Cut Off, Kashmir Pays Price
HEEVAN, Kashmir — Saja Begum was cooking dinner when her son walked in with a stricken look. “Mom,” he said. “I have been bitten by a snake. I am going to die.”
Ms. Begum could not call an ambulance: The Indian government had shut down Kashmir’s cellular network. She began a panicked, 16-hour odyssey to find an antidote that could save her 22-year-old son. While his leg began to swell and he grew faint, she trekked across a landscape of cutoff streets, security checkpoints and hobbled doctors.
Two months after the Indian government imposed harsh security measures across the Kashmir Valley, the crackdown has taken lives, in large part because of a communication blackout. Patients who buy medicine online have been unable to place orders. Without cell service, doctors can’t talk to one another, find specialists or get critical information in life-or-death situations.
Indian officials say that hospitals have been functioning normally, and that health workers and emergency patients have been given passes to allow them through checkpoints.
Doctors at Sri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city, said there had been a 50 percent dip in surgeries
Iqbal Kirmani and Suhasini Raj contributed reporting. the past two months because of the restrictions and drug shortages.
On August 13, Ms. Begum’s son, Amir Farooq Dar, was tending his family’s sheep near Baramulla when he was bitten by a krait. Most bites are fatal unless an antivenin is injected in six hours. Ms. Begum cinched a rope around his leg, hoping to slow the poison. She ran to the village health center, which usually has the antidote. It was closed.
She begged for a ride to Baramulla’s district hospital. But doctors there could not locate any antidote. They arranged for an ambulance to take the young man to a hospital in Srinagar. Soldiers stopped it many times on the way, the family said. Mr. Dar was closing his eyes. He told his mother that he could not feel his right leg.
On August 5, the Indian government revoked the special autonomy that the Kashmir region, which is also claimed by Pakistan, had held for more than 70 years. Hours earlier, Indian officials imposed tough security measures, cutting off the internet and phone services and jailing thousands of Kashmiri political leaders, academics and activists. It also imposed a curfew, limiting movement in the Kashmir Valley, home to some eight million.
In late August, a Kashmiri doctor, Omar Salim, rode a bicycle in Srinagar with a poster hung to his chest. His plea: Restore phone and internet service. He was arrested. “We may not be in a formal prison, but this is nothing less than incarceration,” he said.
A cardiologist at a Srinagar hospital said he recently had a patient who had suffered a heart attack and needed a procedure that required a specialized technician. With no way to call him, the cardiologist drove eight kilometers to the technician’s neighborhood. The doctor didn’t know exactly where he lived and had to ask people. The doctor said that they managed to save the patient’s life, but that Kashmir has been “thrown into the Stone Age.”
In September, Raziya Khan was pregnant when she had complications. She and her husband are farmers in a small village 11 kilometers from a hospital and couldn’t call an ambulance. They walked, taking hours because of her condition. They made it to the hospital, but were then sent to a bigger hospital in Srinagar. It was too late, and they lost their baby.
After hours of searching for antivenin, Mr. Dar and his family made it to Soura Hospital in Srinagar. It didn’t have the antivenin, either. They did not know it, but the hospital in Baramulla actually had the antidote in a locked storeroom.
In Srinagar, the family traveled from pharmacy to pharmacy pleading for the antidote. Ms. Begum shouted at her husband, Farooq Ahmad Dar, “Sell everything, but save him!” Mr. Dar, 46, said he had never felt so helpless. “I felt like pushing a knife into my chest,” he said.
At 10:30 a.m. the next day, 16 hours after he was bitten, the younger Mr. Dar died.