THE VIRTUAL WAR
As yet another social media ban hits the Valley, HT meets young men and women who, despite the risk involved, film protests and upload the videos to tell their version of the Kashmir story
In a move that has historically failed to quell protests and check mobilisation of the youth in Jammu & Kashmir, the state government on Wednesday banned 22 social networking sites. Since 2012, the state government has interrupted web services 29 times but there is no evidence to suggest that such crackdowns succeed in scaling down protests. The current round of online censorship comes in the wake of what is described as ‘video wars’– a series of videos juxtaposing two realities of Kashmir: the local population’s opposition to the armed forces, and human rights violations by the security personnel.
These videos stormed the internet after the by-election for the Srinagar parliamentary seat on April 9, which witnessed eight killings and seven per cent voter turnout.
In one of the videos, local men can be seen heckling a CRPF jawan returning from election duty. The video became viral and triggered primetime debates on news channels. Another video shows a Kashmiri man tied to the bonnet of a military jeep as a human shield. In a third video, security personnel can be seen firing from close range on a boy, part of a group of young protesters throwing stones.
Amateur videos shot from mobile phones first emerged in the Valley during the 2010 unrest. First among these videos was that of four naked Kashmiri men being escorted by security personnel. It triggered widespread outrage, particularly among the youth, who, by then, had formed online communities for political discourse and protests.
It was their way to vent their anger in the wake of curfew and strikes, which continued for more than four months. “These are children of conflict,” said Sheikh Mushtaq, senior journalist and former Srinagar bureau chief of Reuters. “Most of them were born in the 1990s when militancy broke out or after that. They have created their own ways of telling people what is happening here.”
In spite of frequent internet shutdowns, the number of youth who resort to social media to tell their stories of Kashmir has increased manifold since the 2010 uprising. At the time of writing, the ban was only partially implemented and many social media users could access these sites.