply go and work in the US and UK. But I feel I should stay in Kashmir and contribute to this place in spite of such a suffocating and press-averse environment,” he said.

His publication, awarded a grant last year by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris based nonprofit that aims to safeguard the right to freedom of information, is already short of funds. “The grant has dried out and now we can only survive on payments sourced from our readers,” he said.

Also read: Kashmir: FIR Against Journalist After Tehsildar Vows Revenge Over Demolition Drive Report

India’s press freedom ranking has seen a consistent decline over the last few years. Last week, Freedom House downgraded India’s status from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ and among the reasons listed for this demotion was Modi government’s crackdown on “expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters”.

Authorities in J&K have also issued a slew of new policies that restrict media freedom. In 2020, the Department of Information and Public Relations J&K enacted a media policy that threatens to strike off newspapers from official empanelment and punish reporters and editors for “anti-national” coverage.

Last year J&K police charged two Kashmiri journalists under anti terrorism laws. FIRs have also been lodged against Peerzada Ashiq, a reporter with The Hindu, Sajad Gul, journalism student at Central University in Ganderbal, Yashraj Sharma, senior editor at Kashmir Walla and Mir Junaid and Qazi Shibli, who work for The Kashmiriyat, an online news venture.

Previously, the J&K government also pulled advertisements from newspapers allegedly over their coverage. Last month, authorities de-empanelled 34 newspapers, suspended ads for 13 and issued notices to 17 for alleged “malpractice”.

Last year, the government also seized the office of the Srinagar bureau of the Kashmir Times newspaper.

The Wire reached out to Superintendent of Police Sandeep Gupta, who featured in several videos in connection with the incident, with queries about the alleged assault. However, he hung up on the call citing unfamiliarity with the reporter. The Wire has sent a message to Gupta and this article will be updated when a response is received.

Shakir Mir is a Srinagar-based journalist.

Internet Restrictions in J&K Are Undermining the Supreme Court’s Orders

A year since the apex court’s verdict, the ban on high-speed internet remains firmly in place, making Kashmir the world’s most digitally starved region.

On Friday, January 22, the Jammu and Kashmir government issued yet another order authorising the extension of a 4G ban in the Union territory. It has become a fortnightly ritual in the former state where such orders are met with a mix of indifference and exasperation.

But prolonging the ban for months, without interruption, risks undermining the significance of the Supreme Court’s intervention in Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India case in January last year. Couched in the diction of lofty idealism, the judgment had stopped short of declaring internet access a fundamental right and also did not call for the restoration of internet services in J&K.

But the court endorsed the principle of proportionality for internet shutdowns while reading procedural safeguards into the Telecom Suspension Rules. Henceforth all such suspension orders were supposed to be made publicly available, a timeframe for suspension specified and a review committee set up.

In Kashmir, where the legal basis for internet blackouts has previously remained shrouded in secrecy, the judgment paved the way for a more transparent framework. The Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) in its first-ever report on Internet shutdowns has observed that the J&K government had previously failed to furnish specific legal grounds for indefinite internet restrictions.

Instead, the report states, “the only public notifications…placed before the court were two vaguely worded “sample” orders issued by District Magistrates in two districts under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973, without outlining how these were related to the indefinite and complete internet shutdown across all Kashmir districts, how many other similar orders were passed, by whom, when or under what circumstances.”

Also read: As J&K 4G Ban Is Extended, SC Should Adjudicate and Not Wait For Restoration

The enactment of Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules 2017 pulled the brakes on the use of Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to authorise Internet shutdowns.

The Supreme Court in January last year held that blacking out internet services indefinitely is not permissible under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Service) Rules, 2017 as the suspension can only be availed temporarily and that all such orders are subject to judicial review.

This had inspired hope that the judiciary was finally placing checks on the executive. But a year has passed since the verdict came out and ban on high speed Internet remains firmly in place in J&K. With blackouts being enforced on and off as well, Kashmir is now the world’s most digitally starved region.

A man uses his mobile phone in the Kashmir Valley. Photo: Pracsshannt K/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

In Friday’s order, the government has cited “dissemination of seditions propaganda, terrorists inciting youth for furthering anti-India agenda and data services being used to facilitate infiltration” to justify the perpetuation of 4G ban. If a couple of such previous orders are reviewed, an interesting pattern emerges. In December 25 order, the government justifies the ban on apprehensions of “grenade attacks, infiltration and recruitment.”

On December 11, the government flagged “continuous attempts to radicalise the youth through social media.”On November 26, the J&K administration submitted that 4G will lead to “public disaffection and surge in terrorists activities.” On November 11, the ban was extended on grounds that “terrorists might dissuade the public from participating in (DDC) election process and attack political activists.”

So while purported imperatives necessitating the Internet restrictions in Kashmir always change, the 4G ban itself is uninterrupted, implying that its continuation is already pre-decided and the government only customarily puts out fresh reasons to justify the restrictions.

Also read: Can the Right to Internet Access Flow From the Right to Life?

Otherwise, with 140 encounters and 580 killings of which 159 are members of armed forces, 2018 was the most violent year in a decade in J&K. Yet only sixty-five internet shutdowns were enforced in 2018 compared to sixty-nine in 2020. And the 4G ban notwithstanding, the recruitment in 2020 turned out second highest in the last ten years. This indicates that the government may have been overhyping the connection between high-speed internet and militancy.

The threats of terror attacks, militant recruitment and infiltration are not new to J&K. Their intensity has been ebbing and flowing from the last thirty years. But what’s been totally new is the scale and severity of internet restrictions. With the J&K government successfully able to get around the system, the issue of restrictive internet is likely to turn more intractable.

Here’s why: In May last year, the Supreme Court, while refusing to order the restoration of 4G, directed the Centre to constitute a special committee to examine the contentions raised by the petitioners Foundation of Media Professionals (FMP) who challenged the prolonged ban on high-speed internet in J&K. The special committee, which is separate from the review committee, was supposed to consist of representatives from both the central and the Union territory governments. In essence, it meant that the court, on whom the constitution devolves powers to review the executive, was delegating the functions back to the executive, effectively “nullifying constitution,” as one lawyer put it.

The special committee reportedly held two meetings between May and June. As per Centre’s submission to the court, it had made certain decisions and also reviewed them but did not put this information in public as it was supposed to do, prompting FMP to seek contempt proceedings against the Union government.

A week later, the Centre filed an affidavit in court submitting that the special committee “considered all facets of the matter, including the feasibility of alternatives suggested by the petitioners as well as the recent occurrence of terrorism-related incidents in the region” and decided against restoring the 4G Internet in J&K – a decision it would review after two months.

On August 8, the court urged the government to explore whether it can relax the restrictions in certain areas in view of the statement by the former lieutenant governor of J&K G.C. Murmu who backed restoration of 4G.

Also read: The Throttling of Internet Speeds in Kashmir is Aimed at Fighting Ideas, Not Terrorism

The J&K administration restored 4G services in Udhampur and Ganderbal districts on a trial basis on August 16, but refused to extend high-speed mobile internet beyond these precincts citing inputs from security agencies about “terror modules trying to lure youths into terrorist organizations.”

Till now, there have been no further changes in this posturing even as people across J&K continue to reel from the most damaging form of internet deprivation, affecting their access to health care, their trade, commerce and education. Last week, the Private Schools Association of Jammu and Kashmir representing 3,800 institutions, filed a fresh affidavit seeking the ease of restrictions on the internet. It said that children in J&K were losing academic years because it’s impossible to conduct online classes using video-conferencing tools such as Zoom or WebEx at 2G mobile Internet speed.

The reasons for such obduracy on the part of government are obvious – the judiciary has been remarkably lenient with the Centre and whatever little measures it took to enforce checks and balances to secure civil liberties and fundamental rights have been conveniently circumvented by the Jammu and Kashmir administration.

Shakir Mir is a Srinagar based journalist.

From One Year of the Gag to the Next, ‘Normalcy’ in Kashmir Comes at a Price

Just when the central government was supposed to plan its course under the cold hand of reason, Modi’s pyromania in Kashmir comes with the potential to trigger a blowback that India may not afford.

Srinagar: From the central government’s perspective, the year that just ended signifies a triumph of sorts on the Kashmir front. Despite the fact that the Valley was still reeling from the chaotic aftermath of the end of its special constitutional status – the loss of statehood, its division into two, the world’s longest internet shutdown, mass detentions, a violent crackdown on protests and significant structural changes that Kashmiris would have never consented to – the year passed off peacefully. No uprising. “If Kashmiris are angry, then where is the unrest?” a senior police official casually asked me in early 2020. “Did you see anything happening?”

But an honest reading of events will tell us that the Centre is executing far reaching changes that will drastically alter the lives of Kashmiris as they know it with the support of a severe crackdown on any expression of dissent, thereby ensuring that no effective opposition or collective voice is ever mobilised. This, even as the rights of Kashmiris to their own legislature remain suspended, the right to protest or assembly denied, press freedoms abridged and modes of communication severely curtained, regulated and in many cases downright refused.

If this represents a triumph for the establishment, ordinary Indians too, in overwhelming numbers, are gripped by a sense of elation over the taming of the Kashmiris. In the popular view, the era of ‘appeasement’ that previous governments helped sustain has finally ended. In this telling, the ingratitude of Kashmiris – dissatisfied despite their ‘special status’ – needed a draconian response. Inaction breeds immunity. And immunity, a sense of entitlement – which was actually the reason why Kashmiris managed to annoy India this long, or so the logic goes. But is the Centre’s ‘solution’ really a solution? Will its monumental assault on civil freedoms, the crackdown on civil society, the climate of fear and intimidation engendered through vengeful and selective pursuit of cases by central agencies and detentions and the indiscriminate [mis]application of a host of draconian laws eventually produce the social and political obedience in Kashmir that Narendra Modi is promising?

A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officer patrols an empty street during a lockdown on the first anniversary of the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, in Srinagar August 5, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Danish Ismail

An economy that can’t breathe 

There’s one more aspect which has thrust its way into the lives of Kashmiri people: the economic strangulation. Two back-to-back lockdowns spanning an entire year have all but gutted trade and commerce in Kashmir accounting for the loss of Rs 40,000 crore and causing 5 lakh layoffs as internet closures forced entrepreneurs to flee, BPOs to wind up, artisans to lose contracts and the tourist business to crash. For a regional economy that contributes only 0.77% to India’s GDP, that forced diminution is excruciating. Add to this, the rising debt of business establishments. And while all of this was happening, the J&K government last month ordered banks to secure mortgaged properties within 60 days under the SARFESI Act, whose application to Kashmir in 2015 itself was a fairly controversial move since it contravened the provisions of the erstwhile Article 370. This astounding economic squeeze has percolated down to ordinary Kashmiris, resulting in an unprecedented financial crunch perhaps much harsher than the one inflicted during the economic blockade imposed upon Kashmiris in 2008.

Also read: With One Lockdown After Another, J&K’s Economy is Shuttered and Shattered

No room for peaceful protest

Under such conditions, it’s absurd to expect that Kashmiris can mount an uprising, at the cost of their lives, their peace of mind and their livelihood. In 2020, such a civil unrest – to which Kashmiris are not historically unaccustomed – could barely materialise given their present situation. Yet, a few days ago, I chanced upon a small video clip of India’s National Security Advisor where he credits the lack of unrest to the National Investigation Agency’s “efficient” work of tracking “terror funds” – a believable conjecture for a large majority of ‘patriotic’ Indians whose information deficiency regarding Kashmir is only matched by their zeal to look other way as the central government doubles down on the erosion of dignity of people in J&K.

Seventeen months after the ‘integration’ of J&K with the rest of India, Section 144 – which bars the assembly of more than four persons – is still in place and its enforcement has been unmistakably rigorous. Just wrap your head around this: Less than two percent of all individuals arrested in militancy-related cases have actually faced conviction in J&K even as jails across the Union territory are overflowing with prisoners beyond their carrying capacities with under trials accounting for 90% of inmates. This empirically confirms how mass detentions have been an indispensable tool in the hands of authorities in J&K, designed not to bring down crime, but to curb dissent and the right to peaceful political mobilisation. As any political scientist will tell you, it’s the violent suppression of peaceful political action that ultimately breeds violent militant response.

The detention of Shopian’s Waseem Ahmad Sheikh is a case in point. Waseem was detained as part of the crackdown to quell protests against the scrapping of Article 370 but the district’s top civil servant Yasin Choudhary – who authorised his detention – reportedly did not furnish the grounds. Here’s what J&K high court observed, before quashing Waseem’s PSA last month: “So far as the…non-communication of the grounds of detention is concerned, a perusal of file reveals, that there is nothing to show or suggest that the grounds of detention couched in the English language were explained to the (detainee) in a language understood by him…[and since]… there is no material to that effect on record…the grounds of a challenge set up by petitioner succeed and the detention stands vitiated.”

Kashmiris walk past broken window glass after clashes between protesters and the security forces on August 17, 2019, in Srinagar. Photo: Reuters/Danish Ismail

That means Waseem served 400-plus days of unlawful detention. How many such individuals like him continue to languish in jails under unlawful detentions is hard to ascertain since a majority of the over 600 habeas corpus petitions filed at the J&K high court since August 2019 remain pending, as per the J&K High Court Bar Association.

Since the likelihood of public protest was already thwarted, it was only natural for the administration to doggedly pursue individuals who used their freedom of expression – written, spoken or otherwise – as a means of registering annoyance or resentment against the government’s policies.

Social media clampdown

Hence, one of the first cases that J&K’s newly established Cyber Police lodged was of an open FIR under provisions of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) against individuals who accessed the internet through proxy networks and “propagated secessionist ideology”. Never mind that Section 66A of the IT Act was struck down by the Supreme Court way back in 2015. Later, the police went into overdrive, booking half a dozen people in less than one month for the nature of the content they posted on social media. The Cyber Police have also been accused of summoning Twitter users in Kashmir and intimidating them for their social media posts critical of the government. Some social media users alleged they were called to interrogation centers and subjected to beating.

Also read: ‘The Assault Is on Journalism’: An Interview With Kashmiri Journalist Gowhar Geelani

Under the UAPA, the J&K authorities have detained individuals for “provocative sermons”, for “playing cricket in memory of a dead militant”, “for organizing protest in university allegedly against bad quality of food” and for “shouting Azadi slogans during Ashura procession.”

Additionally, the Modi government, through the NIA, struck a mortal blow on human rights activism in Kashmir. On allegations that funds were being raised abroad to support “separatist activities” in J&K, the agency raided the offices of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) both of whom have been influential in documenting the scale and intensity of rights violations in Kashmir. In fact it was the reports of the JKCCS that formed the backbone of the first ever human rights report published by UN Human Rights Council in 2018 calling for an international inquiry into multiple rights violations in Kashmir. On the other hand, APDP – supported by grants from the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture –has produced damning reports on cases of alleged enforced disappearances in Kashmir. Its founding members were felicitated with the prestigious Rafto Peace Prize in 2017. The seizure of USB drives and documents from the APDP office have led to fear of reprisals against victims of alleged torture and enforced disappearances who had recorded their testimonies with the NGO anonymously.

Censorship by any other name

But it was ultimately press freedom in Kashmir which bore the worst assault of the crackdown in 2020, with the police lodging various cases against journalists and editors.  In April, the police booked noted photojournalist Masrat Zahra under UAPA for uploading a picture of Shia demonstrators carrying a poster of slain militant Burhan Wani. A day later, the police also booked journalist and commentator Gowhar Geelani for activities deemed “prejudicial to the integrity of India.” Similarly, an FIR was registered against Peerzada Ashiq, a correspondent with The Hindu newspaper whom the police accused of “inaccurate reporting.” Naseer Ganai, who reports for Outlook magazine was summoned for reporting about a strike call issued by the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. At least twice, the police summoned Fahad Shah, editor of a Kashmir based weekly magazine. His publication has accorded fearless coverage to allegations of human rights abuse by the security forces.

File photo of journalists protesting against the restrictions on the internet and mobile phone networks at the Kashmir Press Club during the lockdown in Srinagar last year. Photo: PTI

Editor Qazi Shibli, who previously served internment for nine months under PSA for reporting about the surge in troop deployments, was detained again in August and later released. When a Kashmiri journalist, Auqib Javeed, reported on the Cyber Police’s alleged harassment of social media users, he was slapped by a police officer and threatened with legal action – although the police officially denies this. During the recent District Development Council elections, three reporters associated with national TV media also accused a senior police officer from South Kashmir of assaulting them when they attempted to verify allegations of voting being stopped in favour of BJP candidates. Furthermore, the J&K government also sealed the Srinagar office of Kashmir Times newspaper, claiming misuse of the property. Its editor Anuradha Bhasin, was lead petitioner in the Supreme Court against the internet shutdown and communications blockade in Kashmir.

The alarming frequency of these incidents underscores the tough conditions under which reporting takes place in Kashmir. It also means that the Modi government has acted vindictively against modes of communication over which it does not exercise full control. Capping all these developments is the new Media Policy spelt out by the government, which empowers the authorities to strike off journalists from official empanelment, refuse accreditation, pull out advertisements and also punish publications for “anti-national” reporting. With these draconian provisions read into the official policies, censorship in Kashmir has become institutionalised. For state functionaries, it no longer remains an offence whose likelihood of commission is determined by the lack of accountability.

Also read: Why Journalists Are Worried About the New Media Policy in Jammu and Kashmir

The gag policy has been so stringent and pervasive that even Kashmir’s high court bar association was not spared. Two months ago, it was barred from holding any elections until it clarified its position on terming Kashmir a disputed territory. The order was passed under the aegis of senior civil servant Shahid Choudhary. Even the last surviving vestiges of democratic checks and balances in Kashmir are facing unprecedented erasure. In 2020, the number of cases of no-response from authorities to various RTI applications rose alarmingly, rendering this important weapon against official subterfuge toothless.

But why is such a harsh, broad-based crackdown still continuing despite the government successfully containing the fallout of revocation of special status? That’s because the Aug 5, 2019 decision was a superficial, if symbolic, intervention. The real changes were instituted over the past 12 months.

Marginalising a people in their own homeland

The central government in January reduced the share of native candidates entering the all India civil services from 50% to 33%, which means there will be an increase of non-local officers in J&K who run the police and civil administration. The same month, an IPS officer who never served in Kashmir was given sweeping authority over security and policing, including direct control over the reshuffling of SHOs.

The administration has earmarked 6200 acres of land across J&K for proposed corporate takeover, reassigned Srinagar airport’s security from the J&K Police to the CISF, opened mineral resource extraction to non-local bidders and annulled the five year relaxation for J&K civil service aspirants. It has empowered the armed forces to declare any area as ‘strategic’ and permit constructions outside the Cantonment board and narrowed down judicial recourse for locals who many stand to suffer in case of a corporate takeover.

It also enacted policies that incentivise housing for slum dwellers and low income groups – whose presence in Kashmir is sparse but who, coming from various parts of India, could be encouraged to settle in UT. It enacted policies that abridge the authority of future chief ministers by undermining their power to take decisions concerning the civil service, police and anti-corruption bureau.

A man rows his boat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, India, September 12, 2020. Photo: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Athar Parvaiz

The Modi government also cleared the decks for imposition of a new property tax in the UT that political parties believe “will overburden people who are struggling to make ends meet”. It also ended the 131 year reign of Urdu as sole official language of the J&K, amended the Panchayati Raj Act and made DDCs electable through direct vote, consigning sarpanches into irrelevance. The J&K government is now allowed to advance the retirement age of officials to 48 years, escalating fears that employees dissenting with the state’s political view might be declared as “deadwood and axed” without the matter going to court or tribunal.

Most significantly, it opened J&K land to outsiders, liberalised criteria to acquire domicile with provisions for punishment against officials if they failed to furnish it expeditiously, overturned the historic land reforms of Sheikh Abdullah and enacted laws that make the stay of migrant labourers in J&K attractive. It attempted to weaponise the Roshini act to squeeze our more land from Kashmiris but scrambled to file a review petition in court, challenging some on its own contentions, when people in Jammu erupted in anger as the revocation of law affected them more.

All these changes and manoeuvres only reaffirm the suspicion of Kashmiris that the Modi government is seeking to alter the demographic composition of J&K, marginalise them in their own land, erode structures of self-government, disempower them politically and then muzzle all voices of protest. The Indian state is literally creating a pressure-cooker situation in Kashmir.

Also read: The Second Sale Deed of Jammu and Kashmir

The new ‘normal’

Does that make Kashmir normal? Yes, by throwing the Indian constitution to the wind and violating various international rights declarations to which India is a signatory. By incurring denunciations and disapproval from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNHRC, CPJ, RSF, Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, top European and American lawmakers, international academics, journalists and publications. And by precipitously slipping down on several indices measuring the health of democracy, human rights, press freedom and independence of judiciary. The Indian government has certainly put together conditions in Kashmir which convey some semblance of “normalcy” – if that’s how we describe the lack of civil and political unrest. But how long will that “normalcy” sustain in the region, trapped as it were, in the mix of political experimentation, severe repression, simmering anger, military and police excesses, lack of democracy and civil freedoms and a judiciary that looks the other way?

Then there is also China, which has emerged as a new player in the whole scheme of things. Let’s not forget that Beijing is under obligation to demonstrate to the “Quad” that its supremacy will remain unchallenged in the region. The next few years are, therefore, crucial. And just when the Indian government was supposed to plan its course under the cold hand of reason, Modi’s pyromania in Kashmir comes with the potential to trigger a blowback that India may not afford.

 Shakir Mir is a Srinagar based journalist.

How to Teach the Social Sciences to Postgraduate Students in Kashmir – Over 2G Speed

Mere days ago, the Jammu and Kashmir administration decreed, yet again, that high speed internet will not be restored in the Union Territory barring two districts.

Postgraduate studies in the comforts of a metro city and animated with the exchange of ideas, was a privilege that was easy to acknowledge but obscure to understand.

Today, as someone who teaches postgraduate students in Kashmir over 2G network speed, I am faced with the task of introducing texts and complex ideas to my students, who for over one year have not had access to regular university facilities. 

Mere days ago, the Jammu and Kashmir administration decreed, yet again, that high speed internet will not be restored in the Union Territory, barring Ganderbal and Udhampur districts, because of reasons related to national security.

In the communications blackout since the Article 370 was scrapped, Kashmir was cut off from the world and students lost a semester worth of classes.

Then, the COVID-19 lockdown came, necessitating use of technology for the flow of ideas and information. The technospaces of Kashmir are characterised by absolute control of communications – electronic and mechanical. Much has already been written about the complete communications blockade since August 5, 2019. The blockade has transported Kashmir to the Stone Ages. However, the impact of this blockade on the education sector has been much worse than any comparison to our primate ancestors.

Since I started teaching, it has always been my belief that students in the social sciences are unusually perceptive. This, in spite of the fact that many choose to study social sciences as a backup option, after not being able to qualify for professional courses.

Given the conflict, I find that students in Kashmir are able to locate power and engage with the capillaries of the Foucauldian Panopticon with such relative ease that it would leave faculty in bigger universities envious.

Kashmiri college students teach children inside a house in an Anchar neighbourhood, during restrictions in the immediate aftermath of August 5. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

Yet, it is one thing that a young mind can intuitively decipher the operations of power and another thing to train that mind to channel this intuition as an analytical tool.

A classroom is meant to be a safe space, a space where students and teachers can exchange ideas, where teachers are supposed to push the cognitive boundaries of young minds so that they can engage with their social, cultural, political and economic context better.

However, given that one does not know the extent to which online spaces are compromised by profit-oriented companies or by authorities, this task has been difficult to achieve and has led many to self-censor.

I teach my students over an erratic 2G connection where calls keep getting disconnected. Thus teachers often switch their video feed off and so do students. Students also turn their microphones off so that background sounds does not interrupt the lecture.

Also read: ‘Online Classes’ Make Mockery of Kashmir’s Students Who Haven’t Attended Classes in a Year

Usually, it takes me at least a few minutes to be able to share my screen with my students, and then too I need to enlarge the shared screen for the benefit of those who access classes on phones. There have been times when I discuss important points in a key text, and realise only later that connection (either mine or the students’) was weak and so, at least some of them could neither hear me nor see my screen for a while.

Imagine teaching social science classes for a over a semester now, without being able to see your students, gauge their expressions or ensure that they are mentally or physically present in the lecture or discussion.

Teachers have found the key skills of articulation and framing questions difficult to encourage among students, as they are unable to meet or see them.

Further, on 2G speed it is nearly impossible to attach bigger files – like books or power points. Last month, I needed to share a student’s presentation with the audience of an international seminar where they were scheduled to present. It took me nearly a day to attach that presentation to an email. As students cannot download or share relevant texts at this speed (especially students in their dissertation phase) questions related to access have become important.

A life drawing class for art students over a Zoom internet livestream. Photo: Reuters

This speed also makes it difficult to share readings for classwork or give assignments, usually over private Google Classroom accounts. During last semester’s final exams, I had to grant extended time to students in certain parts of South Kashmir where gunfights had led to a complete internet shutdown.

Naturally, the quality of education has suffered colossally. And students have been at the receiving end of this.

Not only is the 2G connection erratic, if you have students who are not from urban centres, you can be assured that most of them will have a localised internet shutdown once or twice a month for few days because of ‘encounters’ or gunfights between militants and security forces.

All of this is compounded by the fact that many students in Kashmir do not own personal laptops or have access to private broadband connections (which were only restored in March this year). Teachers have had to remember that not all students have access to the same technology.

This point is of significant importance in the current context, where due to a continued lockdown of 13 months, students have found it hard even to meet university fee requirements. It is therefore imperative to understand that students from rural areas or economically weaker sections find it even harder to access the same education as compared their more privileged classmates.

Situated as the students are in a conflict area, many have lost loved ones to the conflict and some have even lost their homes (or homes of their friends and relatives), which have been gutted during gunfights. They have grown up in highly controlled environments where freedom of expression and movement is restricted – if not penalised – and where parents live under constant fear of their children’s security.

Also read: Beaten for Demanding Internet Access, Balochistan Students Draw Parallels With Kashmir

As if being young is not difficult enough, youth here need to reconcile their reality with what has been projected to them as normal by popular culture.

Many of my students, across disciplines, have contacted me telling me that they find it pointless to attend classes online in the current scenario. They speak of a sense of detachment from their surroundings and the difficulty of opening up about these  confusing feelings to their families.

They are anxious and isolated, and the lack of adequate mental health infrastructure only aggravates this problem.

A student of mine had stopped attending classes after he was unable to access therapy and medication in his village. His situation did not allow him to travel to one of the cities for regular therapy. It took a great measure of support from his peers and personal strength, for him to rejoin regular classes against all these odds.

Lastly, students who completed their degrees in the last year could not apply for fellowships, scholarships and admissions abroad and in India. I had students who would request relatives, friends or acquaintances outside Kashmir to download forms and books for them and then arrange for these to be sent to them.

Journalists use the internet as they work inside a government-run media centre in Srinagar January 10, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Danish Ismail

Social media and broadband was only restored in March 2020 at 2G speed, granting Kashmiris access to all websites – between January and March only limited ‘whitelisted’ websites were accessible in Kashmir. But by the end of March, the admission process is past application deadlines for most universities. Similarly, many research scholars could not apply for or renew their fellowships and scholarships.

Also read: No Social Media, Full Data Access to Cops: Kashmir Internet to Come With 6 Conditions

The university where I teach has worked with the student council to address many of the issues raised here. And these issues reflect only some of the challenges that students and faculty in the higher education sector in Kashmir face. 

However, the solutions to the woes afflicting the education sector, specifically the higher education sector, can only come through systemic policy level changes, which should include the immediate restoration of regular speed internet and clear directives on digital surveillance.

There is much that needs to be done to study the impact of the internet restrictions on the education sector in Kashmir. 

Khatija Khader completed her Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has worked as a campaigner with Amnesty International India and with Centre for Equity Studies. At present, she is teaching International Relations at the Centre for International Relations, Islamic University for Science and Technology (IUST), which is located in Awantipora, Kashmir.

Kashmiri Editors Can’t Use Fear as an Excuse for Their Continued Silence

Kashmir’s media story is encouraging and disappointing. While some have undertaken pathbreaking journalism, others have gradually begun to succumb to pressures from the government.

Tazia processions during Muharram in Kashmir have rarely been event-free in the last three decades. This year however marked a departure for another reason.

As clashes erupted between mourners and the police in Srinagar on the ninth and tenth day of the Ashura on August 29 and 30, teargas shells and pellets were fired, slogans of Azadi were raised and stone-pelting broke the calm of the procession, the local newspapers responded with a conspicuous silence even as the scale of brutality surpassed those of previous incidents.

In the past, claims and counterclaims have been common after processions have gone awry. The recurrent cycle where the police and the locals blame the other for the provocation – effectively reducing the debate of whether police brutality preceded the sloganeering and stone-pelting or vice versa to a chicken and egg story – has come to occupy the columns of local newspapers in recent decades.

This year, the story all but disappeared – interestingly on the day that the world observes as the Day of Enforced Disappearances – instead papered by bold headlines of ‘Religious fervour’ of the Muharram processions. Evidently, many believed that the story didn’t merit any further coverage or was reduced to a footnote.

What was glossed over by the local newspapers, however, was splashed across social media on the evening of August 29 with appalling images of pellet riddled bodies and faces. The story figured prominently in some sections of the national and the international media the next day and was pursued by many others the day after that.

Since last year, particularly after the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill was passed, Article 370 of the constitution was scrapped and a stringent lockdown accompanied the developments, local journalism has been in a state of stupor. While many professionals have struggled to keep the news alive and ward off any attempts to suppress the flow of information despite a communications blockade in place, multiple forms of intimidation and the launching of an Orwellian Media Policy 2020, the Valley’s leading newspapers have chosen to keep their publications alive by killing news stories and burying all morals of journalism.

For over a year, I have grappled with the question of ethics – whether as an editor of the newspaper Kashmir Times, I might be crossing the principled stand of commenting on the content and conduct of ‘rival’ newspapers, and thus held my peace.

But a race driven by purely material considerations is not my line of work. More importantly, when the actions of some affect a trend impacting journalism as a whole – and perilously so – it is important to speak out. In Jammu and Kashmir, the powerful dailies dictate the kind of journalism that the rest are obliged to follow, unless they choose to be out of sync with the rest and face consequences.

A man with pellet injuries is treated inside a house in a neighbourhood where there have been regular clashes with security forces following restrictions after the government scrapped the special constitutional status for Kashmir, in Srinagar August 14, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Danish Ismail

When a bevy of newspapers agree to fall in line, without a whimper, the going becomes even tougher for the rest, including weekly and monthly publications as well as freelancers, many of who are courageously struggling to speak out and facing risks.

Also read: How Free is the Media in the Kashmir Valley?

Notable is the case of the editor of The Kashmir Walla, Fahad Shah, who was summoned by the Cyber Police and twice faced an interrogation for one particular report. I do not intend to take any high moral ground. As journalists, we go about the daily rigours of negotiating multiple challenges, including occupational hazards and deadlines for work, imperfectly. The excessive risks media professionals, particularly Kashmir based editors, are exposed also deserves acknowledgement. But when the very foundational principles of journalism stand compromised, there is a need for introspection. The idea behind writing this article is to initiate this much-needed debate.

Needless to say, it has been a tight-rope walk for media personnel in Jammu and Kashmir, particularly in the Valley, since last year. But despite the logistical impediments of operating without a communication system and in an intimidating climate of partial bans where journalists are criminalised or summoned repeatedly, many brave journalists have resisted all kinds of pressures to ensure that news about Kashmir does not absolutely spiral down the black-hole. The counter to the state’s narrative has made headlines in the national and international media due to their admirable efforts.

Are the pressures more exacting on local media organisations which have largely preferred to remain silent and submit to the powers that be over pursuing ethical journalism? The consideration of advertisements and finances apart, in July 2019, editors of two Kashmir based newspapers were grilled for several days by National Investigating Agency (NIA) as part of an investigation into a case of “terror funding”.

When August 5, 2019, descended, with the gagging and muzzling of dissent, newspapers completely lost their voice, even as some continued to be printed in their truncated forms and with content that was out of sync with the existing situation of the time. Setting aside the arrests, torture and human rights violations, the absence of reporting on the impact of a stringent lockdown on the day-to-day lives of ordinary humans and the devastating blow to the health and education sector was so pervasive, it ended up legitimising the myth of ‘normalcy’ that the government was labouring to showcase.

Even as editors were caught in a situation with a lack of choices, with two essentials vital for the existence of newspapers – local news and political comment – gone, the publications were reduced to mere shadows of their former selves. A year on, while some of this has been salvaged, the readers are judging the newspapers, not on the basis of what was reported but what was not.

The absence of the news on pellet gun injuries becomes an important case study in assessing the state of media in Kashmir and the interplay between journalism and its readers. What disappeared or appeared in a muted form on August 30, after the first day of the brutal crackdown on the Muharram processions, resurfaced, mostly apologetically on August 31, after the newspapers faced a severe backlash from Kashmiris on the social media.

Also read: In Kashmir, the State Sees Media as Being ‘Part of the Problem’

One of the leading dailies, Greater Kashmir, in a report on August 30 titled ‘Ashura Today’, detailed the significance of Muharram procession in the opening paragraphs, and dismissed in two small paragraphs – which figured at the fag end of the report – that “the police used tearsmoke shells at Hamdania Colony Bemina” to disperse the procession leading to “injuries to mourners”. It also added that “The mourners alleged that metallic pellets were also fired on them. A couple of youth sustained pellet injuries.”

The Rising Kashmir blacked out the Muharram procession completely, neither carrying the ‘religious fervour’ associated with it, nor the disruptions to it. The Kashmir Reader published on August 30 dismissed in six small sentences a news item titled, ‘Restrictions in parts of Srinagar to prevent Muharram procession’, barely mentioning some barricades manned by police and CRPF.

What was missing on August 30 found a cautious and guarded presence in print the next day. The criticism on social media surrounding the lack of coverage of pellet injuries by local newspapers brought the news into focus the next day, even though the report about the ‘religious fervour marking the 10th day Ashura procession’ dwarfed the violent scenes on the road.

A newspaper vendor in Srinagar, Kashmir. Credit: Reuters/Danish Ismail

A newspaper vendor in Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo: Reuters/Danish Ismail

The Greater Kashmir published, on August 31, the news titled, ‘Two dozen mourners injured as police use force to stop Muharram processions in Kashmir‘ and a strap that read, ‘Our men too received injuries: SSP Srinagar’. It said that two dozen mourners sustained injuries from police action and two youth sustained pellet injuries. It went on to mention:

“The authorities imposed restrictions and blocked the roads to stop processions in some parts of the valley.
Several main Muharram processions have been banned by the government in Kashmir since 1990.
The clashes started after police deployed in huge numbers in Zadibal tried to stop a large procession. The mourners in turn clashed with the police who restored to tear gas shelling and fired pellets. The police also lathi-charged the mourners.”

The rest of the news article (about nine paragraphs) was dedicated to the police version of the events.

The Rising Kashmir, in its edition of August 31, carried the Muharram story titled ‘Amid COVID-19 restrictions, curbs, Ashura observed in Kashmir‘ and straps that read, ‘Clashes reported in Zadibal areas, Police officer among several injured; Rich tributes paid to Hazrat Hussain (RA) and other Karbala martyrs’. The news, an overall round-up of various Muharram processions in Jammu and Kashmir and Kargil, also made a cursory reference to the violent happenings of the day by saying:

“Later in the day, mourners gathered at Kathimaidan and tried to come on the main road in shape of the procession. Police used tear smoke shells and disperse them.
A Police official said that the mourners resorted to stone pelting at Kathimaidan.
A Selection Grade Constable Showkat Ahmed (1007/s) from Police Station Soura sustained head injuries.”

The Kashmir Reader on August 31 published a report ‘Restrictions mark Ashura’ as its second lead story and a smaller box item under it, with a detailed news item titled ‘Mourners hit by pellets in eyes writhing in pain’. The report was based on the version of some eye-witnesses, a doctor, and pellet injured victims including a man who said, “I have forty pellets inside my eyes”.

Also read: Shujaat Bukhari: A Saga of Courage and Empathy

Last year, the news about a protest in Soura, a locality in Srinagar, where hundreds of demonstrators had occupied a park with banners opposing the ‘abrogation of Article 370’ and an incident of violent clashes between protestors and security forces, was first broken by the BBC within days of the imposition of restrictions.

The Indian government responded to the report with an abject denial. Some Indian and foreign media organisations reported the same, one reported on how young men were using the mosque to mobilise the public in the area. Few others reported about young men being wounded by shotgun pellets and another reported that a young man had jumped into the Jhelum river that flows through the city to rescue himself. Some outlets also reported about cases of those who had been injured by pellet and were refusing to visit hospitals and were being treated by self-trained locality experts working with basic antiseptics and crude blades. The Indian state called these reports fake.

The handful of newspapers being printed from Srinagar maintained silent – they were cautious enough to even avoid reporting on the contested claims of both sides and instead cherry-picked ‘safer’ things to talk about. A contested incident about Kashmir and the controversy surrounding it, that garnered headlines in the foreign and national media, was not considered newsworthy enough in Kashmir.

They got away. Locked up in their homes with no internet connections or phones – probably also without any knowledge of the controversy or the incident – the readers made no public display of their disappointment.

What local newspaper organisations took for granted last year may no longer be possible. The overall shock and sense of fear that germinated last year has begun to wear off. The two days of coverage on the latest spree of pellet gunshots demonstrates that even a slight rebuff from readers and the general public is enough to compel media-houses to stop ignoring local voices and incidents.

This moral policing, however, has limitations. As long as involved readers expect the media to function and seek accountability with positive results, it may be fine. But at what point can this readership activism morph into mob-rage? In the last one decade, Kashmir’s media has dealt with its share of mobs setting newspapers on fire or disallowing selective journalists from entering certain areas on allegations of deliberate blacking out of the news of public protests and campaigns or human rights abuse.

When democratic spaces vanish, the dangers of a venomous and unstoppable mob are enhanced with a probable future of the thin line between reason driven criticism and irrational, vitriolic vengeance blurring. The only thing that can avert such a danger is a responsive media, guided purely by the principle of informing and enriching informed opinion. The realm of fear, real as it is, cannot be used as a perpetual excuse by editors of newspapers to defend their silence.

Also read: What the Last Month Has Looked Like for the Media in Kashmir

An unidentified editor of a Kashmir based newspaper was quoted in a report in The Telegraph on August 31, as having said, “the Kashmir dailies were ‘gradually reclaiming the space’ they had conceded last year after the clampdown.”

What can be reclaimed after they chose to turn a blind eye to the horrifying spectacle of over 200 injured men, many being sprayed with pellets on their bodies, faces and eyes?

According to the same report, another editor claimed the newspapers had been discreetly told to give the most extensive coverage to “developmental activities” by the government.

Kashmiri journalists protest against the internet shutdown in Srinagar in November. Photo: PTI/S. Irfan

About two months ago, senior Indian journalist Ajaz Rashid, while researching about J&K’s new media policy, asked me whether journalists and editors would be willing to speak freely. I told him I had doubts about the latter. The editors who are part of the Editors Guild of Kashmir haven’t made a murmur as yet, and newspapers are carefully dropping anything that the government would be uncomfortable with. A day later, after trying to speak to some editors, he messaged back, “you were right. Either they don’t speak or speak little but do not want to be identified.”

That editors begin to speak to journalists on conditions of anonymity is telling enough about how they are caught in the grip of haunting fear. L.K. Advani’s famous retort to journalists after the dark days of Emergency, “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled” rings true in the Valley today.

Kashmir’s media is not new to the realm of fear. In the 90s, caught between the gun of the security forces and a hundred militant organisations, journalists chose not silence but the path of cautious balancing as they negotiated the multiple powerful stakeholders that spoke from behind the barrel of the gun and ensured that journalism survived, even though in a battered form. The years of calm that dawned with the new millennium saw the rise of a vibrant media in the entire state, mushrooming growth of newspapers, weeklies and magazines and a young breed of immensely talented and courageous journalists who enriched journalism with a nuanced narrative of all the regions.

In Jammu, the nascent development of professional journalism remained short-lived as, post-2008, in the wake of the Amarnath land row, editors and some reporters succumbed to the deepening religious and regional polarisation and inter-twined with that a venomous idea of ultra-nationalism in which loyalty to the state was deemed as the only sacred duty of media. Other than media being guided by the idea of being on the right side of the government, nuisance became an important ingredient in some publications and television channels.

Also read: Stopped, Beaten, Prevented From Working: Everyday Troubles of the J&K Journalist

Reportage, at par with the studios of Sudhir Chaudhry and Arnab Goswami of the television world, turned into a jarring discourse laced with expletives, religious hatred and character assassination of the ‘victim of the day’ in some of the newly started local newspapers. In Kashmir, the media story was both encouraging and disappointing. In the last few years, while some journalists continued to bring out path-breaking stories and enriched comment spaces with informed opinion pieces and brilliant articulation, many others, particularly editors, gradually began succumbing to pressures from the government which started using its weapon of advertisement revenue to the hilt. The complete surrender by August 5 came easily in this backdrop.

We live in an era where finances are extremely important for the existence and survival of the media. Technology, talented reporters, marketing strategies, circulation – everything requires money to keep the mare going. The traditional model for generating newspaper revenue is disproportionately dependent on government advertising.

When newspaper editors, guided by considerations of both fear and ambition of turning their publications into robust commercial enterprises by expanding space for government advertisements, squeezing news space and blanking out news reflecting ground realities, they become extensions of the public relations department of the government and journalism ceases to be what it ought to have been – the fourth pillar of democracy, an enterprise that holds those in power accountable and also one that brings voices of the marginalised people into the public domain.

Resisting what senior journalist Yusuf Jameel calls as the present moment of “Undeclared Censorship” requires not just overcoming fear but also searching for alternate models of revenue, without which the choice is either of ‘silence’ or of struggling to continue in keeping with the true spirit and ethics of journalism, at the risk of sagging circulation, downsized staff, poor quality of production and even the threat of closing down.

When the dictum comes ‘Fall in line or Perish’, the choice is not between survival and persecution, the choice is between saving a business enterprise or journalism which certainly cannot be reduced to a pamphlet fed on advertising.

Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal is the executive editor of Kashmir Times.

Watch | No Internet, Lack of Study Material Couldn’t Deter This Kashmiri Man From Cracking UPSC

Sabzar Ahmad Ganie ranked 628th in the examinations and has become an inspiration for students hoping to clear the UPSC examination in Kashmir.

Sabzar Ahmad Ganie, a young man aged 25, from Geeboom in south Kashmir’s Kokernag area in Anantnag, recently cracked the civil services exam.

With 628th rank in the examinations, he has become an inspiration for students hoping to clear the UPSC examination in Kashmir.

Sabzar completed his education from Government College of Engineering and Technology Jammu and later applied for free coaching at Jamia Milia Islamia Residential Coaching Academy in Delhi.

The institution provides free coaching classes for competitive examinations for students belonging to weaker sections amongst educationally backward minority communities.

However, Sabzar’s journey was not free of obstacles.

While Sabzar prepared for his exams in Delhi, his father, the sole bread earner of the family would toil hours working as a labourer and return home in time to prepare meals.

His mother, proud of her son’s achievements, says that she and her husband did everything to ensure that Sabzar pursued his dreams.

Sabzar plans to give the exam again this year and hopes to secure a better rank.

However, as the coaching institute in Delhi remains closed due to COVID-19, Sabzar has been facing problems accessing study material online due to the lockdown and the remote location of his village.

As New Delhi Spins an Alternate Reality, ‘Naya Kashmir’ Emerges in Centre’s Image

Other than the government and the groups supporting it, no other social and political institution survives in Kashmir.

In the 1940s, Kashmir’s then most popular leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah set out his vision of a modern Kashmir in a revolutionary manifesto. It advocated equal rights regardless of nationality, religion, race or birth, as well as freedom of conscience and worship, freedom of speech and of the press. It also affirmed that “women citizens shall be accorded equal rights with men in all fields of national life”. 

The manifesto’s economic plan was more radical, envisaging agrarian and land reform and land redistribution that involved transfer of excess land from the feudal landlords to the peasants and tenants. Once Sheikh took power in 1947 as the first prime minister of an autonomous Kashmir within the Indian Union, he immediately implemented the plan, in one stroke ameliorating the economic lot of rural Kashmir. 

This document was called ‘Naya Kashmir’ or ‘new’ Kashmir.

Seventy two years on, a week after India scrapped Article 370 that guaranteed Kashmir’s autonomy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech to the nation said the move would usher in development and prosperity to the state. He assured that the state’s  merger into India would aid the Union government’s plans to end corruption, atrocities and violence and make way for industries, private investments and employment.  

Also read: Kashmir: A Story of New Delhi’s Betrayal

He also labelled his development agenda for the region ‘Naya Kashmir.’

Between these two ‘Naya Kashmir’ pledges is a lot of history that begins with partition of British India into India and Pakistan and the conflict between the two newly formed nations over Kashmir, a state which they control in part but claim in full.  

In fact, there are two historical trajectories that have resulted from this. One, the dispute between India and Pakistan, that has led to three wars and countless skirmishes between the two countries. And another, the lingering struggle to fulfil the political aspirations of Kashmiris. This struggle has led to the loss of more than 70,000 lives over the past three decades.

Over the years, the two aspects have come to be known as external and internal dimensions of the conflict. The dimensions have run side by side in the region, spawning their respective politics, spheres of influence and discourses.

Curfew in Srinagar on August 4, 2020. Photo: PTI

That was until New Delhi unilaterally read down the Article 370 on August 5 last year. This, in one stroke, integrated Kashmir into India in defiance of the whole point of the decade-long festering conflict over the region. What’s more, India went ahead and split the state into two federally administered areas, J&K and Ladakh, which began to be called Union Territories (UTs).   

Wiping the slate clean

India’s far-reaching move has attempted to undo the history and politics of the past seven decades in the region. The game plan, as it has unfolded so far, is to unmake the old order and spin a new one in its place  

Kashmir that existed before August 5 and after that are thus two distinct realities. And this difference is not just the one between the old autonomous state and the integrated federally administered area of India that the state has become now. It is the complete political, social and even cultural makeover that is being attempted.

Also read: One Year On, it is Clear India is Occupied By Kashmir

And to some extent, New Delhi may have succeeded in accomplishing this. Parties like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, and also smaller ones, like the People’s Conference and Awami Itihad Party, not to talk about the separatist groups, have receded into the background. In the past 12 months, none of them have been able to organise any political activity.  

Ditto for civil society. No pre-August 5 civil society group is active on the scene. They have been bullied into silence following the arrest of their leaders, many of whom have since been released.  

Similarly, most of local media now faithfully reproduces government propaganda. This can be gauged both from their news content which is devoted to covering government activities and also from their opinion pages which eschew any political commentary.

The current situation in Kashmir looks like this: Other than government and the groups supporting it, no other social and political institution survives. There is no established leader active on the scene, no functional political or social organisation which could either articulate the sentiments of their people or formulate a response to the current crisis. 

August 4, 2020 in Srinagar. Photo: Irfan Amin Malik

Complete lack of internet and social media for around seven months had also emptied everyday life of the play of the conventional mainstream and separatist discourses and temporarily pushed them out of collective memory.

Criminalisation of protests and their ruthless suppression by use of PSAs against the protesters has ensured an eerie silence on the streets and across political and civil society space. 

Also read: Year After End of 370 and 35A, Kashmiris Fear a Fraud Bigger Than Rigged Election of 1987

Naya Kashmir that Sheikh had created is no more.

This has created a deep social and political vacuum that needs filling. And New Delhi is determined to not let the old order come back to life and reclaim the space. It is going for an artificial reconstruction of a new socio-political structure from the ground-up. 

Creating anew

To begin with, prolonged suspension of internet and other means of communication was, in large part, to borrow the words George Orwell wrote in The Listener in 1941 “to isolate people from the outside world” and “to shut them up in an artificial universe in which they had no standards of comparison”. This was also geared to give people a break from the play of the local political and social discourse to enable the introduction of an alternate reality.

And it began with spinning of a new story about Kashmir. Justifying the government decision to strip the region of its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy, India’s home minister Amit Shah on August 5 told the parliament that Article 370 didn’t allow democracy in Kashmir, bred terrorism and corruption and hindered development, when the opposite was true.  

But the facts haven’t deterred the Modi government from sticking to alternative facts which it has continued to peddle since then, to manipulate the public opinion. It only continues to generate many more such ‘facts’ by the day and put these into circulation. 

Having controlled to a large extent what people should hear, watch and read, New Delhi has followed it up by attempting to remake the politics of the region. On March 8, a new political outfit, Apni Party was floated by a businessman turned politician Altaf Bukhari, a former PDP leader and a minister in the Mehbooba-led government. Most of its members have been drawn from the neutralised regional parties. 

Also read: Apni Party: With Centre’s Helping Hand, ‘Third Front’ in Kashmir Slowly Takes Shape

Introducing his party before the media, Bukhari made it clear their job was not to seek restoration of Kashmir’s autonomy but to work for the development of the region. As things stand, Bukhari’s politics has a free run in Kashmir as New Delhi has ensured he faces no challenge from main parties whose top leaders either remain in jail or under house arrest. And those who are free have adopted a code of silence.   

A Kashmiri woman feeds pigeons at a street during restrictions after the scrapping of the special constitutional status for Kashmir by the government, in Srinagar, August 11, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

Similarly, existing civil society organisations have been coerced into silence and in their place, new groups are being promoted which uncritically toe the government line. Some of these groups were made to meet the three batches of foreign envoys who were brought to Kashmir by New Delhi to showcase the region’s “normalcy”.  

The recent past has also witnessed India going for an economic makeover of the region. With the lockdown and prolonged internet gag having wrecked the local Kashmir economy, New Delhi is wooing outsiders to invest in the region with an offer of around 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares) of land. Kashmir bureaucrats were sent to hold roadshows in other states to persuade Indian corporates to invest. 

Earlier under Article 370, outsiders were barred from buying land in Kashmir and the businesses from other parts of India would struggle to get land on lease. This had protected the small local economy and the former state’s  land from being overrun by outsiders.  

Also read: Kashmir 2020: Rumoured Resolution Is Greatly Exaggerated

And in all these far-reaching decisions, local people have no say. After August 5 move, New Delhi is in direct control of Kashmir and working overtime to cast the region in its image. And to achieve this it is adopting a totalitarian technique of radical ‘emancipation’ of the society by artificially refashioning terms of political and social reference to alter people’s sense of themselves. The attempt seems to be to create conditions to force Kashmiris to fall into oblivion of their political aspirations and the ongoing three decade long separatist movement. It wants them to snap out of the conflict psyche and reconcile through a sense of resignation, defeat or pragmatism to India’s control, And to this end New Delhi is supplying them a new narrative and a new political and economic environment to rethink themselves.

 And this fundamental overhaul of the facts on the ground is  being done coercively by confronting people with a real spectre of an existential threat in the form of a demographic makeover of the place. With Article 370 gone, there  is now no bar on the outsiders to buy land and settle down in Kashmir.

Also read: J&K’s New Domicile Order: Disenfranchising Kashmiris, One Step at a Time

As things stand, New Delhi is certain to prolong the abeyance of the old order to let the new reality take root and grow. Will that happen? Can an alternate reality achieve a degree of authenticity if protected from a challenge from the underlying established reality and backed by the might of the state? Only time will tell.

Importing a new Kashmir

What is playing out in Kashmir is the war on the Naya Kashmir bequeathed by Sheikh and which for all its troubled baggage had largely evolved from the ground. And in its place being forcibly imposed from above is the Naya Kashmir of Modi in the form of a prefabricated political and social structure complete with an alternative narrative and facts. 

Congress leader Saifuddin Soz speaks to reporters in Srinagar from captivity, hours after the government claimed he was not under any form of detention. Photo: Basit Zargar

In a literal demonstration, as it were, of this unsparing assault on the former, Sheikh’s honorific Sher-i-Kashmir (Lion of Kashmir) is being excised from the institutions and other Kashmir landmarks named after him and his birthday dropped from the list of gazetted Kashmir holidays. His party’s place  is now sought to be filled by Bukhari’s party and the allied outfits. That is, if his son and grandson don’t fall in line with new reality in Kashmir. 

Kashmir that is emerging from the long siege is eerily calm, creating an impression that the ongoing socio-political engineering may be working.  But there’s an egregious amount of coercion that is being deployed to sustain this engineering in the hope that an artificial reality is quickly grafted on to a decades-old history of conflict and bloodshed. It is a far-reaching experiment in the works, a more advanced how-to in forcibly remaking a society. And this time by the world’s largest democratic country.  

Riyaz Wani is a Kashmir-based, award-winning freelance journalist. He has worked at The Indian Express for ten years, at Tehelka for seven years and at the leading regional paper Greater Kashmir, as its managing editor, until April 2019. He received the Ramnath Goenka award for his coverage of Kashmir in 2015. 

The ‘Unlock’ in Kashmir Has to Take Into Account Human Rights Violations

The COVID-19 lockdown in Kashmir came on the heels of another lockdown – imposed since August 5 last year – and led to the further curtailment of rights and freedoms.

Amongst the bleakest in the history of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), these past 12 months beginning with the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A on August 5, 2019 have witnessed unprecedented violations of the human rights to health and life.

Decades of oppression and humiliation of the people of J&K were escalated further through indefinite curfews, unconstitutional arrests and detainment, unprecedented military presence, and the clampdown on democratic and public institutions. The imposition of an indefinite lockdown – among the longest in J&K, as early reports by media and civil society (August to December 2019) flagged – impacted every dimension of life in Kashmir. People were deeply affected by the arrests and detentions, shelling and pellet injuries, economic distress, health problems, and breakdown of public services including education and health. Inevitably, the impact on people’s physical and psychological health and access to healthcare was severe.

Life-saving medicines were in short supply and stock-outs were evident. The lack of transport caused pregnant women to travel long distances on foot for delivery and created barriers for reaching the hospitals in time. Patients suffering from cancer, those requiring dialysis were unable to reach hospitals or access healthcare, and
patients discharged from hospitals were unable to return home due to lack of transport. Roadblocks and the communications shutdown had also affected healthcare providers and frontline health workers like ASHA workers, and prevented them from providing regular health care services due to restrictions as well as fears with regard to their safety.

Hospitals had to use ambulances to ferry hospital staff to and from their homes because private vehicles were not allowed in some areas. Doctors were stopped repeatedly at multiple barricades for identity checking and interrogated about the purpose of their travel, delaying them from reaching health facilities. People’s experiences of severe distress, trauma and high levels of psychosocial stress were seen to worsen.

Despite narratives of “normalcy” that began gradually emerging, a visit to Kashmir in February 2020 by a group of activists and academics witnessed a far-removed reality of widespread experiences of distress, fear, anger and violations. Interactions with people in Kashmir during the visit exposed the facade of “normalcy”, reiterating the huge daily challenges including access to health services, particularly due to the continued restrictions on movement, curfews, absence of transport and communications, as well as the fear of violence.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The lockdown had precipitated a public health crisis – evident from, for instance, the significant increase in numbers of stillbirths, foetal distress and severe postpartum anaemia because pregnant women could not come for regular check-ups. Moreover, the exponential rise in mental health problems reported since August 2019 provided more clues about the effects.

Further, the shutdown of internet, landlines and mobile phones disabled the functioning of health systems and programmes for the benefit of people, especially for the poorest. The narratives of daily humiliation and distress due to the sway of absolute power, control and disruption of all aspects of their lives, was a constant refrain.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the health situation in J&K

By the end of March 2020, the feigned rhetoric of normalcy was further shattered by the imposition of a sudden and total lockdown by the Central government in all states as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While most parts of the country experienced this for the first time, for J&K, the pandemic lockdown deepened the implications of the pre-existing lockdown since August 2019.

The response to this unprecedented global health catastrophe of COVID-19 has been an authoritarian lockdown implemented by an aggressive state, creating an severe humanitarian crisis. For the people of J&K, this has further exacerbated the trauma and impact of the ongoing clampdown as well as the fractures in the health system, and its consequences for the health and lives of the people. The COVID-19 lockdown has provided legitimacy for further repression under the garb of a public health necessity.

The lockdown not only continues to limit movement but also suppress the ground realities, including conditions of work of healthcare providers and barriers to access healthcare in the pandemic. For instance, on April 1, 2020, the Directorate of Health Services in Kashmir issued a circular threatening ‘strict action’ against government servants who criticise the government’s efforts to combat the pandemic on social media or in the press. This was to challenge the prerogative of healthcare providers to flag concerns about the unavailability of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic, the lack of safe working conditions or the absence of response by relevant authorities.

Watch | ‘Economic Damage to Kashmir Is Worse Than What Is Being Reported’: Former Srinagar Mayor

Whether the senior cardiologist in Srinagar who was detained and beaten up by the police and later lodged in a police station in Srinagar, the three gynaecologists of the Lal Dedh Hospital who alleged harassment by the police deployed outside the hospital, or the ambulance driver who was beaten up by police personnel in Pulwama district while transporting patients, the harassment and violence against healthcare providers preventing  them from carrying out their healthcare duties have raised serious concerns.

As has been seen in other parts of the country, the pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of the public health infrastructure and human resources even in J&K. Given the non-availability of primary health care, patients develop secondary symptoms and need advanced health care including critical care involving ICUs, ventilators and oxygen supply. With merely two multi-specialty hospitals in the Kashmir Valley, patients are deprived of timely treatment.

Doctors have also called for increased home quarantine and for the home quarantining of asymptomatic patients to reduce the burden on the healthcare system. ASHA workers, who were engaged in contact tracing and door-to-door surveys, also reported the non-availability of surgical masks and sanitisers.

Although the J&K high court, in April 2020, sought a report from the Department of Health and Medical Education on the availability of safety equipment for healthcare professionals and on the provision of care for the families of healthcare and government employees or officials engaged in the fight against COVID-19, concerns about safety of healthcare providers has been most visible in the context of the pandemic located in the larger context of surveillance, violence and control.

The prolonged blockade of 4G internet services is one such example. With only low-speed 2G services available, especially in areas of South Kashmir, the functioning of doctors and patients accessing healthcare have been severely affected. The absence of fast-speed internet can affect the health of the entire community in general and particularly in a pandemic context, where immediate communication and widespread outreach are critical public health imperatives.

Women in J&K continue to experience trauma because of their inability to access timely  health services for delivery due to lack of transport, stigmatisation and delays and denial of maternal healthcare, which have resulted in morbidities or even in the death of women. There were reports about a full-term pregnant woman who was denied services, allegedly on the pretext of waiting for her COVID-19 test results.

Also read | Excluded from Law-Making for Two Years, Kashmiris are Angry and Alienated

In July 2020, a PIL was filed in the J&K high court, on the basis of which the court directed the health authorities of all districts to maintain separate maternity hospitals for pregnant women and children, equipped with all facilities and trained staff. This ruling mandates a magisterial enquiry into all incidents of medical negligence resulting in the death of a child or a pregnant woman, and compensation to be deducted from the salary of the employees guilty of medical negligence.

Furthermore, the anxiety and distress of day-to-day survival, financial uncertainty, job loss, isolation, fear of illness or violence, grief, inability to access health services, inability to pay medical bills, lack of communication with relatives outside Kashmir, and many other psychological effects are increasingly evident.

Undoubtedly, there is an urgent need to address these issues through immediate as well as sustained strategies, given their potential social and economic impact. However, despite the overwhelming current focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, the narrative in Kashmir cannot be isolated from the more deep-seated, fundamental factors that determine the health and lives of the people here – clampdown and violence that have created constant fear and humiliation, surveillance and control of every aspect of their lives.

The “unlock” process in J&K limited merely to the pandemic would be a travesty of justice, public health and human rights. This public health crisis will eventually pass, but is likely to leave a trail of social and economic devastation. In Kashmir, this is linked to the violation of people’s health and their rights as citizens.

The author acknowledges Roshmi Goswami, Kalpana Kannabiran, Navsharan Singh and Pamela Philipose, who were a part of the five-member team that visited Kashmir during February-March 2020. A few parts of this essay has drawn from the report “Interrogating the ‘Normal: Report of a Visit to the Valley”.

Special thanks to Deepa V. and Ranjan De for their valuable inputs, and Abhiti Gupta for research support.

Sarojini Nadimpally is a public health practitioner and National Co-Convenor of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan.