Fearful of protests India's shackling of Kashmir causes severe shortage of food, medicines

Streets in Srinagar city in the Kashmir Valley were deserted on Wednesday.

SRI NAGAR (Dunya News) – Seeking to tighten its grip on the region, Modi-led Indian regime blatantly continued its clampdown on the tenth consecutive day in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir with all public mobile, landline telephone and internet connections suspended and people suffering through severe shortage of food, medicines and other essential facilities have been confined in their homes.

Sources familiar with the matter told the media that Indian forces have been deploying more troops in the region for ‘security’. Thousands of Indian soldiers have been patrolling in Kishtwar, Pulwama and Poonch and conducting security checks at various places while a ban on public gatherings of more than four people stayed in force.

Amid strict travel restrictions and intensified clampdown, dwellers who stepped out were forced to walk for several kilometres as facilities were not available to them.

Streets in Srinagar city in the Kashmir Valley were deserted on Wednesday as restrictions on the gathering of people continued to be in place in the area, days after India’s revocation of Articles 370 and 35A which had secured special status for Jammu and Kashmir as the Muslim-majority state.

Many people were still struggling to make contact with relatives in the Eid holidays while India has cut off all communications after detaining more than 500 political leaders and activists, and enforcing a curfew with tens of thousands of troops and policemen stopping movement of all residents.

Regional leaders have warned of a backlash in the region, where already tens of thousands of Kashmiris have lost their lives in decades of oppression by India.

Instead of resolving the dispute under United Nations Security Council resolutions, New Delhi scrapped the state’s right to frame its own laws and allowed non-residents to buy property there.

Kashmir journalists frustrated by communications blockade

Kashmir has nearly 180 English and Urdu daily newspapers, but only five are publishing with new dates and old news due to restrictions imposed by Indian authorities to prevent what New Delhi calls ‘unrest’ in Kashmir.

That is frustrating for the region’s journalists, many of whom are veterans of covering a long insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir and operating under prolonged curfews.

“This is the biggest story of our generation and we haven’t been able to report it,” said Faisul Yaseen, associate editor of Rising Kashmir, one of the handful of newspaper groups that is still publishing.

With phone lines and internet services suspended, six newspaper editors and journalists told Reuters they have no way to access wire reports or any outside online news sources, their district correspondents, and seek comment from government officials.

Only five newspapers out of 174 dailies are now publishing, according to newspaper distributor Mansoor Ahmed, and they are being distributed within a 5-km radius of Lambert Lane, the main newspaper hub of the region, because of severe restrictions on movement, he said.

Usually a 12-page edition, the Rising Kashmir English daily is now only bringing out four pages, much of it sourced from a few national TV news channels and four reporters who have living and working from Rising Kashmir’s office.

The final layout of the paper is hand-delivered to the press on the outskirts of the city in the evening when movement restrictions in some parts are slightly relaxed.

Two other Rising Kashmir newspapers – one in Urdu, another in Kashmiri – that the group publishes are suspended.

Within Srinagar, reporters and photographers are finding it difficult to work without any passes to go through security checkpoints.

Editors of two Urdu newspapers in Srinagar said they had ceased publication because of a lack of news sources, movement restrictions, and staff being unable to reach the newsroom.

“Even in the worst of times, the press were given curfew passes,” said Morifat Qadri, executive editor of the Daily Afaaq, which usually prints 4,000 copies daily.

“They don’t want that anybody covers the current situation,” he said.