Lockdown to be eased in Kashmir
Schools in the Kashmir valley will open after the weekend, some phone lines will be restored and restrictions on movement will be lifted after a review of each area, a senior Indian official said yesterday. He did not say when internet and mobile phone services will be restored. “It is expected that over the next few days, as the restrictions get eased, life in Jammu and Kashmir will become completely normal,” Jammu and Kashmir chief secretary B.V.R. Subrahmanyam said. Friday prayers went off peacefully with security forces deployed outside mosques across Srinagar
Around the time Mohammad Sikander Bhat lay dying at home in Srinagar, Shafiq Ahmad was racing to get his pregnant wife to a hospital, negotiating about 85km of highways through a maze of heavily guarded checkpoints. Amid severe movement restrictions and a total communications blockade one man perished without his last wish fulfilled: that of seeing his three daughters.
The other battled the odds, saved his wife, and became father to a son. The death and the birth and both families’ struggles reflect the human cost of the government’s harsh clampdown in the Kashmir Valleye.
For the first five days after the government’s move, parts of Srinagar had been turned into a fortress, blanketed with armed paramilitary and rolls of concertina wire blocking main streets. Anyone attempting to cross the checkpoints faced questions.
‘We could do nothing’
It was around 2pm on August 7 that Bhat — suffering from cancer in his 70s — asked his son to go fetch his daughters, his son said, declining to be named because he feared authorities could disapprove of him talking to the press.
On most days, it would not take more than 10 minutes to drive to their homes, he said. That day it took more than an hour.
“By the time I came back, father had passed away,” he said. Under normal circumstances, he said they would have tried to call a doctor and make one last attempt to save Bhat, a moustached man with a love for gardening.
“This time, we could do nothing,” his son said, because there were no telephones available to help bring a doctor quickly to Bhat’s side.
Authorities say the lockdown and the detention of hundreds of local leaders aim to prevent widespread protests in the region.
Some of these movement restrictions have now been eased, but aside from a few hundred public telephones, all communication remains blacked out for the 12th straight day.
Highway hell
Kokernag, a town in southern Kashmir, where Ahmad lives with his wife and daughter, was also locked down on August 7, he said.
A lean man with a ready smile, Ahmad took his expectant wife to a nearby hospital for a check-up. There, doctors concerned about her blood pressure, referred her to the district hospital at Anantnag, some 25km away.
So, Ahmad, his wife, his daughter and sisterin-law piled into an ambulance. Ahmad said what is typically a 45-minute journey took more than two hours, passing through eight checkpoints. At the Anantnag district hospital, staff quickly ran tests.
Again they determined they could not risk it, Ahmad said, asking him to take his wife to the main maternity hospital in Srinagar, about 60km away, for a safe delivery.
They were stopped 10 times and it took them 2-1/2 hours instead of one to get to Srinagar, where his wife was able to deliver a healthy boy. But the rest of the family is in the dark. “Nobody has a clue where we are,” Ahmad said, because all communication lines are down.