When the jolt of 5 August (2019) came, the first thing to hit anyone was the lack of information about what was happening outside and about their own near and dear ones. Most of the television channels were not working, but even if they were, they had one linear narrative – everything is under control, and people are happy.
But lack of communication with friends and relatives was more overwhelmingly debilitating. It meant a complete disconnect from parts of one’s personal life. Not knowing about the well-being of family members and friends in times of excessive vulnerability also meant that the birth of a newborn could not be rejoiced, and death could not be mourned. They remained unknown in the otherwise close-knit society of Kashmir.
It meant not being able to move out or even hear the voice of a loved one outside the confines of one’s home. It meant a complete information blockade, even about the tiniest celebrations and mournings people indulge in. It meant that patients on dialysis and cancer therapies missed their sessions. And it also meant that underprivileged patients could not access the government’s healthcare schemes, which are now fully digitalized.
It took a month for landline phones to be made functional. People could not call for ambulances if there was an emergency and public transport was off the roads – all looped up in a maze of barricades and concertina wires.
Should some people, mostly with medical emergencies, dare to venture out and plead with gun-toting security men to let them pass, they were either sent back or told to take a longer route that would take two or three times the normal time to get to hospitals. Such detours defied logic but appeared to drill into the minds of the citizens the new reality of their impotence.
Shops were shut, ATMs were non-functional, and if people ran out of supplies or money, they had nowhere to go to. In the pre-5 August days of panic, many people had begun queuing up at petrol pumps to get sufficient supplies to last them the coming calamity despite the hunch that they would be imprisoned in their homes. That is how instincts work in a conflict zone. Everybody tries to be well prepared with everything stocked.
For three months, there were no mobile phone services, and the internet – so integral to ‘Digital India’ – only started to be partially restored six months into the lockdown.
Two or three weeks later, the mouse-trapped people were rewarded with the opening of some landlines and setting up of government kiosks where civilians were allowed one-minute calls to their family members, but only after a long wait.
Deprived of any choice, people endured the humiliation of trekking miles, passing through security checks, just to be able to call up their sons and daughters studying or working outside and speak barely for a minute, if they were lucky to get their turn and the number, under complete surveillance of a government officer – all this in an age of communication.
It is not difficult to imagine what the conversations on those minute-long phone calls were like – filled only with ‘Tohi chu’va vaare’, ‘Tske chhuk miyon jigar’, ‘Mei chhu chyon yaad yiwaan’ (‘Hope you are well’, ‘You are very dear to me’, ‘I miss you deeply’) – not only because of paucity of time but because the callers felt they were being watched and heard.
Amidst the exchange of notes about well-being were passed the warnings to each other, ‘Tsoph Karini’ (Don’t say anything)!
During those days, when a Kashmiri journalist based in Delhi called me to get some comment for a story, I asked him if he had been in touch with his family and if they were fine. I found his voice cracking up. ‘I can’t tell you how humiliating it is when your parents call you after two weeks, able to do so after trekking three kilometres from home, standing in a queue for a painfully brief call just to say that they are fine and to add “be quiet, don’t say a word”.’
Beseeching loved ones to remain silent while longing to hear them in those snap calls was a sign that fear had possessed everybody. There was little knowledge of what people, by and large, were enduring. The sources of information had run dry.
No news is not good news when the place happens to be Kashmir – with a history of immense violence and where the state has shown its ability to treat the citizens like subjects, with impunity. In the worst of times, and before the advent of the internet, through the nights and days under curfew of the conflict years, Kashmiris had learnt to communicate by word of mouth.
A blanket communication ban and stringent restrictions on movement, however, had impaired that traditional ability, though rumours continued to be in circulation travelling from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.
Many of these had their origins in official circles, whether or not there was a premeditated design behind them.
A university professor, for instance, said that a friend – a senior police officer – had talked about hundreds of boys being killed in south Kashmir, triggering fears of mass extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances and secret burials.
In the villages, many allegedly heard the detained people scream, amplified over loudspeakers, as they were physically tortured inside the security camps that had become torture chambers. The 1990s witnessed the notorious interrogation centre, Papa II, housed inside an old, abandoned palace, which in a decade or so was renovated and later housed former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti.
In 2019, there were mini-Papa IIs dotting the landscape of Kashmir. News of such incidents of torture captured on loudspeakers for sadistic effect on a vast population had begun to travel outside these villages. Sketchy fragments, bits and pieces of the various forms of tyranny, began to be known in those early days even though nobody had the means to authenticate them.
What was known and heard was chilling and being cast into prehistoric times in the jet age, lack of knowledge and information could only allow imagination to go wild.
Absence of any shocking statistics of casualty is no solace for a people caught in such a lockdown, where one crackdown in a neighbouring locality, one arrest close by and one case of torture is enough to instill overwhelming fear that leaves an indelible imprint on the memory and psychology of the people.
The Valley had been fully insulated. No one could go out if the government did not want him or her to, and no one could come in.
Many Indian politicians and civil society activists were detained at the airport and sent back unless they got permission from the Supreme Court of India. To reduce even this relief to a trickle, Kashmir-related cases, including habeas corpus petitions and those pertaining to resumption of basic essentials including communication channels, had been virtually put in the cold storage or taken up in slow-motion mode by the courts.
A small initiative by fourteen prominent women, mostly retired teachers known for their social activism, was scuttled before it could even begin. On 13 October 2021, they emerged at Pratap Park – the Hyde Park of Srinagar – with placards for a silent protest against the blockade and abrogation of Article 370.
This is what the placards at Kashmir women’s protest said: ‘Respect fundamental rights’; ‘Dignity & Justice for All’; ‘Our voice is the future’; ‘Why downgrade Jammu & Kashmir?’; ‘Kashmiri brides not for sale’; ‘Don’t deceive Indians’; ‘Stop telling lies to the country’; ‘Release all detainees’.
A posse of over 100 cops awaited these women, most of them senior citizens and one of them a heart patient with a pacemaker.
Within minutes, they were whisked away in police vehicles before they could even assemble. The media teams were just in time to capture the visuals of them being pushed and bundled away, taken to Kothibagh police station. A few hours later, these women were pushed into Srinagar’s Central Jail, after a brief medical check-up at Rainawari hospital.
They were released on bail the next day but had to sign bonds, agreeing not to comment on Article 370-related changes. The world’s ‘largest democracy’ had ‘fully integrated’ an entire region by turning it into a vast prison with sophisticated methods to ensure compliance to the new mantra of absolute silence and supreme subjugation.
(An excerpt from ‘A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370’ by Anuradha Bhasin, Harper Collins, December 2022)
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