Schools & phone lines set to open in Kashmir
srinagar — Authorities will begin restoring some telephone lines in Indian-administered Kashmir from Friday night, including in the main city of Srinagar where afternoon prayers went peacefully amid heavy security, the top state official said.
Telephone and Internet links were cut and public assembly banned in Kashmir just before New Delhi removed the decadesold autonomy the Muslim majority territory enjoyed under the Indian Constitution. The measures were aimed at preventing protests.
“You will find a lot of Srinagar functioning tomorrow morning,” Jammu and Kashmir Chief Secretary B.V.R. Subrahmanyam told reporters.
“Over the weekend, you’ll have most of these lines functional,” he said, responding to a question about landlines.
He did not say when Internet and mobile phone services would be restored, adding that militant groups could use the latter to organise “terror actions”.
Security forces were deployed outside mosques across Srinagar on Friday, while police vans fitted with speakers asked people not to venture out, according to two Reuters witnesses.
In some parts of the city, posters appeared calling for protests and asking preachers in mosques to talk about the current situation in Kashmir valley. “People must try to occupy the streets defying curfew,” one poster read.
The lockdown of the Kashmir valley, home to nearly seven million people, has drawn widespread criticism. Subrahmanyam said 12 of 22 districts in Jammu and Kashmir are functioning normally, with night time restrictions in five districts.
In the Kashmir valley, Subrahmanyam said schools would open after the weekend, and restrictions on movement would be lifted after a review of each area.
“It is expected that over the next few days, as the restrictions get eased, life in Jammu and Kashmir will become completely normal,” he said.
Detained
Hundreds of political leaders and activists remain in detention,
some of them in prisons outside Jammu and Kashmir.
At least 52 politicians, most of them belonging to the National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party regional parties, are being held at a hotel on the banks of Srinagar’s Dal lake.
A senior government official said authorities had booked 58 rooms in the hotel. “These leaders are locked inside the hotel rooms but are allowed to meet at dinner and lunch only in a dining hall,” the official said, who declined to be identified.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has said the revocation of Kashmir’s special status was necessary to ensure its full integration into India and speed up development. —